Finally discovered where my MIPSB shares had gone to, they had been added to my etrade account, just not
to the portfolio view. So know my whopping 6 shares of Mips class B shares are shinning towards me since I
manually added them to my Portfolio. Think I will sell them as soon as the general market improves, only reason I
got them in the first place was the SGI spin-off. I try only to have shares in companies I personally like or believe
in
and MIPS is to big of an unknown factor to me. Think that of all the contenders in the processor market the
prospects MIPS isn’t the best.

A little unsure where I am going to invest the ‘fortune’ the sale of my MIPS share will make me, maybe VA Linux
is
a good buy at the moment or maybe even Big Blue.

ErikLevy since I have been working the graveyard shift now for two days my
mind
is too foggy
to properly contemplate your musings, so I might be arguing points you haven’t made :)

But I think that freedom is a very subjective matter and what is free and what is not a matter of interpretation. For
instance I think that the GPL is free’er than the BSD since it ensures the availability of the code and the basic
rights of usage. BSD advocates on the other had views freedom not with the concept of users as a plural concept,
but with the user as an individual and in such a regard the BSD license is freer.

Is freedom a natural right? That is a weird question, since ‘rights’ are all human made. There are no natural
rights as such, only opportunities. For instance the sanctity of human life is not a natural right, but a right that
modern society has created in order to protect it citizens. As soon as society as we know it falters this ‘right’ will
be worth zero like all other rights created by the current regime, unless they are adopted by the next regime
too.

Is free software the only moral way to develop software? Once again a subjective matter. People in the third
world might feel that proprietary software is immoral since it puts them at an even greater disadvantage to the
industrial world, while a developer might feel that open source software is immoral since it deprecates the
incomme
potential of his/her closed source software on which his/hers livelyhood is based.

Should all software be free? I consider myself a libertarian and think that people should be allowed to do what
they want. Yet again, no one man is an island, and I think that if the people around you exercise their opportunity
to choose to use what they want, they will choose free software, thereby making it very hard to survive making
anything but free software. There is usually a big difference between what you can theoreticaly do, and what you
will find is practically feasible.

I think the reason Free Software is so powerfull is that it will change the rules of conduct in the software
industry. Some people think that if all software is free then software developers will starve. Personally I find that
idea silly. The matter of fact is that people need new software to accomodate their needs, as long as that needs
exist money to develop that software will be forthcomming. The introduction of free software into the marketplace
doesn’t change the basic rules of supply and demand, it only changes the way that money is being generated.

So while free software probably will kill of a lot of software companies who doesn’t manage to adapt to a new
reality, it will not kill of software developing as a profession.