On Monday 08 May 2006 17:19, A J Stiles wrote: > The problem is, purchasing decisions are being made by people unqualified > to make those decisions.
That's true. In my country the public administration - including the university - is wasting public money (derived from taxation) in software that is found with debian, sometimes of better quality. They could better make donations to free software. > However, there is scientific proprietary software from small softwarehouses that has decades of experience and development, is sold with accompanying source code, and solves problems that debian is quite far from solving. Again, don't ask me the names because I am not advertising (and I am user not softwarehouse) but I believe that such softwarehouses deserve full support. They have my support. In other words my point is not free software ueber alles, may point is serious software ueber alles (which implies getting the source code of the proprietary software, albeit with restriction to use it in connection with modifying the code to adapt the software to, say, the particular calculations). francesco pietra -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]