Yeah, I'm pissed off. Bastiaan Jacques writes: > On Sat, 27 Sep 2008, Russ Nelson wrote: > > > Benjamin Otte writes: > > > And the only feature that Flash video formats don't give you yet is > > > Freedom. But if you care about Freedom, you don't use Flash, > > > > I'm sure you didn't mean to write this. Would you retract it? > > It makes perfect sense to me.
Well, I thought that Benjamin (Company on IRC) didn't mean to impugn my motives, but after chatting on IRC, he apparently did. My reply to him is "well fuck you too, asshole." Apparently he's a free software zealot who doesn't understand the difference between strategy and tactics. If you want to help people, then you help them. You don't argue that what they're trying to do is wrong, and that they should do something different. For far too long free software zealots argued with people rather than helping them. The goal here (or, rather, my goal) is to free up the SWF standard so that Adobe can't use it to gain proprietary advantage. The way we do that is *we* make free changes to the SWF standard. Adobe can implement them or suffer. In order to do that, we need to gain adoption of software that complies with the free standard. Benjamin obviously doesn't care about freedom because he doesn't want to free up the SWF standard. I suppose it's fine if Benjamin only cares about himself -- if he only cares that *he* has the ability to run free software (HTML5 / <embed> of Ogg/Theora). Me, I'm not that selfish. I want other people to have the same freedom that I have. People aren't going to abandon SWF just because Benjamin declares it Not Free. Running around, and jumping up and down and proclaiming that some piece of software isn't Free, has worked as well as it has always worked: not at all. SWF isn't going away. It's important to its users that we free it up for them. If you don't want to do that, then you're on the side of proprietary software vendors. (Note: If this pisses you off, Benjamin, then understand that I am merely reflecting back on you the same judgement you made of me. Don't like it? Don't do it. The Golden Rule: "do not do unto others as you would not be done unto yourself". Since I want Benjamin to apologize to me and retract what he said, then I will be the first to offer to retract what I've said about him here, and apologize for ever doubting him. But let's get the order straight: he insulted first and he can apologize first.) -- --my blog is at http://blog.russnelson.com | Unregulation is a slippery Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | slope to prosperity and 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315-323-1241 | freedom. Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | Sheepdog | _______________________________________________ Gnash-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnash-dev
