Appologies for this will be long: >And he also mentioned that, in his own opinion, nobody works for free, >and everything happens for a reason, so this means that there is no such >thing called: "FOSS programmers don't work for money. "
Thats true and not true. There are 2 senses to the word "Free"; Free as in "Freedom" and Free as in "Pizza". When people use software, they would like to achieve some goal, mostly with their work; This is the main purpose of software. FOSS is there to help people achieve it for free in both senses. Without paying money for the software they use and without any attachments or constraints that may limit their freedom. When people create commercial software, their primary concern is to sell the software. They try to make it as good and unique as possible to compete with other products. Although this may sound good, but when people start to depend more on software, and start to feel the heat of using expensive commercial licenses, they will look for cheaper alternatives (if available). Things start to get ugly when a software giant dominates the market and decides to play king and ruler. This is where users lose their freedom on how to use the software and thus their work. Imagine a world where you have to pay for every single piece of software you wish to use; That is the Operating system, word editor, Media player, IDE for writing programs, Media and content authoring programs, .... Or even worse, Imagine that you have to pay licenses to use network protocol, video and music file formats, document and image formats, Online services, Even paying for the way you use your very own data that you created using these software and or purchased via these services. This is all happening right now. In this kind of world, the play field is largely biased to large companies and organizations (even countries). There will are no rights to the users. only constraints and more constraints. Normally, people would think that when buying a computer they have the freedom in using everything inside (HW&SW) as they please. The truth is, they don't know what is the cost of that freedom. In the future, where Digital information would play the major part in human development, This would be the equivalent of occupation not by armies and soldiers, but by digital information. Nowadays, people are using pirated software and illegal copies of digital media. Its mostly targeted towards digital entertainment; but it will not be fair when software becomes an essential part of our lives. It will be like stealing food to live. This is were Free and Open Source Software role comes to play. When this whole thing started, it was only the desire for people to learn how do computers work, and try to make them work better by modifying the software they use. This gave birth to everything in the IT industry! from the Internet protocol implementations, to the text editor we use to write e-mails. Now using FOSS is something and producing FOSS is something else. I can use a complete operating software with all the bells and whistles and still create commercial products. As mentioned earlier, software is used to help us do our work. All Human beings must work and get payed in the end. Some people's work is to create FOSS software, Some people create FOSS to get the required skills to and be employed by commercial software companies, some do it just to show their talents, and some do it for pure selfless reasons (yes this could also happen in this time and space). The point is, the result is Free as in Pizza and Freedom (with more stress on the last). Mohammad Khashashneh --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Jolug" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Jolug?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
