2011/11/20 Joris Meys <jorism...@gmail.com>:
> I am very much pro open source and I have my own ideological ideas
> about a lot of things.
I am personally not so much in favour of open source. Open source is
ok, but it's not enough. Free (vrije) is a lot more important than
open.
> And as much as I'm pro open source, rigorously trying to block any
> access to paid software is not only hypocrite
No, there's nothing wrong with paid software. Paid software is great.
Non-free software is not. There's a difference. There is lots of good
free commercial software, e.g. Red Hat, Ubuntu, gitorious:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business
http://gitorious.com/
even selling binaries is great for free software, e.g.:
http://ardour.org/download
The possibility of also selling binaries for Octave has come up
several times, and I am much in favour of this.
> (there is an octave binary for both Windows and Mac, although you
> can't accuse either of them of being philantropic when it comes to
> sofwarte).
The reason why it's important to have Windows and Mac binaries is that
there are users of those non-free OSes who would otherwise have no
access to Octave. It is not an endorsement of Windows or Mac OS X,
just like having a mex-file interface in Octave is not an endorsement
of Matlab. It's the only way to give those users a taste of free
software they would otherwise not have. It's much too difficult for a
user of a non-free OS to completely switch the OS just for one program
like Octave. But little by little, by making free software available
to those users, they can slowly work on a transition towards free
software.
> It is just ignoring the facts stated. People use tools if they're
> useful, not because the ideology that's behind them.
The point of GNU software isn't to make popular software. The point is
to give people access to free software. If it happens to be GNU,
great, if it happens to be other popular free software, also great. So
the principles behind free software are more important then the
popularity of any particular bit of software.
I personally don't care as much if people are using Octave as long as
they're able to do free scientific computation and care about free
collaboration. If people think Scipy or Scilab works for them better
than Octave, great. Those also allow free collaboration, free work,
free science.
The problem I try to fix when working on Octave is to give people a
free scientific environment unfettered by license agreements or secret
algorithms. I work on Octave because I think it has its own merits and
because nothing else aims to freely ran Matlab code, at least not to
extent Octave does. There is much free Matlab code out there. It
shouldn't be locked to Matlab. The point of Octave compatibility with
Matlb is to break vendor lock-in, and that's why I think our work on
Octave is important.
I don't want to tell those people to go and use non-free software by
hosting links to non-free software on Octave-Forge. That would work
against the entire reason I enjoy working on Octave.
Yours forever free,
- Jordi G. H.
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