On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 4:15 AM, Josef Pktd <josef.p...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Mine was not a snide remark, but the truth. Those other operating systems I >> was talking about do give users more freedom. For example, the freedom to >> use it on as many different machines as you like without an extra license, >> to see the source code, to modify it, and to redistribute the modification >> including an attribution to yourself. > > "Richtige Männer nehmen Pitralon" everything else is "unreal" > > I'm writing BSD licensed software, but I never felt the urge to change more > than a few options in the operating system, and was never interested in the > "freedom" to fix the kernel (and I was never interested in fixing my car > either). >
That's true of me, too. I run Debian Linux on most of my systems, and for the overwhelming majority of packages, I simply accept the precompiled binary that's available from their repositories, rather than tinkering with it myself. But the mere possibility that someone recompile their own software forces authors and vendors to remain honest; it's pretty useless adding in nagware or ads if anyone can simply compile them out again. Plus, the general culture of GNU, Linux, *BSD, and similar ecosystems means that when you *do* want to compile your own software, it's really easy. Want to run CPython 3.6 on Windows? Go hunt down a compiler, fiddle around with it, and see if you can get everything to work. Want to run CPython 3.6 on a Debian system? It's probably as simple as: $ sudo apt-get build-dep python3 $ sudo apt-get install mercurial $ hg clone https://hg.python.org/cpython $ cd cpython $ make Want to try out that interesting-looking patch off the bug tracker? Same as the above, plus one little 'patch' command to apply the patch. Either way, you end up with the main "python3" command still being the one that Debian provided, and "./python" running the brand new one you just built. (If you *do* want to replace your system-wide Python, that's just one more command; but it's easy to keep them separate until you're done testing.) I'm not going to force anyone to abandon Windows, but freedom does benefit even people who don't directly exercise it, so I would still encourage people to consider a culture of freedom. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list