I’m at LOTS and listening to the keynote speech.
What did I like about Stefano Mazzocchi’s talk:
1. He doesn’t like people that insult him for using non-free software on his laptop (an Apple). Freedom should be free – people should be free to choose freedom – or not.
2. He doesn’t believe in technological solutions against the power law “problem”: Any decentralized system will eventually form clusters.
Didn’t list to any other talk, was busy socializing and strengthening my social network – without any software. 😄 I like SunirShah’s way of putting it: *I have a face. Use it.*
Will be there tomorrow again.
#Software
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One of the main things that annoy me about FSF activists is that they never see proprietary software as an alternative, which takes away the freedom of choice from me. Why not just agree that there is tons of software out there and that one should use what best fits the purpose? I happen to think that Photoshop is a better (but much more expenisive) alternative to The Gimp, and that MS Office is the lesser of two evils when compared to OpenOffice, but also that IRSSI beats mIRC and whatnot. Free as in free choice, not free beer.
– Tim Cambrant 2005-02-18 14:18 UTC
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I don’t see proprietary software as an alternative because it’s not free 😉 On the other side (not the philosophical side, the practical side), proprietary software is a source of problems when you are managing a large-scale information infrastructure. You can’t manage the information hidden by proprietary software vendor... You have to dig ourself in the problems, find way to correct the problem in the proprietary software and at the end the software vendor is saying : “Wait for next release”. If you find this acceptable, ok... but software is very complex and you don’t want to add complexity by hidding another layer. Proprietary software is an antinomy to software itself.
– Anonymous 2005-02-18 16:33 UTC