Re: [tlug] [OT] Say _no_ to the Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2007, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Dave Gutteridge writes:
>
> > http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/30/1433211
>
> I'm reminded of why I'm an open source advocate, not a free software
> fanatic.  Eloquence, yes, accuracy, no.

I was just about to say, this bit:

    We have been negotiating the third version of GPL for the last
    18 months. That is, for the first time since 1991, sixteen
    years ago, the fundamental legal mechanisms which established
    copylefted sharing, and which produced this outpouring of free and
    competitively superior software....

put me a little on edge. The BSDs aside (as they were pretty much
limited to the academic community in the 1970s and '80s anwyay) what
about the ever-so-public outpouring of source code for CP/M programs in
the late 1970s? Dave Rand's filer thingie (sorry, the name escapes me at
the moment) was always free, and then XModem and RCPM were a base, free
in and of themselves, on which much was shared. It seems to me that it's
only people who don't remember much before the Apple II, if even that
far back, who think that software has always been proprietary until Mr.
Stallman, on his white horse, came to the rescue. (Gcc was hardly the
first free C compiler!)

> I guess I just have to remind myself that "Extremism in the defense of
> freedom is no vice."

True. And comfort yourself with the fact that the GPL has had some good
effects, albeit unanticipated by those of us who are interested in,
"free as in do the whatever the heck you want with it," as opposed to
"free as in my ideology is better, so you'd better toe the line." (I've
got to come up with a snappier way to say that.)

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
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