Re: Release plans

[Johannes Weiner]

Hi,

"Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> writes:

>    Freedom should never stand over software quality and usability.
>
> Freedom must always stand over software quality and usability, without
> it we cannot improve the software in question.

Not when your definition of freedom forbids certain improvements.

>    Primarily, software is problem-solving.  If your software comes in
>    a flavor that doesn't restrict user's freedom, this is really nice.
>
> It is a prerequisite that software is free to be able to solve
> problems; if the software is not free, then you cannot solve anything.

This is flat out wrong.  Software is written for a purpose.  Windows
does its job, whether it does it good or bad and whether you like the
philosophy or not.  It is not free and it solves the problem it was
written for.

>    If you cripple software for freedom's sake, you have driven the
>    purpose of software ad absurdum.
>
> Nobody implied that one should cripple software for freedoms sake.
> Nor did rms argue that it is good to have badly written free software.
> But it is better to have badly written free software than having well
> written non-free software.  We can fix the former, but not the later.

We can fix the former if our definition of freedom allows us to.  This
was the whole point of my previous email, in fact.

Emacs has still no support to load shared libraries during runtime and
IIRC it was rejected back then due to political reasons.  I call this
crippling.

        Hannes