[Fsfe-uk] Why FS is a Good Thing

[Ramin Nakisa]

With the help of Mark Ray, I've put this draft together to summarize why Free 
Software is a Good Thing.  I want to keep it to one side of A4.  We can use 
something like this to make our case against software patents, and also to 
lobby the government to use Free Software more widely in the public services 
here in the UK.  Mark made some great suggestions, hopefully others will too.

\begin{itemize}
\item Free Software allows people the freedom to re-use other people's source 
code, so software developers do not have to ``re-invent the wheel''.  Science 
owes its explosive growth over the past century to the free and open exchange 
of ideas.  As Isaac Newton said in a letter to his colleague Robert Hooke 
dated 5 February 1676:

\begin{quotation}
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
\end{quotation}

Free Software is in the process of recreating this explosion of ideas in the 
world of Information Technology.  Free Software such as that distributed 
under the GNU public license ensures that people are free to make 
improvements and redistribute software, but must always make the source code 
available.

\item Most software is written in-house and never sold, and in this case 
software patents are a hindrance.  Free software is like infrastructure - 
freely available to all businesses and an enabler of progress and innovation. 
Investment banks, for example, devote considerable resources to developing 
in-house software to manage trading systems, and these would benefit from 
reduced cost and faster development times by using Free software.

\item Free software is often distributed for no cost.  This can save around 
20\% of the cost of every computer in an organisation, because although 
hardware has become consistently cheaper personal computer operating systems 
have increased in price.  If licenses have to be paid every year using Free 
Software will result in even greater cost efficiency.

\item Free software is bankruptcy-proof.  It is usually stored on globally 
available software repositories and will often outlive any company or 
organisation that created it.  While the community of people that use and 
maintain the project continue to exist, the software will persist and develop.

\item Support for free software is often much better than that for 
proprietary software.  Newsgroups exist where users post questions and 
receive prompt and helpful replies.  People are encouraged to report bugs and 
these are often fixed within a few weeks.

\item Most people use computers to write documents and presentations, read 
email and look at the Web.  Free software exists to perform all of these 
tasks.

\item Many thousands of free software projects exist (see the Free Software 
directory at http://www.gnu.org/directory).  Some of the most successful 
include:

\begin{description}
\item [GNU/Linux] an operating system (like Microsoft Windows).
\item [KDE, Gnome, GNUstep and XFCE] desktop environments (attractive and 
easy to use interfaces for GNU/Linux).
\item [StarOffice] a word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation package 
that is compatible with Microsoft Office.
\item [Mozilla] an Internet browser that shares code with Netscape.
\item [Apache] industry standard software used to run web sites (used by 
Amazon.com, the German government, the FBI in the US, Walmart).
\item [Beowulf] for parallel computing (used for climate change simulations, 
particle physics computations and medical drug discovery applications).
\end{description}

\item Many companies have invested heavily in Free software.  IBM has 
invested over \$2 billion in GNU/Linux, and now sells many of its computers 
from million pound mainframes to laptops with GNU/Linux pre-installed.

\end{itemize}