Re: [Fsfe-uk] Why FS is a Good Thing

[Alex Hudson]

On Sun, 2002-03-10 at 20:05, Imran Ghory wrote:
> > \item [StarOffice] a word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation package 
> > that is compatible with Microsoft Office.
> 
> I thought Sun were planning to change StarOffice to a non-free licence ?
> (http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=020306001967) 

No. Although it is currently free (beer) to distribute, they are turning
it to non-free (beer) distribution. But StarOffice has never been Free
(speech). Please don't advocate using StarOffice - it, like Netscape, is
not Free Software. But OpenOffice and Mozilla _are_ Free Software, so we
can talk about those and recommend them to anyone. 

I would also say that while the text showed many of the benefits of
using Free Software, it doesn't make much point about the freedoms Free
Software gives you. Also, there appears to be confusion between patents
and copyright ;) 

I also wouldn't list Beowulf, since many people wouldn't know about the
area, let alone the software. Probably better to talk about applications
like Evolution, Gnumeric, GIMP, etc. - apps that people will recognise
these types of application much more readily. A lot more people use an
e-mail client than clustering software :)

Cheers,

Alex.

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