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

[Imran Ghory]

On 10 Mar 2002, Alex Hudson wrote:

> 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. 

But isn't OpenOffice based on Star Office code ?

> 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. 

Yes, maybe it should also cover the "openess" aspect of free software
more, i.e. being more trustworthy. (for example would you be happy for
online elections to occur when the software 95% of the voters use is
controlled secretly by one company) .

> 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 :)

The problem isn't really in convincing people who use linux though, the
majority of people who we need to explain about free software to are
Windows users, and there are hardly any pieces of free software for
windows in wide spread use. 

Imran