Re: [Fsfe-uk] BECTA discriminate against FLOSS?

[Chris Croughton]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 10:37:57PM +0000, Ramanan Selvaratnam wrote:

> On Sat, 2004-01-03 at 18:03, Chris Croughton wrote:
> 
> > I'm tempted to move to China, or one of the South American countries
> > which is heavily promoting FLOSS for government use <g>.
> 
> If it is for the software or related services you could subscribe from
> here. I am sure the prices will be competetive apart from supporting the
> spread of freedoms in software.

No, I don't want to give my money (as in taxes) to the UK government.

> > Well, I wouldn't work for MS if you paid me. 
> I would, just like an increasing number of others (for gratis on top of
> it!) as long as the solution respects the users freedoms that have been
> traditionally denied in their products so far. 
> (currently looking at Uniscribe ... a very neat product from MS itself
> ... Mozilla uses it better than IE in many cases)

What I've heard about MS working conditions make me not want to work
there, for a start.  Far too "big business".

> > Red Hat is not a good example (it
> > seems to me that they are breaking the spirit of FLOSS 
> 
> Please, can you explain what is the spirit of FLOSS broken by Redhat?

Taking developer fixes and code from 'Fedora' and passing them on to the
'Enterprise' version for sale?

I haven't been fond of RH for ages (try building a kernel with their
patches which is the same as the one they supply as binary, for
instance), but they seem to be going further into the idea of "let's
make money off the developers".  Which is of course allowed by the free
software licences, but if the developers get the impression they are
working "for free" for someone else to sell their work how long will
they continue to do it?

The "spirit of FLOSS" is that people put back into the community.  RH
don't seem to be much interested in honouring that any more...

Chris C