Re: [Fsfe-uk] Mac OS X refund

[Noah Slater]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 01:18:47PM +0000, Jon Grant wrote:
> There has to be some half-way house at some point during change over..
> it's when someone doesn't plan for a complete change over and sticks
> with the intermediary that there is a problem (like FSF support of
> Adobe Flash format!)

I wish people would stop mentioning this, it's almost as if you're all
tempting me to restart the flamewar! Sooooo tempting... ;)

I /will/ just mention that I read somewhere a compelling essay about
how the most important thing for the FLOSS movement while it still
holds a market share as low as it does (<1%) is compatibility with
existing systems, formats and standards.

With such a low market penetration, I hardly think we are in the
position to start crossing our arms and staunchly refusing to
implement free software applications for rubbish formats (because
let's be clear, Flash is not non-free per se, just pretty rubbish)
simply because they disagree with our higher standards(!)

For the FLOSS community to grow we need adoption and for adoption we
need interoperability with existing systems and formats. Flash isn't
the be-all-and-end-all but it is certainly important (in terms of
user-base, which no one can legitimately argue against), no matter how
much well all secretly hate it. :)

-- 
Noah Slater <http://bytesexual.org/>

"Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as
society is free to use the results." - R. Stallman