'Proprietary software keeps users helpless'



http://www.techradar.com/news/software/ ... ss--963248

Fascinating interview, but I'm curious as to just how far he'd have gotten without Linus/x

Well, that's wrong, isn't it? There's tons of "free" apps out there, which just happen to run on a proprietary OS base. I don't think he can claim such apps are forbidden in that case.

I assumed he was talking around their approval, censorship and so on, but that sort of confusion highlights just how difficult it is to convey his particular line of thinking

Surely only a tiny percentage of users would be interested in doing that, though? I think Stallman assumes every user (or almost every user) is as keen to get into the nuts and bolts of the software as he is.

I don't think Stallman considers the average user that often at all. He's an arch dogmatist. Free software good, non free software bad. What people want, need or use is irrelevant to his world view.

Jon

I had an argument with some Linux troll on Twitter once. The word "free" is not used in the context of "beer" but in the context of "speech". My point is using the word "free" is ambiguous and misleading because the majority of people will assume the word "free" in the context of software is that you don't pay for it. People don't know (or really care) about the other use of "free".

He was having none of this and started a cyclical argument.

Do many users actually care? If I find a bugbear in a program I write to the developer and explain what I would like in the program. I made a couple of suggestions to the developer of License keeper and they have both been implemented. One was the ability to import from the macupdate user account website and the other was syncing. I now have the iOS edition and it syncs with the desktop.

He is not talking about free as in beer, but free as in speech. Apple forbids programmers to submit apps to the store which use an open source licence...

The guy is a free (speech) advocate and goes way beyond the pale a lot of the time.

He cuts off his nose to spite his face a lot of the time and wants that all users do the same.

Most people just want a system to work, he wants it to work, as long as 100% of the code is open sourced. If you need a closed source driver to get 3D acceleration working on a graphics card (E.g. KDE 4, Gnome 3 or Unity desktops in Linux), then you should forgoe the easy to use interface and suffer a slow, outdated UI on principal. Most users are more pragmatic and don't really care, as long as it works smoothly.

The same goes for contet, at the moment, he spoke out against E-Books as being evil this week. And don't get him started on music or video, that is pure, undiluted evil!

I have a preference for using "free" software where possible, but I must confess Linux becomes a lot more usable and friendly when you combine it with proprietary goodness - for example I have Flash, Java and the Nvidia driver installed.