One word...
WRONGO!!!!
How can someone be so inane, I mean
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I don't see how it seperates users. I see it the opposite. With proprietary software everyone has the same version, everyone can do the same things, variation is almost non existant.
No everyone doesn't have "the same vision." First of all, with proprietary software the vision of the users is left out, and they have no say. It's a software dictatorship. We can have standards and freedom with free software, this binary world of "nazi software lockdown" or "splintered BSD fragmentation" is completely separated from reality. Just look at Xfree86, freedesktop.org, and the Linux kernel. There are people who end up having a say what goes into the official version of each major free software project. But I could download the Linux source code, fork it, and make my own kernel! Sure there are literally dozens of distributions of Linux, but that's what freedom is all about. You are free to create, even if you want to break standards to do so. Truly a boon to innovation.
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With Free Software, you can change it and make it do things that the standard distrobution couldn't do. Thus making your friends who have the same software incapable of doing the same things that you do with it.
What does this mean? If I created some custom distro that did something fancy, what would stop me from giving it to my friends? And even if I didn't, that would still make it more free than proprietary software, where nobody but the software owner can make changes.
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And your right, free software is good for the bottom sonsumer who does not make money off of advanced expensive software. But then another problem arises. Free software is programmed by, usually smart, linux geekos. Thus making the product, usually, have a totally unintutive interface for the basic user, so that this user can not easily use it.
Have you used KDE 3.1? Go download Mandrake Linux 9.1 right now.
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That hour was with years of Photoshop experience already behind me, imagine a user with no digital image experience jumping into the GIMP.
years of photoshop experienceYou see, you think photoshop is easier because you've been trained to use it from the start.
When I got heavily into Gimp I used it for quite a long time and came back to Photoshop one day and realized I liked the Gimp better. None of the shortcuts and commands I used in Gimp worked in Photoshop. At that point Photoshop was the hard to learn, unfamiliar program, not Gimp. It's all about what you were used to.
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Also, the basic user will most likely have problems compiling software.
Who says they ever have to?
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In my opinion, Proprietary software helps everyone, except the people that for one reason or another expect everything to be free.
Wrong. Proprietary software helps the software owners who use the threat of force to lord over the mere "consumers" of software. Everyone's a consumer in this system, something to be exploited. The software owners are the only benefactors, and use copyright to divide, dominate, and mistreat the public.
And the "free" I'm talking about refers to freedom, not price. Please read this page:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html quote:
I really hate that. Like with this Music "Sharing" thing. Your not fucking sharing, your stealing.
How exactly am I stealing? If you want to know what
I really hate, it's when media companies and others try to apply our ideas and intuitions about whether it is right to
take an object away from someone else and try to apply it to merely making a copy of something. If I make a sandwich, I do object if you eat it, because then I cannot eat it. But if I sell you a program I shouldn't have the power to tell you what you can and can't do with it, including making a copy and sharing it with your friends. No one should have that power.
I suppose if one day we have star-trek like machines that let people copy objects like food and computers you would support oppressive and greedy companies and people who try to restrict the copying in the name of profit, because that's exactly what they do in this country with published information. They mistreat the public and deny them their freedom to copy and share, all in the name of the almighty dollar.
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Another thing that seems kind of a not so strange coincidence, is that most free software is a copy of some sort of proprietary software. Sure, some of it worked the other way around, but not much. And most of the free software is not an exact copy with more features, it is a semi-copy, with less features.
Well, a lot of it [end user software] is designed to replace a specific piece of proprietary software, so naturally it's designed to behave in a similar fashion. Since when was it a crime to do this?
[ March 26, 2003: Message edited by: Linux User #5225982375 ]
