Free software is a remarkable phenomenon. It is a highly evolved form of collaboration: compared to other creative endeavors, free software developers all over the world are able to work together on a project with surprisingly little friction.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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can.axis
3 years 32 weeks 1 day 3 hours ago
“Ecosystem”
« It is a mistake to describe our community (or any community) as an “ecosystem”, because that word implies the absence of (1) intension and (2) ethics. In an ecosystem, species evolve according to their fitness. If something is weak, it goes extinct, and that's neither right nor wrong. The term “ecosystem” implicitly suggests a passive attitude: “Don't ask how things should be, just watch what happens to them”.
By contrast, beings that have ethical responsibility can decide to preserve something that, on its own, would tend to vanish—such as civil society, democracy, human rights, peace, public health, … or computer users' freedom. » -- source: Some Confusing or Loaded Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding (FSF)
aboutblank
3 years 31 weeks 6 days 22 hours ago
Some of us free software
Some of us free software activists support the development of free software for political reasons and not just for altruism.
A major problem is the rest of the world (people that are not free software activists) is seduced into using proprietary software. We support the development of free software in order to reduce the attractiveness of proprietary software. Another problem is that users have no idea about our plight, our endeavor to escape from the rule of software proprietors. We write useful and convenient free software and attach the message of freedom to it so that all the interested people will know.