When people think about adopting an Open Source solution, the first factor that comes to mind is the price: it is usually cheaper than proprietary alternatives. What a lot of people fail to consider is that there are a lot of other advantages to Open Source that can be much more important than the price factor. Let's have a look at a few of them...

RMS: Thus, the Pirate Party's proposal would give proprietary software developers the use of GPL-covered source code after 5 years, but it would not give free software developers the use of proprietary source code, not after 5 years or even 50 years. The Free World would get the bad, but not the good.

Those of us in the free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) community know the routine by now.

Benjamin Mako Hill argues that "a FLOSS program might be better or more reliable than proprietary software. Or it might be worse. [...] We can use empirical evidence to help bolster our arguments but we should be careful to not confuse these empirical claims with the principles themselves. They can, and sometimes will, be proven wrong."

Everybody knows, that DRM is bad. Also everybody knows, that Open Source is just a compromise and a stage in transition to a close-to-ideal system, which Free Software is. However let’s try to look at the other side of the coin.

This article is not about free software, although many ideas in this article are similar. This article is about the rights and respect that the computer user deserves, and have been taken away from him without even knowing it.

"...It is time for scientists to reconnect their work and expertise with a wider role in society, to become Citizen Scientists [...] By doing science differently, these scientists and others like them are challenging assumptions about the why, the how and the what of twenty-first century science." — via Lionel Larqu