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The free software community understands that free software gives the user more freedom than proprietary software. Proprietary software confines its users, prohibits them from making changes that would allow everyone to benefit, etc. Free software advocates (myself included) have a habit of claiming that using free (libre) software means the same thing as having freedom.
OK, I'm conflicted. Last Saturday at the Software Freedom Day event in Boston, Richard Stallman called Miguel de Icaza “a traitor to the Free Software community" because of de Icaza's involvement with Microsoft-based technologies like Mono and Moonlight.
This time we talk about free software, Mono and whether or not it's a gratuitous risk, Microsoft's broken ODF support, PHP, and MySQL Workbench. Download Kongoni Nietzsche!
"..RMS’s other mission here is to promote the Free Software Movement. The creator of the GPL...is at pains to correct misunderstandings of what the term free software means and to draw a distinction between it and the open source movement.
With Independence Day coming up, I want to do a series of posts about freedom and what "free software" actually means. The English language is weak in the area of freedom, so when somebody says "free software" they think "free of charge" or "gratis" (to use the Latin term for the concept), which can really throw you, since most free software is available to anyone without monetary cost.
"Why should we care to have a 100 per cent free operating system? Isn't being almost free enough? Not if you value freedom itself.
The Free Software Movement was founded to win freedom for software users. Its offshoot, Open Source, was founded to downplay freedom as a value. This difference, which may seem subtle, has big consequences and this is one example of them..."
