Non FOSS and Fedora

[Adam Kosmin]

Rui,

Your comments are right on the money and I could not agree more. I hope
you don't mind me bringing this to the attention of the list. In fact, I
did not know that fedoranews.org was a separate project. Regardless, I
think the issue is relevant and hope to see support for your point of
view. Also, I sent an email to the author of those tutorials and hope
he'll respond by taking the documents off of the website.

Sincerely,

Adam Kosmin
WindowsRefund.net


Rui Miguel Seabra (rms at 1407.org) wrote:
" On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 09:51, Adam Kosmin wrote:
" > Is it appropriate to encourage people to install non-FOSS software on
" > Fedora?
" 
" Fedora News is a different project from Fedora.
" 
" IMO encouraging people to install non-Free software, regardless of what
" operating system you are running on, is extremely bad advice.
" 
" You should always look suspiciously towards anyone advising you to
" install something is bad for you, and generally evil (for instance, with
" Sun's JDK you are not allowed to give a copy to a friend of yours, that
" could revoke both your copy and his immediately since only Sun and
" authorized distributers can give access to its JDK).
" 
" It is true that some non-Free software may perform certain tasks better
" than their Free Software counterparts, but remember that non-Free
" software brings a social cost that is very bad: social division between
" those who can and those who can't.
" 
" With a proposed European Directive law that turns copyright infringement
" a public crime being actively pursued by guys not at all unlike the BSA,
" you might even face jail time for having unlicensed copies.
" 
" Remember that even though you can download Adobe Acrobat gratis, you
" still have to abide to its license (ie, you have to click I Agree) and
" doing so, you agree that you will not help your friend by giving him a
" copy of a program in case he needs it.
" 
" That's one reason why all software should be Free Software, so you never
" do something wrong by giving a copy of some program to your friend.
" 
" I think it's totally evil to turn the world upside down, into some
" society where you can't legitimately help your friends because you're
" not allowed to.
" 
" rui
" 
" -- 
" + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
" + Whatever you do will be insignificant,
" | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi
" + So let's do it...?
" 
" Please AVOID sending me WORD, EXCEL or POWERPOINT attachments.
" See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html



-- 

"Yes, Your Honor. Now, where we are so far, in at least my
line of reasoning, is I want to walk the Court through enough of our
complaint to help the Court understand that IBM clearly did contribute a
lot of the Unix-related information into Linux. We just don't know what
it is." 

-- Kevin McBride SCO vs. IBM 12/05/03