Le 18 Août 2005 12:47, Piotr Majdak a écrit :
And by the way: going to a store gives the saleman a salary. So, in this example, freeware/OSS appears to be less social ;-)
The free software business is worth billions a year worldwide. People are paid to program, install, maintain and use free software.
Yes, we'll do, I'm sure about it. Because every month some OSS programers scream for that what they call "freedom".
I'm more a user than a programmer. And this debate is raging every second everywhere, not only once a month here.
And forget, that what they really want is to restrict freedom of other individuals.
This is very far from the truth. First, there's a big difference between "freedom" and "personal liberty". A definition of freedom (not the screaming OSS programmer's one): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom
Please (re)read those important references: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html http://www.debian.org/intro/free
Then read this essay written for people thinking like "suits": http://www.searls.com/linuxforsuits/1-lfs-freebusiness.html Take a break and read this entertaining comment by Bruce Sterling: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/view.html?pg=4 And finish your reading marathon with this fine article: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_03/free_labour/
So, why do _you_ want to force NVidia to do something your way? They are free to sell their driver - you are free to not buying their product if you don't like them.
_We_ might have to buy their product if _we_ need to work seriously with 3D, because it seems that nVidia is now the best choice for Linux, technically speaking. And because nVidia is a leader, competitors are also closing the drivers' source code of their newer products. The only freedom _we_ have in this situation is to use old cards with free drivers, even if these cards are now considered obsolete... The 3D business is a "vendor lock-in" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in/)
Example: I don't like M$ and that's why I don't use MS Office. But, I need MS Windows as OS thus, I _buy_ MS Windows. Sorry for that, it's MS's and my freedom.
_I_ think this is a bit masochistic, but feel "free"... ;-) -- Marc