[LBo] Linux Leader takes aim at Free Software Movement

[James Allen]

My 1/2 cent:

>From the interview I read of Linus, he doesn't care if hardware
manufacturers restrict you from running Linux. He says just go out and
buy other hardware. Guess that comes from making it rich off of Linux
and he can go out and buy more hardware ;-)

On this issue, I haven't seen it being about "success". It's about
freedom. And to me freedom is more important than success. The DRM
restricts my freedom. The recording industry wants it to be law that
they can restrict your freedom. I disagree with them and I don't think
Linus sees the whole picture. I think it is not just a right to look
at the source code. What good is that if you can't use it?

BTW, I don't use Red Hat or Novell at home and don't plan on doing so.
Canonical to me has a better model and hopefully more companies will
continue to get on the Ubuntu wagon.

As far as applications you can make great ones but it doesn't do any
good if Microsoft has a proprietary format, and keeps changing it with
each version. Then software such as OpenOffice.org has to program to
meet those changes. The key will be acceptance of the Open Document
format as a standard.

One thing Linux does need for the corporate world is an Outlook look
alike. Got to make the non-technical types happy ;-)

James

Interviews with Richard Stallman

http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3/torino-rms-transcript.en.html#drm

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060625001523547

Draft of GPL v3
http://gplv3.fsf.org/gpl-draft-2006-07-27.html

Interview with Linus
http://trends.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/02/1636216