Winpdb - A Platform Independent Python Debugger Free Ignorance
Here is my five-months-late take on the Negroponte-Microsoft love story announcement. It is an ironic story in which the FLOSS community is harnessed to pull the OLPC wagon to Africa and goes ballistic when told that they have to carry Microsoft in that wagon as well. I say that anyone in that community feeling betrayed can only complain of his or her own ignorance.
Take a look at Negroponte’s announcement (http://www.olpcnews.com/people/negroponte/nicholas_negroponte_sugar_olpc.html): The term Open Source appears 27 times in the announcement and comments while Free Software appears in one comment only where it is being slammed. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on OLPC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olpc): The term Open Source appears 7 times but nothing there on Free Software.
Well, isn’t Open Source all about that corporate-friendly magical method for creating high quality software? Not about user freedoms or hating a particular corporate. You would think the FLOSS community members who feel strongly about something would actually know what it means, right? wrong.
And guess what, there is a two years old interview with Stallman on YouTube in which he warns of such an occurrence (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBogiLGPMwA). This is what he says beginning on minute 08:45: “I ask you to please always call it Free Software because that way you will encourage other people to pay attention to the question of freedom. The term Open Source was formulated by people who did not want to talk about freedom and that is the stupidest thing any people can do. If people don’t talk about freedom it gets forgotten and then somebody says ‘if you will just accept these little restrictions, here is this convenient pleasure you can have’, essentially saying ‘we will sell you something in exchange for your freedom’. And if you have not been thinking about freedom and realizing what freedom means, you might accept that poisonous deal and then your freedom is gone.”
I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make? What is your 5-month assessment?
The point is that users should value their freedom or be doomed to lose it. Using the term Open Source to describe free software does not help our (the free software activists) cause to educate people about freedom. Using the term ‘free software’ is better than open source because people would question why our software is free and why the more common proprietary software is not free.
The fact is, OLPC showed signs that it was not a project that intended on spreading freedom. The biggest sign for this is the fact that it never referred to software freedom in its public communications; it was always about “leveraging open source” instead. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised of the fact that the OLPC project collaborated with Microsoft in order to make the hardware (somewhat) useable for Microsoft Windows. This action proves that OLPC project is a project intended to get computers into the hands of children and not a project intended to convey freedom.
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