[CoLoCo] RMS interview.

[Collins Richey]

On Dec 20, 2007 10:53 AM, David L. Willson <DLWillson at thegeek.nu> wrote:

>
> Eeeww.  Jim, that's just gross.  OK, now I have to ask Collins:  Who do
> you cheer for?  Who or what gets your undiluted praise and why?
>

"undiluted praise' - that's a tough one. No one is without blame. I
have great admiration for Mark Shuttleworth, Patrick Volkerding,
Daniel Robbins, the sidux developers, the KDE developers, the many
thousands of Debian developers, the developers of the xxBSD distros,
the developers of perl and python and ruby and bash, and even RMS
himself from time to time, but I certainly cannot give undiluted
praise to any of them.

I am a believer in open and free software, but unlike RMS and most of
you, I have no problem with proprietary software. Microsoft is not an
abomination because its software is not released under the GPL but
rather for its many other failings. As an example, Microsoft is evil,
but nVidia and Adobe are not. Each is in the position of developing
products that people are drawn to based on their merits, and neither
is in the business of coercing people to use their products. My nVidia
cards work just fine, and I have no problem utilizing closed-source
drivers as long as they work. I have no problem using Flash and Adobe
Reader when there is a release that works well under Linux.

If someone chooses to develop and market software that is closely held
but that works well on my Linux system, I don't need to listen to RMS
or his minions ranting about this evil practice ( see indigestion in
the earlier post). That being said, I prefer to use open source
software when it is well suited to its purpose, and I always use 100%
free distributions of Linux.


-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.