Ubuntu is not free.

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 2006-07-13 at 11:20 -0300, Norton Roman wrote:

Firstly, please don't top post, it makes discussions impossible to
follow after a while. I know gmail puts the cursor at the beginning,
Outlook style, so you need to scroll down before typing

> Right, but we may end up in a circle, whereby we need a lot more
> people to make some pressure, and we can gather more people only if we
> allow non-free stuff to be shipped with ubuntu...

Considering the numbers of CDs shipped by Canonical, I think the point
where we have enough users to make a difference has already been
reached.

There comes a point where we have to take the viewpoint that our basic
rights have been eroded enough and when we come to the point of being
able to say we can now force the vendor's hand. I believe that point has
already been reached and we can now tell them "I know we had to tolerate
your restrictive proprietary nonsense in the past when we were small,
but now we are big and I suggest you listen to this significant group of
customers."

> that's not a simple matter of "I don't want it and you should make it
> as I wich".

Why not?

History abounds with examples of customers and people being ripped off
who eventually got fed up with it and demanded things changes. There's
even an old saw about it: "Determined men and groups are the only thing
that ever caused any change in this world." Ask AT&T about it. 

> By the way, there is no way of providing reliable figures about any of
> the questions above... you cannot tell people would abandon ubuntu for
> sure, but you cannot tell they wouldn't move back to windows either.
> intuition says they would move back... and that's something that even
> micro$oft takes very seriously (I think that's the main reason why
> they did not build a brand new OS from scratch). 

I know there is no way of measuring these things. My purpose is to get
as many people as possible to wake up and realise that they don't have
to continue being the effect of IT vendors and just accept the status
quo, that things can change, that we can make it happen, that assuming
that people will revert back to Windows if we don't put heaps of
non-free stuff in the distro is not a logical assumption. But especially
I want to help rid the community of the assumption that non-free stuff
will always be non-free and we can't change that. I'm not saying we
*must* use non-free, I'm saying we must get it changed to be free. It's
not hard to do this, we need to open our mouths and be heard, but not
just one or two of us - it will take all of us in a concerted organized
effort.

alan