On Tue 30 Jun 2009 15:12, Richard Stallman pondered:
That is great - and I applaud your efforts. I think that the work you are doing is valuable, and the contributions you have made have been critically important to the free and closed software developments that people to today.If you mean that my work has contrubuted to non-free software developments, I am not proud of that. It is not a good thing that people develop or use non-free software.
Not to go down a rat hole - but as a normal part of development of non-free software, people use emacs, gcc, and gdb all the time - you aren't proud of the contributions you made to those projects?
I was trying to say that your efforts have changed the face of computing in general, in both that it has created the "free" and "non-free" software software categories, and helped inform users of their freedoms they should be expecting.
To use someone else's words - an IDC 2006 study "Open Source in Global Software: Market Impact, Disruption, and Business Models" described free software and open source as "the most significant all-encompassing and long-term trend that the software industry has seen since the early 1980s" and found that over 70 percent of all developers are leveraging open-source and free software.
In any movement - there needs to be the golden standard - that is unwavering in its ethics and standards. Not everyone likes that standard - but it needs to be there.