On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 07:46:08PM -0500, Eliah Kagan wrote: > When you say the world is not made of such extremes, do you mean you > think the long-term effects of something are always unquantifiable?
The long term effects of anything are always something left to optimism or pessimism, according to each PoV, short of mathmatical formulas. > That these specifically are unquantifiable? Indeed, if you could be > more clear, that would be helpful. I think they're unquantifyable. > Suppose someone is unable to use Wine to run a proprietary program on > a free operating system. As a result, they never use the free > operating system. So they never use all the free programs that are > part of that operating system. Well most of those programs fulfill a > function that is also fulfilled (or sought to be fulfilled) by > proprietary programs. So by enabling them to use their proprietary > program in conjunction with a free operating system, they are also > using many free alternatives to many other proprietary programs. This > seems to promote development of software that replaces proprietary > programs. People seldom evolute in harsh steps. Before I learned of free software, I only thought GNU/Linux as useful for college. Windows was invaluable for the games. After some time I noticed I didn't have enough space for my music collection and I hadn't booted on Windows for months in a row... never again. This was... about ten years ago... give or take an year. Never went back. > There are also quite a few free programs that run only on Windows. > (Being able to redistribute a program and its source and modify and > redistribute the source doesn't somehow cause it to be instantly > ported to other platforms by the grace of God.) These programs can be > run on other operating systems with Wine. They can be ported to run on > other operating systems with winelib. I didn't say Wine is evil, just counter-productive. And it's totally my own opinion. Its fortunate success, as Free Software, may have enabled some users to use more Free Software, but it may also have enabled some users to continue using non-free software, even when replacements exist. > What I'm saying is that the matter of what supports replacing > proprietary software with free software is complicated and merits a > more textured analysis. In response, you seem to be saying that I hold > a black-and-white view. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me > (though you have managed to quote me in a way that makes it look like > I hold and black-and-white view, I will assume that this was not > intentional). Hms, you used the "ultimately" this "ultimately" that expression, sorry if I took you for holding that BaW PoV! Rui -- Umlaut Zebra |ber alles! Today is Sweetmorn, the 6th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3174 + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...?
