Comments on: The RedHat Package Mangler

By: 10 mobys

10 mobys — Tue, 06 May 2008 05:24:56 +0000

i don’t get the big deal, i mean what percentage of the world knows how to hack open source code in any kind of useful way? and the percentage that can write device drivers for undocumented pieces of silicone is what, like 0.1% of the world’s population less? so basically you’re just about as free to modify the system anyway so that you can use your computer that otherwise displays gleeps and uncomfortably-colored stripes because there’s no open-source graphics driver. but it is slightly closer to achieving their philosophical ideals to prevent those forming part of the 99.9% of the world’s population who would be otherwise included in 6 8ths of the first statement but unfortunately have hardware that doesn’t have free device drivers and are so destitute that they can’t buy a shiite video/audio/ card and so poorly socially-connected that they can’t just swap gear with their windows-using friends from using ubuntu at all.

yeah i know that sentence was way too complicated, but it’s free like speech.

By: שיפוצים

שיפוצים — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:46:09 +0000

best one so far :)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 15:32:40 +0000

” Market share is by far much more important to software freedom today than “free software philosophy”. ”

Yes, just look at how the BSDs took the over the world by thunder to become the number one Free Operating system, and all by just making it easier for proprietary interests to divide and conquer.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:00:22 +0000

excellent one!

I kindly request these pictures to be included some time in the future

http://juliancash.com/view/rms1/set/medium_bigjpg_os6_d4_4412.html

By: subnetmask255x4

subnetmask255x4 — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:29:24 +0000

I wrote my own interpretation of what ESR was saying. Just go to my website, click Posts, then click “Eric S. Raymonds big goodbye.”

By: David Nielsen

David Nielsen — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 08:38:31 +0000

Pure comedy gold!

By: Jack Ripoff

Jack Ripoff — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:38:19 +0000

Market share is by far much more important to software freedom today than “free software philosophy”.

The free software alternative in general isn’t totally free. You aren’t free to play DVDs. You aren’t free to use whatever software you want. You aren’t free to use whatever hardware you want. You aren’t free to open most file formats. These freedom problems will only be solved with significant market share.

Not that I am defending Ubuntu. I don’t like it either. To be honest, I don’t like Linux in general. I prefer FreeBSD rather than Linux.

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 00:39:29 +0000

Priceless. The face shot of esr is perfect!

*hahaha*

By: john

john — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 23:24:05 +0000

Nick: well spotted. I’ll shut up now.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:35:27 +0000

Well… drivers aren’t applications, so what’s your point there?

Anyway… I think it’s totally OK to use this for comedic purpose but I thought it was supposed to be a parody.
So, as a dedicated Ubuntu user, I laughed hard about the whole strip – just after I looked up, what the hell peotomy means ^^

By: john

john — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 13:15:26 +0000

a bug in http://launchpad.net/ubuntu

“Ubuntu includes only Free Software applications. You are free to modify or change any aspect of your Ubuntu system.”

By: James Governor’s Monkchips » links for 2007-03-09

James Governor’s Monkchips » links for 2007-03-09 — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:28:59 +0000

[...] Everybody loves Eric Raymond I can’t believe I just came across this. Thanks redmonk irc. This is a new must read. (tags: ESR comedy) [...]

By: Tuttle

Tuttle — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:05:31 +0000

I thought it was “cut your NOSE off to spite your face”…

By: kris

kris — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:01:28 +0000

Definitely one of the best one yet ;D

By: Panzer

Panzer — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 11:48:06 +0000

@elerfan:
You obviously never run a commercial business. Hardware vendors make money by selling their products. Do you think that any hardware vendor (apart from Apple) would endure more than a month if it would ship a product without any kind of Windows drivers for it? Who would buy such a product? Therefore, if You do have a 70+% market share, you can dictate the terms for the market: if you say “No more non-free drivers for my product” (and you could do that without loosing more than a couple of percents of your own market for that reason), then HW vendors would have to comply if they want their businesses to continue making money. That’s capitalism.

But if you’re a minor player in the market (almost invisible on the radar) as “free” Linuxes currently are, then with attitude like yours you can only stand aside sulking and watch other people jump ship because they cannot use their hardware the way they can use it with ‘compromise-prone’ Linuxes or, Gods forbid, proprietary OSes.

I, for one, am thankfull that I can use binary-only drivers if they do solve mu problems better than open-source ones: in my laptop (MSI S270) I have a RaLink 2500 WiFi card. RaLink open-source driver is in the default kernel for ages (I’ve even read somewhere on the Net that GNU encourages people use this card because the company is open-source friendly), but it was not modified to use the new WiFi framework in the Linux kernel. Therefore, I’ve had problems configuring it for my home network using WPA – I wanted to use NetworkManager to manage my card, but it wont work in WPA mode, only WEP. Finaly I’ve found the solution to compile RaLink own utility, but that was a kludge. So, I opted for Windows driver and ndiswrapper and it works great – I can use NetworkManager to manage my WiFi card no matter what type of encryption is used. With ‘free’ driver I obviously could not use it that way. And yes, I would like to try to improve the driver but I don’t have the skills needed for that job and I don’t have the possibility to break apart my home network for that.