kasia in a nutshell

Richard Stallman was nice enough to give a talk at the Greater Hartford GLUG meeting. It was tempting enough and I braved the drive through Hartford during rush hour and attended. I'm glad I went. Everyone knows the history of gnu and linux but it's always good to hear it from the proverbial "horse's mouth".

Stallman is a good speaker, throws in enough humorous references to keep the crowd interested and is anything but boring. I suppose I could summarize his stance on non-disclosure agreements (they're bad), free software (free as in freedom not free beer) and general state of software development today, but that's really easy to find on the web in numerous papers and books he's written, so I won't.

I agree with much of what he says. I believe in open source, I think software patents are ultimately evil and I think the government has no business bending over for corporations and passing laws like the DMCA. I don't think *all* software has to necessarily be free. There is room in our communities for both. I can't imagine excellent products like Photoshop (gimp is nice, but it's not photoshop) and autocad would ever come into existence if all software was free. Support fees only go so far for products like these. Companies other than hardware manufacturers need an incentive to create good, professional software and income is probably the best one of them all.

These companies have the right to write software, keep the source private and charge money for it, but they do not have the right (this is in my view, not in legal terms) to tell the users how they can or cannot use their software. They should be responsible for flaws and lack of quality. Most of all, they do not have the right to invade, control or do anything to the user's computer just because their software is on the machine. I think it's a quote from "Good Omens".. "The devil should learn to write agreements from the software manufacturers".

The halo on Saint InGNUcius's head? I was right.. it's a hard drive plate.