Subject: Re: [lojban] New to lojban, any suggestions?

From: "Robert J. Chassell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 23:13:14 +0000 (UTC)

... the emphasis here seems to be on the Linux realization, which
is about 10 years old (it seems to be hard to pin down a date) ....

The free software realization has been actively going since 1984 (that
is when people started writing code specifically for what is now
GNU/Linux; the Linux kernel itself is only 10 years old, but the
software that it requires was written before it and is portable.)

Before 1984, software freedom was not much of an issue since, as a
practical matter, the people concerned could get and modify and
redistribute sources. (In the 1970s, one book about software was
censored; i.e., taken out of bookstores because the police said it was
illegal to publish it; but few took that seriously. The people
involved did not feel their freedom was under attack; they faced
technical and ability limitations -- their institutions could not
afford the hardware they wanted; they could not think how to solve a
problem -- but they did not face legal barriers to working in their
profession.)

... The intricacies of the Free Software movement seem a bit off
the point here right now, noble as it is in itself.

Oddly enough, this is a topic that is uncomplicated! 

You don't have to be a programmer to understand. The question is
whether you favor freedom or monopoly in the industry. Freedom leads
to a competitive free market, a choice of vendors; monopoly leads to
monopoly profits for the successfull monopolist. Which do you think
your government should have its police enforce? A choice? Or not?

That means things that run on Windows and MSDOS and Macs and Linux
and -- if the need arose -- CPMs and supercomputers. 

That means creating `portable software'. The tools for creating that
kind of software easily were written and distributed more than 10
years ago. (Before that, portable software was written, but it was hard.)

For the past decade, portability has meant `runs on more than 40
different systems'. For the last decade, the impediment has been
legal, not technical.

-- 
Robert J. Chassell [email-masked]
Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com