From bob@RATTLESNAKE.COM Mon Aug 13 16:13:24 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: bob@rattlesnake.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 13 Aug 2001 23:13:24 -0000 Received: (qmail 69449 invoked from network); 13 Aug 2001 23:13:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 13 Aug 2001 23:13:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost) (140.186.114.245) by mta1 with SMTP; 13 Aug 2001 23:13:23 -0000 Received: by rattlesnake.com via sendmail from stdin id (Debian Smail3.2.0.111) for lojban@yahoogroups.com; Mon, 13 Aug 2001 23:13:14 +0000 (UTC) Message-Id: Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 23:13:14 +0000 (UTC) To: To: pycyn@aol.com Cc: lojban@yahoogroups.com In-reply-to: <110.3ba074d.28a9a754@aol.com> (pycyn@aol.com) Subject: Re: [lojban] New to lojban, any suggestions? Reply-to: bob@rattlesnake.com References: <110.3ba074d.28a9a754@aol.com> From: "Robert J. Chassell" ... 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 bob@rattlesnake.com Rattlesnake Enterprises http://www.rattlesnake.com