rajendran wrote on Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 12:19:54PM +0530:
,----
| Suraj -- Thanks for your mandrake tip. (He was my favourite indrajal
| comic character too!) Do you have a mandrake distribution that I can
| try out at my home? Checked out their website. It says Try/Buy. Does
| it mean I gotta pay? This is not a FREE distribution? I don't
| understand. Can you clarify?
`----
Free does not necessarily mean price. the 'free' in Free Software
refers to "Freedom". Many free / open source software are available
for a price. This does not mean that you cannot view / modify /
redistribute its source.
Two views (united in their goal for keeping software free but quite
different in their approach for doing so):
1. The Free Software philosophy: http://gnu.org/philosophy/
2. The Open Source philosophy: http://opensource.org/
Another simpler approach -- "get the job done". OSS/FS is a better
choice for most applications simply because:
a. What you want to do is almost already done and is there in some
CVS somewhere :) (or your favourite distro has already compiled it,
packaged it and is there on its CD!)
b. Availability of developers with open source related skills is
easy because they might have learnt it all by themselves OR by
paying a much lower fee. The same reason why there are more C/C++
programmers than "ABAP consultants", i think.
The following article presents a very neat overview of why you should
go for Free/Open Source software:
http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
I hope someone in chennai still possesses the OGGs of RMS's speech at
MIT. You can borrow it and listen to it. Even otherwise, his message
is the same wherever he goes -- so you can download one of his
speeches from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/audio/audio.html ;(oh,
please dont ask "why aren't there MP3s?" :) listen to his talk on
'dangers of software patents' :) )
,----
| days, and I braved it all. So, I am not a knowledgeable fighter here
| to enjoy the war, I am a trying-to-be-clean guy using the only route
| (however thorn-ridden) that I know of. Probably the only solution
| might be that I should quit this dirty profession of software and
| computers itself!! :-(
`----
heh.
You can gain knowledge anytime, though :) The "our way" of gaining
knowledge is to search the manpages, the web (now that there is also
Yahoo! Search, I wont simply say 'google' :) ) and finally post on
mailing lists. Almost everything you want to know about would have a
mailing list (for example, X on debian is called the debian-x
list[1]). Searching on that mailing list archives will turn up answers
for your problems (thankfully most such mailing lists have their
archives on the web and most search engines would have crawled the
archives. So searching on your favourite search engine should do the
job).
cheers,
-Suraj
references:
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-x/
--
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