On Jul 2, 2015, at 8:46 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote: > > I seriously doubt you're going to castigate the whole concept of free > software just because it's founded in a philosophy of, you know, > freedom. Freedom isn’t free. Someone has to do the work. I have yet to see how you explain who will do this work, how those people will get the resources to do this work, or what your role is in helping with the provisioning of those resources. And I still have yet to see how any of this involves the CentOS project, short of distributing the result as part of CentOS 8+. >> Given that CentOS doesn’t let you create C programs without any knowledge of how to program, would you also argue that CentOS doesn’t give you Freedom 0? > > No, but that would render the freedoms moot. Programs are assumed to > exist, just like electricity is assumed to exist. “Free” time is not free. It is a gift of someone’s finite time on this Earth. You have said that you are not entitled to receive this gift, and that you have no natural right to it. I don’t see that you are spending your own free time writing the software, nor are you hiring others to do it for you. So why do you expect to get this gift? Who will give it to you, undeserved, and why? > Those freedoms can't be > realized without access. I'm not saying access is a right or an > entitlement, I'm saying the lack of access has consequences, and that > consequence is free software is rendered impotent to those users. It > doesn't free them if it's not something they can use. I came up in computers in the early 1980s, when every computer came with a BASIC interpreter, and all the computer magazines had programs in them. The expectation at the time was that everyone who wanted to use a computer would create at least *some* of their own programs. Then people discovered that they could give money to other people to get them to license them copies of programs they created. Others discovered that they’d rather just give the software away, under assorted licenses and schemes. The missing link is the tie between that latter group and the necessity that they create arbitrary programs for you. You will not join them, and you disclaim a right to their time and resources. So where’s the link? Until you can close this gap, all you’ve got is Sad Trombone. >> So no, “developers” are not abandoning Linux for OS X. A bunch of us are choosing to use OS X on the desktop, but when it comes to deployment, well, let’s just say that macminicolo.net is very much on the fringe. > > OK well it's funny you say they're not abandoning Linux for OS X while > you're doing what so many others have decided to do which is make OS X > their primary platform for free software development because of some > deficiency of doing that work on a free OS. A developer may switch to OS X on the desktop while still writing software primarily on and for Linux, and while deploying primarily to Linux. I held myself up as an example of this. I’m not alone. I have reason to believe that software I wrote is running on many thousands of Linux boxes. (I have no way to count them. It’s just a guess.) Why does it matter which OS was running the text editor that software was written in? > you haven't really helped stem this transition. Developer adoption of OS X will not be the thing that destroys Linux, if anything ever does. OS X’s popularity probably is exchanging some potential Linux growth for BSD growth, but that’s not so bad a thing, is it? The BSDs can use a lot more developer love than mainstream Linuxes like CentOS.