[ILUG] games.linux.ie

[Jerry Connolly]

Paul J Collins said the following on Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 03:35:36PM +0000, 
>     JC> Not the type of example I had in mind exactly (I was thinking
>     JC> more of a business setting where software may be required for
>     JC> carrying out one's work), 
> 
> But you have no examples.
 
I've given you an example of a product that doesn't have a free alternative 
of the same quality.  Imagine a similar situation with some business critical
software.

> You are not free to give your friends copies.  You are not free to
> read the source code and learn from it.  You are not free to fix bugs
> that affect you.  You are not free to change the game engine to take
> advantage of the latest hacked-up set of instructions that Intel has
> added to their CPUs.  The list goes on and on.

Why should I have this "freedom" ?
Don't get me wrong, I like to have a full source tree for my system in case 
I need to figure out a problem that the manual can't help me with, or to learn
from how things are done, or if I need to clarify the internal workings of a
library etc.  but I feel that it's a privilege, not my birthright.

> This isn't about *my* freedom, it's about everyone's freedom.

I've gotten used to the chains.

-- 
Jerry Connolly                  Computer Incident Response Team
jerry.connolly at eircom.net       Eircom Multimedia
 
Opinions stated are my own and not necessarily those of my employer,
yadda yadda yadda.