[ILUG] Red Hat in Easons.

[Aidan Kehoe]

 Ar an 1u la de mi 10, scriobh Niall O Broin :

 > You're right of course - 5 of the last 7 years spent living in
 > Germany have polluted my mind. It does tend to make French
 > conversation very interetsing
 > :-)

Hmm. Well, I can't speak German at all, so, umm, touche :-) . 

 > It sometimes appears that hardly anything is OT here :-) and I certainly
 > wouldn't imagine that the subtleties of the GPL are. I'm not quite RMS bu as
 > it happens I do believe that the GPL license is the best free license. You
 > get the software free (as in gratuit) and you may do it as you will BUT if
 > you choose to sell it or otherwise provide it to others, modified or not,
 > they receive the same freedoms (liberte et gratuite) as you did. 

But if you want to make a living from selling computer software, you
can't use that code[1]. And if you can't make a living from selling the
software, you don't have professionalism as as much of a
motivation. 

Thus, NLS/Unicode isn't a factor ("Documentation in foreign languages?
But doesn't everyone who uses *ix speak English anyway?"--yes, but
purely because of this attitude.) Very few English speakers provide
internationalisation hooks in their Free Software. You provide the
documentation for an Emacs function *in the definition of that
function*, so *everything* is documented, but *nothing* is translated.

 > It just doesn't seem right to me that somebody can take others'
 > work and build on it and profit from it without giving anything
 > back.

And if the person who provided the work was well aware that people
would do that? But was sufficiently good-natured to do it all the
same?

 > I suppose the Echelon watchers have me in the communist book now :-)

Ah, anyone east of Bermuda is a red commie to them, anyway.

Take care, 

	Aidan Kehoe

[1] CF. Ximian vs. Apple, who admittedly are a hardware company, but
people are willing to pay a (substantial) premium for that hardware
because of their software. 
-- 
`... when the elephant man broke strong men's necks, when he'd had too 
many Powers, ...'