And hence the need to separate FSF from OSS. I am sure you are aware (http://bit.ly/zo7XH
;-)) of the fundamental disagreements between Torvalds/Raymond/etc (and we should really discount Raymond greatly, given his greatest effort has been pretty much the thing he highlights: fetchmail) and Stallman, and that is why many of us here keep going back to Stallman and the FSF. Torvalds, Raymonds, much of that crowd influenced by Torvalds miss the point altogether in their "pragmatism". But it is not true that they have come to entirely represent F/OSS -- hence my pointer to the debate between Matt Mullenweg and some others over the GPL. So, the arrival ad blatherings particularly of a hanger-on like Raymond is not the start of F/OSS but the fork of it into an accommodation of corporate interests.
Some comments on Bill's post: when iTunes imports an MP3 you can have it leave the file in MP3 format. You are not forced to re-encode it to AAC. iPhoto does not use propreitary formats for the images themselves. They are JPGs (typically) and can be either dragged out of iPhoto into any tool, including Finder, or you can get to them by navigating into your iPhoto Library directory -- you may need to right- click and choose Explore Contents or some such option to enter the directory.
Jordan is at his snarky best in dismissing most software as buggy code that is best destroyed. Fine. But there is a lot of very good code written as well, and unlike paint or whatever it is, software can (and should) be reused. More on that later, if the conversation develops further on that line.
Doug writes:
> I'm not sure how it's exactly "socialist." The programmers do their
> work for free, meaning they have to have other means of support. So
> they're doing the work in their spare time. That really doesn't
> transform social relations, does it?
Indeed Free Software relies on the efforts of those who rely on the traditional system to survive. I think that is quite fine since what they are doing is advancing a particular activity or area within a broad socialist umbrella. I admit to ignorance regarding phrases like "transform social relations" so these explanations might hardly work with[in] the framework at hand. I also admit to perhaps employing a much fuzzier idea of socialism including even Indira Gandhi's (IIRC) self-serving notion of it in a constitutional amendment, Chomsky's libertarian socialism and even certain forms of enlightened liberalism that Andie would endorse (also see: http://bit.ly/wYwUv, http://bit.ly/HiU6g) .
In this sense, Free Software is valuable for two reasons: (a) it demonstrates (warts -- especially libertarian ones -- and all) a possible model of human activity, in a highly sophisticated area which dominates our lives, where the effort and the product are not in private hands, (b) in an immediate sense, it retains (albeit in a difficult sense) ownership of an individual's data as well as keeping the management of it in the open.
> Is our model a world in which programmers - and musicians and
> writers - don't get paid for their work?
(a) "from each according to his abilities..." and all that. (b) it's not an issue of whether they get paid (hence Stallman's emphasis on what "free" means, as outlined above), but who does the paying and how much. If we eliminate redundancies, rock star dot-com payouts, profit- taking, so on and so forth, we, the public, can well afford to pay programmers to write Free Software.
--ravi