DFS <nospam@xxxxxxxx> said on 2008-12-25:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> Richard Stallman: A non-free program
>> systematically denies the users the freedom to cooperate; it is the
>> basis of an antisocial scheme to dominate people.
>
> RMS is confused and paranoid.
>
I have great respect for Stallman. He does sound paranoid sometimes.
Domination, in the above case, is a two sided matter - a closed-source
application dominating a user, and a user allowing himself/herself to
be dominated. Users have choices and they can move to other
applications if they plan everything carefully.
Long time back a family friend moved from Microsoft Word to
Wordperfect, and then recently to OpenOffice. He complained how closed
source applications limited his move, but he was smart enough to
convert his documents to either text, HTML or RTF using simple macros
leaving some documents as-is. His move over to Wordperfect and OO was
very smooth. It did indicate to me that somes users that are aware of
closed and open source applications are also smart enough to not allow
an application to dominate them.
Many users simply don't care about closed and open source as long
as they have the ability to acquire software that can read/write their
documents while not leaving their comfort-zone.
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