Windows vs. Mac OS X vs. Linux

[Soul Fly]

That is very interesting. Though I'm aware of the distinction between free to redistribute, and copyrighted freeware. I just don't see how this is relevant given he's talking (presumably) from a utility standpoint rather than philosophical.
If there is an added nuance of the how the nature of the new intellectual property created using these applications changes between the two (like say, is there a difference in IP if I edit using GIMP v/s say Photoshop) - then that I'm not aware of.

But as I said, I do not think that was the angle mikel was driving at. On a primary level I was responding to this assertion: "that the windows philosophy of non-free software being automatically superior to free software.".. very distinct from what you're saying. And then judging by his later post he most definitely seemed more concerned with features and access of utility of the free native applications. Because I'm pretty sure native (and especially preinstalled default) OSX applications like " mail client" and "torrent client" and "word processor" do not meet this criterion. On an even-if scenario nor do I see how it is important to have a fully redis email client to say, Thunderbird.

But if that wasn't the case my bad. I'd definitely appreciate a clearer explanation otherwise, as to how it uniquely affects mikel.

 

[jumpluff]

I'm not mikel and he can better explain this to you personally, but I assure you my interpretation is not off the mark, unless that was an irony like on my post. Firstly, you made assumptions he was using native OSX applications, which I can't answer to because I don't use OSX; secondly, the assertion you referred to primarily is a general opinion held among users and developers, who prize proprietary software, security through obscurity, brand loyalty (your post is full of it), and tend to look down as a generality on truly free software; thirdly, when using 'free' and 'non-free', mikel continually made it contextually clear what he meant.

the amount of windows-specific software written under an open licence seems, anecdotally of course, to be much lower than on competing platforms.

the entire userland (user-facing applications) on most linux and bsd distributions is free at the source code level for any user to rebuild or distribute as desired (apart from the gpl vs bsd licences etc). the only non-free applications i have installed on my mac at the moment are spotify and the binary blob components of chrome, barring the factory-default apps which i scarcely use. my browser, text editor, email client, torrent client, etc. are all free. not free as in free trial, or free as in restricted features, but completely free.

He also challenged your assertion that open-source = fully free software in the entire second part of this post, which is why I linked the specific gnu philosophy article I did. Open-source != open licence.

Here are utilities we both use. I specifically picked them because I use them all regularly, I don't use Launchy or anything like that. I really enjoy these programs and with the exception of CCleaner and Audacity use them literally daily. But hopefully you can see that while we have our own reasons for liking this software, your comment about money was not what was pertinent (here mikel would agree with you! this is a problem he seems to express with Windows users, flagship proprietary software and even freeware utilities with restrictive licences generally being considered of the highest quality and invaluable on wrong merits), it's not remotely what mikel's talking about when he says free and non-free. In fact, money has no absolute bearing on libre freedom.

• 7-Zip: GNU LPGL except for 7z.dll, which is because there is a more restrictive licence on the unRAR code used to develop 7zip's .rar decompression algorithm. Here it is.
  
• Audacity: Platform-agnostic, under GPL licence.
• CCleaner: There is a commercial edition of this, rendering it freemium software. Software licence for the unpaid version is pretty clear in Section 3. For someone like mikel, pretty much all of the conditions in Section 3 laid down are wrong and harmful to end users as well as the development community. He can explain his feelings on the topic to you himself if he wants.
• foobar2000: Apache licence, pretty much just standard freeware except you're allowed to transfer and use 'unmodified' (vague) binaries.
  
• f.lux: Proprietary software with standard non-redis, non-'control'/ownership licence as laid out in the EULA.
• LibreOffice: Mozilla Public Licence with some Apache and other licences. It's complicated.
  
• TeraCopy: Same as CCleaner.
  
• Thunderbird: Hodge-podge of Mozilla Public Licence and some other open-source licences. Mozilla don't even licence it fully under their own. The EULA makes it pretty clear it's non-free.
  
• µTorrent: I sure hope you don't use any build past 2.2.x, it's horrendous bloatware now. Standard restrictive EULA.

Personally I do not consider cloud software free in any remotely applicable way, except maybe in price. This includes Google Docs, etc., all of which I also use heavily! I made it clear that I don't care to play in such absolutes on this particular an issue for various reasons, and I think a lot of people are simplistically dogmatic about software freedom in the sense that they do not understand why it is good and have zero interest in fully maximising it (which does disservice to the movement frankly), but that doesn't stop me from considering it.

On an even-if scenario nor do I see how it is important to have a fully redis email client to say, Thunderbird.

He can explain this to you himself if he likes; I can think of a number of reasons that might work for him, philosophical and pragmatic, so I don't want to say one definitive reason, but one easy one is 'security' (though email security is an interesting issue since you generally won't have full control over the practices of correspondents). As I explained it is a fundamental philosophical difference and belief system about software, but you seem very inclined to ignore what I have to say so *shrug* I am literally just trying to clarify this rather neutrally for you and for any confused viewers, as gratis vs. libre is a very confusing philosophical topic in general for readers at large and 'free' has many meanings in a software dev context. I fail to see how you've debunked the philosophy, especially because cloud-based software is generally proprietary (unless you run your own cloud) and your control over your own data is tenuous at best, let alone access to the client and server code. It's possible you mean debunking the philosophy of Windows users mikel cited, but I also see how you've failed to do that, since you pretty much went and did the same thing he was talking about before even considering mikel might be measuring software value and superiority differently (in the above post and in the post where you listed Nitro/GIMP/Audacity as the best software because they're free as in money). To me it's a preference thing; I genuinely think jeb made the best post in this thread. But I find many arguments made by software freedom proponents incredibly compelling on a security level and to promote a healthy development ecosystem. I just don't have the interest to focus on that anymore with other preoccupations and play a shitload of video games tbh.

I disagree with a lot of what rms has to say about the world, his views on liberty and property and in general (The Right to Read is a laugh and a half), but:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.en.html you might find some of the earlier introductory articles helpful to understand the mindset of users like mikel.
https://www.freebsd.org/docs/books.html#ARTICLES this too

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/index.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.en.html you might want more secondary sources to form your own conclusion on that one though. Honestly this post is as much aimed at Soul Fly as it is curious PC users who want to understand the discussion, I figure providing reading material can't hurt. This one is just for the licensing debate mikel alluded to lol

Apologies to mikel if I've misrepresented his position anywhere

 

[Soul Fly]

Fair enough jumpluff .

I do understand to a large degree the difference (and the implications thereof) of gratis v/s libre, and in fact there was a phase a year I was aggressively researching into this very thing, especially the Copyleft movement as a whole and other alternative takes in the open source movement. Sorry I made you list out the licencing of all of these software, I perhaps should have been clearer. I'm fully aware that a lot of the free stuff I'm using isn't libre but gratis.

In fact wasn't so much as *ignoring* your post as trying to figure out what mikel's metric was when it came to designating something as "superior". Because I sincerely thought all this while he was trying to establish some pragmatic, objective benefit of using these kinds of software as his primary argumentation (i.e "better" in the more intuitive sense) and how it was specifically available to him on the OSX platform, since he does list this as one of the reasons for why he uses it, and not windows. Therefore my assumption of "native" or applications not available outside that environment - something that I would like to register that I'm still not clear about because libre software (particularly GNU ones) tend to be available on all platforms, but this is more or less ancillary at this point.

But, perhaps I could have been more careful in my reading of the post since this seems to be the case. Thanks for the sources nonetheless. It appears we weren't on the same page about this, so sorry if you felt annoyed by this.

 

[The Kitty Cat]

Y'all niggas is geeks. Don't you get that this is purely a philosophical issue? #RonPaul2016