Re: OT: threats to Free Software (was: AW: Fwd: CEDET sync)

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I think the real threat the FSF's ideals is that computers are being
> split into two camps:
> - cell-phones
> - web-services
> there are still some things in the middle (laptops/desktops) where users
> can run Free Software, but the tendency is pretty clear.
>
> Both sides (cell-phones and web-services) may internally run Free
> Software, but users enjoy (currently at least) none of the freedoms
> provided by Free Software.


I think there is some true in this. Considering that maybe these two
points are could be useful:

- Free software for editing and creating web services might be
valuable. Emacs might help there.

- Tight integration between the middle (laptops) and web-services (and
also cell-phones) is important. To make this happen I suspect that the
library level must be straightened up. This means perhaps actively
killing alternatives so that things comes out tested, used and
reliable.