Re: [Savannah-users] Probably newbie's questions... Build mynewproject

[list]

Am Wednesday, dem 09. Jan 2008 schrieb Peleg Michaeli:

> So: I guess that in the meanwhile I will grab some "CVS for windows"
> software...

I can not help you with that. I do have still a Windows here, but I 
don't use it for my real work. So I never used CVS on it.

> About "giant's sponsorship": I think that being sponsored by giants IS
> against "freedom as in free speech", and Google is a good example: Google's
> software is not "free as in free speech" (but the opposite...), but only
> "free as in free beer".
> 
> So: just like you would feel strange to see Microsoft's banner on a page of
> FSF, so I feel when I see Google's logo there (or Nokia or Intel). Yes, in
> some aspects Google is a "nicer" giant, but in other aspects, it is much
> more dangerous to FREEDOM, the exact freedom you were talking about.

At the top of that page they write "Corporate patrons affiliate themselves 
with the FSF and the GNU project through financial support. The FSF does 
not endorse the activities of its corporate patrons."

In one other text they write:
| Over the years, many companies have contributed to free software 
| development. Some of these companies primarily developed non-free 
| software, but the two activities were separate; thus, we could ignore 
| their non-free products, and work with them on free software projects. 
| Then we could honestly thank them afterward for their free software
| contributions, without talking about the rest of what they did.
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html

The world isn't just black and white and Free Software needs all the help
it can get.

Google is one of these mixed blessings. Sure, they publish unfree software.
But supporting the FSF is something good, their "summer of code" project
is someting good, Google Code... well has the same problems as 
sourceforge, but still contributes to free software to some extend...

Their search engine is not published code. They use Free Software, but 
since they don't distribute the software, they are not required to
publish the source code... That is an important aspect of the GPL, 
I think. Of course a search engine with published code would be
better in this regard. But currently we do not have this alternative.

So let's hope for the wikia search engine. They have promised they will 
release everything as Free Software... (At the moment they are in an 
early alpha stage and barely usable.)
http://search.wikia.com/

-- 
AKFoerster