Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Amusing Free Software Story

[mark]

Hello,

   I think that this story will be amusing and somewhat instructive of 
the kinds of things we are up against in trying to preserve some freedom 
for ourselves and posterity. In order for you to understand the story, 
you will need to know a little about me and my business, Picaflor Azul, 
which is a web design business. We are a free software business, by 
which I mean that we only use the GNU operating system (With a kernel by 
some guy from Sweden or something) and the software we write is all GPL 
too. I'm quite sure that I'll never be able to qualify as a saint in the 
church of emacs, but maybe I could be an aspirant.

   Well, a couple of years ago my daughter was fifteen, and had just 
finished writing her second book. (kawriter.com) I was in the process of 
trying to publish them for her, and for various reasons I had to get it 
done as soon as possible. As far as I know, the ONLY sensible way to 
publish a book is using TEX and LATEX, so I wouldn't have ever tried to 
get any proprietary software to do the job, even if I could have 
afforded to do so. It was August, and we were all kind of running hither 
and thither trying to get the books published by September or October.

   It was into this situation that my mother, with whom I had been out 
of touch for some time, decided to show up on her annual migration from 
Cape Cod to Florida. She is a VERY longstanding and diehard proprietary 
software user. As it turned out she was, unbeknownst to me, also a 
professional book editor and absolutely aghast that I would even think 
about trying to publish these two things I was trying to call books. 
Since I had nowhere near enough money to pay her the going rate for her 
services, she very kindly offered to help my daughter edit her book, and 
did a very good job on one of them, for which I am very grateful. My 
daughter learned a lot from her help.

   Since I use all free software and she uses all proprietary software, 
there were some significant technical problems involving text documents 
versus various proprietary formats. I have had a lot of experience with 
this here and there, and trying to use documents in these proprietary 
formats always causes big problems, as far as I can tell. Since I had to 
use TEX and LATEX to have any chance at all of getting the books 
published on time, it was impossible to use a proprietary system even if 
I would have been willing to go out to the pawn shop and buy one. I just 
didn't have enough time to deal with all those nasty special/nonprinting 
characters. This is why I had to try to explain to my mother that I only 
use free software.

   Unfortunately, in order to explain to her that I only used free 
software, I had to try to tell her that there was such a thing as free 
software. This turned out to be impossible. She kept insisting that she 
knew what free software was very well thank you, and telling me that it 
was the freeware proprietary stuff that is so common on that kind of 
system, and that none of it was worth anything at all. If I didn't pay 
for my software I was just being stupid. Everyone knows that free 
software is worthless. Don't you know that you only get what you pay 
for? Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

   She stormed out and I have not spoken to her or seen her since, 
although she did send my wife an email to complain about a perceived 
breach of etiquette. I'm pretty sure that she still has no idea what 
free software is, and almost certainly never will. It is impossible to 
explain to someone like this that the main reason I can publish a book 
in a couple of months in stead of a couple of years, is because of the 
free software programs TEX and LATEX. They just can't ever get it. How 
much harder to explain how and why free software is so much better in so 
many ways? It boggles my mind that these simple and so important ideas 
about software and freedom, which are so obvious to me, are so far out 
of the reach of so many people.

I hope you enjoy the story.

Sincerely,

Mark