Free Software vs Open Source

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Zoran
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Re: Free Software vs Open Source

Post by Zoran »

AnyOldName3 wrote: 18 Jun 2018, 01:42 My personal preference is to use the best software available to me, using freeness and openness as tiebreakers when it's not immediately clear what's best. I'm a lot happier knowing that if I break something, I can dig in and work out why it's broken and either fix it or make it easy for someone more knowledgeable to fix it, but where possible, I'd prefer software that doesn't break in the first place. In a capitalist society, it's completely possible for the best software to do a particular job to be proprietary, and its cost to a user to be far less than the cost of using their time to create a FLOSS alternative.
I also like software that works nice but only if it is free. Of course that In a capitalist society, it's completely possible for the best software to do a particular job to be proprietary, and it is a common case, but all the best features on the world are worth less then freedom to me.
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psi29a
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Re: Free Software vs Open Source

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And there is this:
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/p ... ed-in-mesa
Back in 2012 when talking with Gabe Newell of Valve about open-source/Linux challenges one of the topics he was awed about was patents encumbering the open-source graphics driver progress. Six years later, Timothy Arceri working on the Valve Linux graphics driver team has freed Mesa's ARB_texture_float support from being built conditionally due to these patent fears.

Arceri on behalf of Valve committed a change to now unconditionally enable OpenGL floating point textures now that the Silicon Graphics patent should be expired.
This touches on a few things... how businesses help forward open-source software, of course with the agenda of improving their own closed-sourced software. I think this is a win-win actually and pragmatic approach. Opensource isn't free, it costs time and time is money. Someone's paying... be it money or in time.

Second is software patents and how they can stifle development. Thankfully not every country/bloc allows software patents.
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Zoran
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Joined: 13 Jun 2018, 07:40
Location: Novi Sad, Serbia

Re: Free Software vs Open Source

Post by Zoran »

psi29a wrote: 18 Jun 2018, 09:32 And there is this:
https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/p ... ed-in-mesa
Back in 2012 when talking with Gabe Newell of Valve about open-source/Linux challenges one of the topics he was awed about was patents encumbering the open-source graphics driver progress. Six years later, Timothy Arceri working on the Valve Linux graphics driver team has freed Mesa's ARB_texture_float support from being built conditionally due to these patent fears.

Arceri on behalf of Valve committed a change to now unconditionally enable OpenGL floating point textures now that the Silicon Graphics patent should be expired.
This touches on a few things... how businesses help forward open-source software, of course with the agenda of improving their own closed-sourced software. I think this is a win-win actually and pragmatic approach. Opensource isn't free, it costs time and time is money. Someone's paying... be it money or in time.

Second is software patents and how they can stifle development. Thankfully not every country/bloc allows software patents.
I think that businesses can make money off free software and the are plenty of examples of that. Lots of businesses do contribute to free software, because it benefits them and as a result they make more money.

Software patent are a different issue. Thay should be banned entirely. They do just the opposite of the purpose patent system. The historical purpose of the patent system was to encourage the development of new inventions, but in software that only hinder the development. Because software is more complicated and contains lot of technical ideas that can be patented.
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