I just read Terry Hancock’s artilce on Is free software major league or minor?. Great article, and I’m very glad to see articulate discussion about these core subjects. Not enough is said about these matters.

However, I disagree strongly on several points that your article raises. I’ll take it point by point in an effort to not misrepresent your views and keep focussed on the statements that you have made.

Is free software really capable of serving end users or not? This issue has political consequences, which is part of what makes it important: either free software is “minor league” or it’s “major league”. Which we believe has a big impact on what our expectations can be and what our political and ethical stance towards proprietary and free software should be.

This post is in response to Dario Borghino’s story, “Why Open Source is not Free Software”. Go read that first…

I have a couple problems with this post. First of all, there is much less difference between free and open source software than this post suggest. Secondly, patents do not have much effect on the software industry, in practice. Those may sound controversial, but let me explain.

First of all, show me an open source license in wide use that is not also a Free software license, and vice versa. See http://opensource.org for the open source definition, and a list of licenses.

Recently, I attended a small symposium here in Texas, with just over 70 people attending: the inaugural “Texas Open Source Symposium” (TexasOSS). Although small, it was a pleasant conference. Topics ranged from 3D applications to business models, to introductions into the inner workings of the free software community process.

As we follow the zig-zaggy quest of me trying to learn to program, I discover the next significant step, “Interest”. I started with a goal: to learn to program. Next I came up with a plan: Learn Python by writing a program called PT (period tracker) but I lacked the last bit, interest.

You see, there was very little that period tracker did that a calendar didn’t. Spending hours to make a program to do work that I could do in five minutes with a calendar and a pencil seemed like a waste of effort.

This is a slightly different post this week. I haven’t found anything of technical note to talk about and only discovered some of the power of Ruby on Rails this week, but have not had the chance to explore it much, but on the surface it looks awesome.

What I did discover while checking things out in cyberspace is three interesting open source models for different areas. War, politics and religion. Just the stuff we like to discuss at the dinner table. No doubt there are many blogs on open source sex, but that’s a dinner table conversation I’m not going to cover today.

If, for whatever reason, you have done some digging on me you will have discovered a dark secret. Well, not quite a secret as I do not hide it, nor is it that dark, more of a information non publiée.

I heard that the open source software movement grew up when it was noticed that people reacted badly to the idealism that the phrase “free software” suggests. In an attempt to attract more people to free software they decided to move away from the ideas implicit in the term “free software” and use their own term “open source” which promotes the practical benefits of this style of development.

The Free Computer is not a dream but it is a reality waiting to happen. All the elements are there we just need to gather them together. There has never been a better time to talk about the idea of the Free Computer than now. Last week I wrote a blog entry about the idea of the Free Computer and where we stand today. I think it’s time to clarify my position and set out exactly what I mean, and where we go from here.

This week I finally learned how to use Bit Torrent, and I downloaded two free-licensed open-source movies: Elephants Dream by the Orange Project and The Boy Who Never Slept by Solomon Rothmon (who is credited as Producer, Writer, Director, and who plays the title role). Both are interesting as first ventures into free-licensed open-source filmmaking, but the contrasts are more striking than the similarities, both technically and aesthetically.

The Boy Who Never Slept