free software category archive

A Charismatic Operating System?

Ray Kurzweil occasionally uses imaginary conversations as a device to discuss ideas in his books The Singularity is Near and The Age of Spiritual Machines. They usually involve people from the future and the past (Ned Ludd, for example). Here is a more contemporaneous dialog between himself and a pretend Bill Gates from Singularity:

BILL: What would the principles of the new religion be?
RAY: We’d want to keep two principles: one from traditional religion and one from secular arts and sciences—from traditional religion, the respect for human consciousness.
BILL: Ah yes, the Golden Rule.
RAY: Right, our morality and legal system are based on respect for the consciousness of others. […]
BILL: And the secular

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Software Inevitably Must Be Free

There is a certain tech “analyst” who likes to troll the GNU/Linux/free software community. I don’t want to give him any recognition by name or hyperlink, but his posts FUD bombs can provoke some interesting comments, like the one included later in this post.

Greg Loeppky asks a good question: How many times do we have to pay for the same piece of software? If you are Microsoft and we’re talking about your software, the answer is: “a bazillion times.” For the rest of us, that’s not a great deal. (This applies to all proprietary software vendors, of course, but as is customary, we will single out our favorite bogeyman.)

There is a lot of debate about how much Microsoft actually innovates in software and how much they copy …

Free Software is a Weak Mode of Production?

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 16 October 2006.

Another digg front page item, with 375+ diggs to date, resulting in more than 10,000 reads at FSM.

This one sparked a lot more discussion both at digg and at FSM, probably because of the provocative title. Maybe it would have been less inflammatory to put a question mark on there as I did here, but you know how it is when you’re needy and desperate for attention. It was meant to be a hook and brief teaser with the first paragraph, but it’s interesting how many people don’t read past to the second and third paragraphs before firing up their flamethrowers. I guess I asked for it. …

Reformation of a Visual Basic Programmer

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 2 October 2006.

Last week I mentioned that I enjoy programming in Visual Basic and suggested that people shouldn’t act so superior and look down at dweebs like me who program in dweeby languages. Today let’s talk about why Visual Basic is an awful programming language and anyone using it should run kicking-and-screaming away. (I’ll admit that kicking and running may be difficult to do at the same time.) Run away, not because it’s lame, but because it’s so horribly unfree.

Who owns this thing?

People sometimes question free software projects because very often no single organization stands behind them. Who are you going to hold responsible for Program X when it is …