Re: federated free software movement

[Jean Louis]

* Arthur Torrey <arthur_torrey@comcast.net> [2021-11-17 04:12]:
> 3. Reality check - You have a repair shop - customers come to you
> with hardware that needs fixing and needs proprietary tools to do
> so.  Which benefits your business more - gritting your teeth and
> using the tools, or telling the customers they made a bad choice in
> hardware and sending them away???

That is matter of ethical attitude or viewpoint that hardware shop
owners have.

You do not appear to have the same ethical viewpoint as me. So people
are different, but please do not push on this mailing list how people
shall be opportunistic for money and succumb to proprietary
software. It is really wrong list for such propaganda.

There are companies that have ethical viewpoints and sell such
hardware that does not require proprietary software.

LibrePlanet is all about free software.

> 4. Personal reality - I mentioned earlier that I need a proprietary
> closed software program that only runs on a proprietary OS in order
> to adjust the programming on my power chair...  I got a comment back
> that I should figure out how to do it w/ Free Software.... 

LibrePlanet is all about free software. That you have hardware and
software that does not give you freedom is already clear.

How about presenting the power chair and how it looks like, that
people can see how it can be replaced or made with free software?
Start a project, ask for help, let us understand what exactly is the
hardware that you wish to run, so maybe interested parties find way to
provide similar hardware and software without proprietary chains.

> So let me see, I have a proprietary undocumented piece of hardware
> that I need to totally reverse engineer from the hardware
> communications protocol to it's internal data structures, along w/
> how to read and write to it (as a non-programmer) OR use an existing
> set of non-free tools that already does what I need?  (and there is
> *NO* commercially available Free Software compatible wheelchair
> control hardware, I'm using what is arguably the most open of the
> available systems) Tough decision....(NOT!)  If I wasn't already a
> Free Software supporter, where do you think I might have told the
> person telling me to figure out how to use free software to stick
> his GNU?

😀 How about you show first that wheelchair on picture and video, that
we understand features and functions of it.


-- 
Jean

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