Re: [Pan-users] Re: OT: freedomware vs... Was: Building Pan on Windows?

[Alan Meyer]

Duncan <address@hidden> wrote:

> There's no problem buying a program.  In fact ...

I see that this is a subject on which you have thought long and
deeply.

I have to agree with some of your points.  On the issue of trust,
for example, I trust that the open source software that I run is
safe.  However I have found that a number of closed source
programs I have installed on my Windows machines included
spyware.  And those are the ones I was able to find out about.
There may be many others that I didn't find out about that also
include spyware.

That's not to say that all authors of non-free software are
untrustworthy, but without the source code we can't easily tell
if they are trustworthy.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.

    Alan