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Am I to be thwarted in my bid to write an entry every day in November by the sad fact that nothing at all happened today? I hope not. I had hoped that today would be the day I received a response to my letter about the plovers, but, alas, no. I choose to believe that this is because the council has instigated an in-depth investigation into the matter, rather than because it's lost on someone's desk labelled with a post-it note such as "Hasn't she got anything better to do?".
I did get some mail today; the current New Internationalist, which this month is about ethical shopping. One of the articles is about open source software, written by a man called Bruce Byfield, editor for the Open Source Technology Group. This is his opening:
When you turn on your computer, you're making a political statement.
If, like most people, your computer boots Microsoft Windows, the statement you're making is that transnational corporations should control access to the most powerful public media that ever existed. You're passively accepting, too, that non-industrial nations should be kept from developing, and helping to preserve a monoculture that threatens the existence of minority languages. At a personal level, you're accepting that these same corporations should control your access to education and government services and have a right to install lock-down technologies on your computer without your permission - to say nothing of controlling what other software you can use and how you use it.*
A few thousand words and an odd recycling comparison later, he winds up with: What happens next is between you and your conscience.*
Now, reading that, my first reaction was "Steady on, old boy; you'll frighten the horses". On the face of it, his argument should tick a lot of my boxes - transnational corporations, language survival, personal choice, and the irritation induced by many software vendors - and I agreed with the guy he quotes who points out that software should be an important issue in civil society. Yet on the whole I had a negative reaction to it. By the end, I wanted to give Bill Gates some more money, just to spite Bruce Byfield.
I eventually found the key in the second paragraph; it's the word "passively". My computer runs on Windows, but that's my choice. I could have bought a Mac; I could have installed Linux. It wasn't a passive decision at all; I considered cost, of course, as well as what I do with the computer and availability of local tech support. Maybe it was the wrong choice, but being harangued by Bruce isn't going to make me change my mind. And that's the problem, I think, Bruce: don't make me feel like a naughty child because I chose Windows - just because your software is free doesn't mean you don't have to sell it.
* Quotes from Bruce Byfield, "Free Software", New Internationalist, NI 395, November 2006, pp. 30-31.
I did get some mail today; the current New Internationalist, which this month is about ethical shopping. One of the articles is about open source software, written by a man called Bruce Byfield, editor for the Open Source Technology Group. This is his opening:
When you turn on your computer, you're making a political statement.
If, like most people, your computer boots Microsoft Windows, the statement you're making is that transnational corporations should control access to the most powerful public media that ever existed. You're passively accepting, too, that non-industrial nations should be kept from developing, and helping to preserve a monoculture that threatens the existence of minority languages. At a personal level, you're accepting that these same corporations should control your access to education and government services and have a right to install lock-down technologies on your computer without your permission - to say nothing of controlling what other software you can use and how you use it.*
A few thousand words and an odd recycling comparison later, he winds up with: What happens next is between you and your conscience.*
Now, reading that, my first reaction was "Steady on, old boy; you'll frighten the horses". On the face of it, his argument should tick a lot of my boxes - transnational corporations, language survival, personal choice, and the irritation induced by many software vendors - and I agreed with the guy he quotes who points out that software should be an important issue in civil society. Yet on the whole I had a negative reaction to it. By the end, I wanted to give Bill Gates some more money, just to spite Bruce Byfield.
I eventually found the key in the second paragraph; it's the word "passively". My computer runs on Windows, but that's my choice. I could have bought a Mac; I could have installed Linux. It wasn't a passive decision at all; I considered cost, of course, as well as what I do with the computer and availability of local tech support. Maybe it was the wrong choice, but being harangued by Bruce isn't going to make me change my mind. And that's the problem, I think, Bruce: don't make me feel like a naughty child because I chose Windows - just because your software is free doesn't mean you don't have to sell it.
* Quotes from Bruce Byfield, "Free Software", New Internationalist, NI 395, November 2006, pp. 30-31.
