Why Free Software Is More Important Now Than Ever Before
I (like many of us) have been reading and following RMS for many years now. It is fascinating how things that I used to feel were impractical about his ideas ("if proprietary software gets the job done, then why shun it? We live in a world where we must be practical, etc.") now seem imperative.This point struck home with his mention of education: how frustrating it is that so much of it lives in, say, Matlab, as compared to any other numerical package!How frustrating that we all depend on Microsoft Excel (or Google Docs) to do pivot tables!How frustrating that we depend on github to store our code.How frustrating that we depend on AWS for our servers.I spend a lot of my professional life migrating from one closed system (eg, deployments on Rackspace to AWS; cc processing from PayPal to Braintree; accounting from Quickbooks to Netsuite) to another.I wonder if, in practice, so many of these frustrations would have been alleviated if we, as an industry, had adopted the "impractical" view of insisting on using only free software.