FOSS Philosophy

[lxskllr]

Where do you all stand on FOSS? Does it have to be free, or will you use anything that gets the job done? For me, I prefer free tools, but will use anything. The program that comes immediately to mind is Opera. Firefox is my favorite browser, but I like Opera for iffy wifi connections. I also have some binary drivers, and other things that make life easy.

How about you? Poll is forthcoming...

 

[AnonymouseUser]

I feel the same with regards to Opera and drivers (nvidia and wifi). I even paid for Opera back when the free version was adware, and it's my primary browser on all OSes (XP, Vista, 7, Linux, Android).

 

[trollolo]

why do you hate freedom so much?

 

[lxskllr]

why do you hate freedom so much?

:^D

I think my Debian install is all free. I'll likely add some proprietary stuff once it goes full time though.

Stallman's a minor hero of mine. I understand, and respect his position, but at this point I don't want to run all free software. I'll have Windows around for a long time to play the occasional non-free game. I haven't used it in almost a year, but I want to play Bioshock3 when it's released. For my Linu... Umm... GNU/Linux machines, I like the convenience of things just working, and I guess that wins out for me over hard line philosophy.

 

[trollolo]

the list of distro's that are RMS approved is hilariously small

 

[lxskllr]

the list of distro's that are RMS approved is hilariously small

Yea. non-free software can't even be offered, even if it isn't by default. You can run Debian 100% free, but it doesn't make the list because proprietary software is available in the repos.

 

[PreferLinux]

I voted that I don't care as in the "FOSS" type free (for the software I use), but I strongly prefer software that is free in that I don't have to pay, and I very much like free software libraries that I can use in my own proprietary software, especially if I can use it without attribution – both of which are actually contrary to FOSS.

 

[Nothinman]

I use free software whenever possible, but will use non-free when necessary. I have a Windows VM on my work laptop which obviously runs non-free software. But in Linux I think the only non-free software I have is VMware and the nVidia driver.

 

[jhu]

I use free whenever possible. The only non-free stuff I have is Intel icc and Adobe's flash player.

 

[Colt45]

I think the only non-free stuff I run on a regular basis is flash, which hopefully dies out soon.

I've got a windows VM too, but that's just for a few microcontroller boards I've used in the past that have programmers/debuggers that don't work with linux. Guess which boards I won't be using in the future... not to mention left a bad taste for the chip in general.

OH. Also the bloody nvidia drivers. :-/

 

[irishScott]

If there's a viable FOSS alternative, I'll use it and be willing to tolerate some minor inconvenience (ie: Libreoffice not correctly interpreting proprietary components of MS office documents)

If proprietary is all there is or the proprietary option is simply far superior for my needs, I'll go with proprietary.