At Tue, 30 Dec 2008 14:28:44 -0800,
Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Darrell Eifert wrote:
> > There are commercial options from Groovix or Userful, but that pretty 
> > much defeats the practical goal of lowering IT costs, or the 
> > ideological goal of moving to free and open-source applications.
> >
> 
> I have a hard time considering "free" (as in "not paying for") as 
> ideological. If linux is a good desktop, the "freeness" is icing on the 
> cake. (And it's only free as in the purchase price; you still pay in 
> some way to maintain it.) If you need to purchase apps to make your 
> library work as it should, then you should budget for that. I think we 
> need to see "free" and "open source" as two different properties that 
> MAY intersect but do not necessarily intersect.
> 
> kc
> (who prefers linux to windows, and is looking forward to being able to 
> purchase my favorite apps for linux as they become available)

I think that Darrell probably meant ‘free’ in the GNU sense:

<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>

best, Erik



;; Erik Hetzner, California Digital Library
;; gnupg key id: 1024D/01DB07E3