Open Source Values

[Jeremy Turner]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 10:31:03PM -0600, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
> Last Democratic president: Decreased national deficit, unprecedented job 
> growth in the private sector, decrease in size of Federal government as 
> measured by number of jobs or percent of GDP spent.
> 
> Prior Republican president: Increased National Deficit, unprecedented job 
> growth in Federal sector, decrease of jobs in private sector, increase in 
> Gov't. spending.
> 
> Blame it on Congress, I guess.

My political contribution:

Some presidents have/get to take the blame/credit for what happened in
the previous 4 years.  Things one president did to get the ball rolling
(or when they dropped the ball) show their results some time later.

Okay back on topic.

I use open source because it's free.  Free as in beer helps me spend my
money on better hardware.  Free as in speech lets me (and others) share
our contributions.  I realize that most users are not developers,
especially that distributions are catering to the non-tech crowd or to
the enterprise environment.  I don't think this is a bad thing because
it increases the userbase.  But the true value of open source and
applications released under OSI licences is that we have the option of
tweaking applications and scripts to our heart's content.

Some users really need to be "saved from themselves," but for the rest
of us, atleast I like to get down and dirty with source every once and a
while.

Jeremy