Ok, so there goes the idea of speedy reporting ;-)
I did present my thing after the previous post, and I did it
in front of a whole lot of people. It went well, even if
a bit faster than I expected. The Q&A part was nice, and
only one question contained the word license ;-)
Later that same day, RMS gave his speech in the same place
(yes, he had a bigger audience ;-). It was his usual speech,
basically the same thing you can read in the FSF's web page.
Some nuggets: "we created GNOME because of the terrible
threat of KDE". There you have it GNOME guys and gals, you
only exist because of us, and to you GNOME fans, you can now
consider GNOME a side effect of KDE, be thankful and stop
bickering ;-)
He did say KDE is illegal, and I decided NOT to ask him when
had he become a lawyer and/or judge. He didn't mention his
lates "implicit permission is given" position, either.
However, after finally seing him in person, I can understand
why he has such rabid fans. He is kinda inspirational. As
long as you are under 25. I would consider anyone older that
that, who still swallows it as uncritically as most of the
audience did, immature.
And yes, he did say that you can always go flip burgers and
code in your (obviously copious) free time.
And yes, he did say that another alternative is to work
developing custom software, which is "90% of the software
industry", and that would not be unethical.
I have a VERY big problem with that argument, which I should
some day write down carefully.
The basics are that the custom software written for, say, a
aerospace company would be just as useful for another. In
fact, it's that software's EXTREME usefulness to other
companies what keeps the software closed.
Consider that it's so useful that a company is willing to
pay for the entire development!
And if that software would be useful for "the neighbour",
then that software's license presents the same ethical
imperatives as any other. You, developer of custom software,
are creating software that is useful for "the neighbour",
giving it to others, and forbidding those others help "the
neighbour" (or at least you are doing just the same as if
you were a Word developer).
Now, I don't believe free software development is ethically
superior to proprietary software development, but RMS does.
And since he does, he either has not noticed this, or he has
two incompatible positions. Your pick.
Or, of course, I'm totally wrong. But I'd like some reasons
why, if you believe that. A good one would be "here is a way
in which developing proprietary custom software for a
company is different from developing proprietary software
for users".
Later that night, we had our speakers' and organizers'
dinner.... where there were about 50 who were not any of
those things.
That dinner kinda sucked, in the food sense, but the
organization of the whole thing was just too good for one
bad menu choice (rice & chicken) to be considered :-)
Then (considerably amount of beer in me) I went to the
hotel, and overslept next morning, missing Julio Santa
Cruz's stuff (sorry julio), saw another one I can't recall,
said goodbye to everyone, missed RMS's second speech (if I
had seen it, I would have arrived home way too late), and
left.
All in all, fun, informative, some good stuff to be seen,
saw a lot of people I had only known by email, and a lot of
people I had not seen in a long while and missed (the guys
from UNER, UTN and UNL!).
I got WAY too tired from this, so I came to work in a zombie
fashion on monday, closed a course, and stayed home
yesterday... and that's pretty much it :-)