Hacker News Reader

Comment by garethsprice | Hacker News Reader

"Some of the most important projects on our list are replacement projects. These projects are important because they address areas where users are continually being seduced into using nonfree software by the lack of an adequate free replacement."

Why is having a free program that solves a problem that's already solved more important than creating programs that solve new problems, but that also happen to be free?

I find it hard to believe that the most important free software project in the world is a player for passively consuming content in a proprietary format (Flash), that is A) dying and B) more for eye candy than anything useful.

View on HN

Because lack of such free software can hinder people who might be otherwise interested in switching to a free operating system from actually doing so.

A free replacement for Flash is likely to become less useful in this situation, as other non-proprietary solutions are becoming prevalent.

The point is that a clone makes it so people "can" switch, if they want.

A "unique to free software" solution makes it so people want and need to switch.

Between the two, I think creating incentives is more powerful than removing obstacles. (Given strong enough motivation, people will overcome obstacles. Lacking strong motivation, why bother?)

Why would a lack of a GPL Flash replacement hinder someone from switching to Linux? Flash is already available for Linux (I've run it under Ubuntu), and while it's not "free software", it's free of charge.

>Why is having a free program that solves a problem that's already solved more important than creating programs that solve new problems, but that also happen to be free?

Because their goals include that everything possible should be possible for to do with free software. It is by definition a game of catch-up.

Agreed - It shows tremendous lack of vision and leadership on the part of the FSF to continually push for "clones". The pursuit of mediocrity that is endemic in open source originates from them.

Let's innovate people...

I think that's vastly overgeneralized. By that logic we'd have no free compiler, no free kernel, no free userspace. It's all clones. True innovation is rare (and it certainly does happen as free software).

The goal of the FSF is to promote the use of free software. If people won't or can't use free software because they need some proprietary program, then the goal of the FSF becomes to eliminate that need.

Sometimes this involves writing software that is better than proprietary equivalents (c.f. emacs and gcc in their early days). Sometimes it means just cloning what's there so you have something to use (most of coreutils falls into this category).

The difference is that there were no high-quality free C compilers available before gcc, so it filled a real need. Lots of people couldn't afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a compiler. However, an open source version of Flash would be replacing software that any Linux user can already get for free (and would probably be of inferior quality to Flash, at least for the first several releases).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com