Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Freelance user support

[peter green]

Quiliro Ordóñez Baca wrote:
> Sounds like a cool marketing strategy. I think it is very important to 
> recognize freedom too in the marketing because people often forget it 
> and think that the reason to change to free software is for short 
> lasting motivations.
There are many reasons people use free software, some use it because 
they belive propietary software is unethical, some use it because of the 
price, some use it because they are fed up with tracking installation 
counts for software licensing. Some use it because it's the best tool 
for the job. Some use it because they don't want to be tied to a single 
vendor for bugfixes. Some use it because they want to be able to 
customise the software to fit their own needs.

I think you should bear in mind that your clients reasons may not be the 
same as yours.
>  Also, mentioning freedom centers quality around it 
> instead of temporary functionality in lieu of freedom. This saves the 
> business from installing non-free drivers of firmware in favour of 
> raising the user's freedom. 
I don't think one should conflate drivers and firmware. I also don't 
think one should let perfect be the enemy of good.

In an ideal world firmware would be free software too but in many cases 
the actual choice is between propietary firmware stored in the hardware 
and propietary firmware loaded from disk. I fail to see how the user is 
any more free with the former than the latter.

I would try to avoid any hardware that required propietary kernel mode 
drivers because they are likely to limit my freedom to upgrade the 
kernel in future.
OTOH if the choices for meeting the customers requirements are a free OS 
with a handful of non-free drivers or a completely non-free stack I 
think a free software advocate would be mad to push someone towards the 
latter by refusing to implement the former.