Re: Free Software Company

[Radhakrishnan C V <cvr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Arun Sharma wrote:

: On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 09:49:14AM +0530, Gurunandan R. Bhat wrote:
: > Ooops. Thas not what I meant at all. My point is simple: I dont need
: > analytic economic arguments to justify the superiority of Free Software. I
: > need no "Commercial incentive" to write Free Software. Ego boo is good
: > enough for me. When the opening bars of Beethoven's "Emperor" start, my
: > hair stands on end. I dont care to justify it with explanations about
: > bio-chemical changes in the lower epidermata. It is politics in the truest
: > sense of the word.
: 
: Donald Knuth wrote TeX for 10 years so that he could format his "Art of
: computer programming" series just as he wanted. At some point, he 
: pronounced that the program is completely bug free. Many people are
: inspired by his life, his books and his code.
: 
: Perfection, satisfaction, inspiration etc have their place in everyone's
: life.
: 
: However, such pieces of art are useful to a very small section of the

No doubt, numbers assume much importance in a democratic free world.
But numbers need not necessarily be taken as an indication of
revelation of truth. With the strength of numbers at a given point of
time, we have killed Socretes with hemlock, crucified Jesus, forced
Shroedinger to keep his theories relating to quantum mechanics in cold
storage for ten years. Belatedly, humanity discovered the folly of
their actions and corrected themselves.

However, coming to TeX, it is used by a sizeable number of that
population world-wide for whom it has been designed. I know at least
397 institutions in India uses TeX in one form or other, around 50 and
odd typesetting companies in this country with employees ranging from 5
to hundreds, use TeX as their text-processing engine.

You can see the huge supporting software (>2.5 GB) written for the less
than 250 KB TeX compiler, available at the Comprehensive TeX Archive
Network (CTAN). Dont you think TeX commands a decent user base in a
population for which it is written?

: population. Most people eat at McDonalds and use MS Word. People go

At the first place, they dont want to or required to typeset something
that can be easily done with TeX alone. That means, they simply dont
need TeX.

Secondly MS Word is a word processor, while TeX is a complete
typesetting and text processing language with data types, boolean,
input/ouput and other characteristics required for a language, the use
and functionality of both are targetted at different sections of the
population. For example take the book, "Patrick Chan: The Java
Developers Almanac, Addison-Wesley, 1998", completely automatically
generated by a TeX package written by my good friend, Arthur Ogawa.
This is near impossible in MS Word, nor this word processor is designed
for such a purpose. So we do the crime of comparing two dissimilarly
circumstanced software that stand for different purposes.

: to IIT Kanpur, study computer science and work for McKinsey. It's hard
: to ignore these people, because they have a ridiculously large majority. 

You will agree that numbers need not necessarily reflect the truth and
need not force a person to follow the majority if it falls within the
ambit of freedom in a given society.
: 
: I think ones views are largely influenced by their surroundings (duh!).
: For someone living in the silicon valley, where the average software
: engineer spends a couple of hours in the morning trading stocks, RMS
: and FSF sound completely crazy.

As per the above, French Parliament must be crazy in allowing a bill to
discuss the usage of free software alone in government and for creating
a commission to check whether free code is available for a particular
purpose and to use non-free software for that purpose to avoid abuse of
the law and making necessary enactment.

: Whereas someone in an academic
: setup in a country with a socialist past might be more sympathetic to
: RMS's philosophy.

RMS' philosophy gained strength in a country without a socialist past,
then only the rest of the so called socialist world came to know of it. 

-- 
Radhakrishnan