community

The wikipedia quite simply defines what is a conglomerate.

A conglomerate is a large company that consists of divisions of often seemingly unrelated businesses.

While there are often negative connotations being associated with a conglomerate, the new one which we are witnessing today is different in so many ways. This is a conglomerate you, your project or your business can be a part of to the full extent. All you have to do is observe and play by the rules. This is a conglomerate that we today call: The Community. That is its name.

One of the active bloggers on Libervis Blogs, Charles Schulz is writing a three part article series examining the Free Software community and relationships between users and developers. He is asserting that the notions of "users" and "developers" are highly irrelevant.

• Part 1: He who owns the code shall rule them all
• Part 2: where's my paycheck?
• Part 3: RMS and Linus, those Byzantine emperors...

The Proprietary Curse

Proprietary, the one word that will send a shiver down any Free Software users spine, like Pandora's Box holding a whole wealth of curses inside just waiting to be unleashed. Any business can be proprietary, all they have to do is disallow you the luxury of having the source code, giving users no choice but to buy it through the simple fact that they have no choice but to buy it. You can pirate it to high heaven and still have enough people buying it to make a successful business, while you think you\'re sticking two fingers up to the system what you\'re really doing is becoming dependant on their software.

It's almost like a drug user will give you a free sample, once you become dependant on it their attitude soon changes, they're no longer you\'re friend, you want their stock? you buy it, it's as simple as that. It's an unfortunate side effect that keeps many people using proprietary products in this day and age, they feel like they can't give it up because they can't see a viable alternative to what they've become dependant on using to gain a level of productivity that's necessary.

Computing Our Liberty: June 2005

Loosing the spirit?

\"Linux\", \"Open Source\", \"Free Software\", these are just some of the new major buzzwords floating around in the information technology world, each one having a different meaning to all of us, each one capable of inducing a different image in our minds of what the true sense of those words are. The average person might only see them as merely a great contribution to any young revolutionaries lexicon, and in this capitalist society made to believe that these things are somehow wrong.

Free Software is making a major breakthrough in the market, there are more GNU/Linux users around these days and even more corporations trying to take advantage of that very fact. Some are scared by it, others are excited by it, but somewhere in the mist of all the excitement did we somehow forget what these things really mean to us. At what point did it become ok to make money from \"free\" software, at what point did we say to ourselves, we have the right to have access to the source code. The truth is both are true, at one point it was black and white but somewhere along the line, the neat little line got smudged, turning black and white into black white and grey, it\'s this grey area that makes people unsure as to what \"Free Software\" truly is.