"Timothy R. Cook" wrote:
> We are at odds, here, I think in the usage of the word 'free'.
> CLEARLY, the normal usage relates to monetary cost, not ideal
> freedom-of-doing-whatever-the-hell-you-want.  As for the former,
> POV *IS* free.  For the latter, I would wager that almost no
> software fits in that category.

Except the some thousand pieces of free software out there. For example
Debian GNU/Linux in it's basic distribution format is free software,
every single packet of it, and there are thousands of them...

> It seems the idea that if something isn't completely free, it
> prevents the user from expressing themselves in their own way is
> fairly prevalent, but it's a load of horse hockey; everything comes
> at the cost of some freedom, given willingly.  You give up your
> freedom to run around killing people in exchange for the security of
> other people not doing the same to you.  And so on.

I think you have missed a point. Dsitributing and making free software
does not kill people - it doesn't even harm anyone. It can harm someones
business, but that's inherent thing in competetion in system based on
market economy.

Being free makes it also easier for software to prosper and quicker to
develop. In case of POV, for example, we have now only two choices if we
want to make helper programs to it: either use POV-Ray scripting or do
completely without any routines of POV. This makes quite much things
harder, while we end up re-writing code that already exists in POV-Ray,
just because of the licence. And making duplicate work is not something
that benefits anybody.

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