We're not going to bore you by talking about free beer versus free speech - that's an old argument and one with which we hope you're familiar by now. Instead, we want you to focus on the web services you rely on. Think Google. Think Gmail. Think Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm or any number of others.
Large chunks of your life are likely to rely on these companies continuing to provide their services to you for free, but are they free software? Of course not - but the problem is that most folks don't even consider that question.
In the old days, JavaScript was a simple glue layer that added snippets of functionality to the web. Dynamic HTML meant that web pages could react a little bit to user input. But really it's the rise of Ajax, which enables web pages to send and receive data without reloading the whole page, that's powering a new generation of websites and enabling people to produce increasingly powerful apps that run entirely inside your web browser - you only need look at the Chrome Experiments to see just how much JavaScript can do.
Thanks to its developers, OpenOffice.org is approaching feature parity with Microsoft Office, and Evolution now functions as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Outlook. But if more people rely on web-based services such as Gmail or Google Docs, which aren't available under a free software licence, aren't we giving up our freedom just as we're on the verge of removing the proprietary shackles once and for all?
Read the rest here.
Interesting read. Rings so many bells that I bet my life that most of you sheep out there will not even get what that article is all about. And you will continue to love M$ Vista 2, errr, sorry, I mean Windows 7.
Sheep wake the hell UP!
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