RFC soon on essay "Does Free Software Production in a Bazaarobey the Law of Diminishing Returns?"

[Ean R . Schuessler]

On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 03:00:10PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> > Some of us have other goals.  My principal goal in writing GNU Emacs,
> > GCC and various other programs was to produce a complete free
> > operating system, so that we could have the freedom to form a
> > community.
> 
> A complete free operating system *of sufficiently high quality*
> (not the highest possible quality, but better than Windows, anyway).
> Otherwise, any old hack would have done the job.

I think that Richard's point is that Freedom is more important than features.
Writing high quality software is fine and well and that is nothing new. The
fact that Free Software authors recieve a philosophical satisfaction for 
their efforts is the prime mover for why this has all occured. People can 
try to make out that it really has more to do with business issues but they 
are just trying to cast a new reality in terms of the old system.

There was a time that the GNU/Linux system was not of "sufficiently high 
quality" to do much of anything useful. If that had been the deciding factor
we would have never made it to this point.

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___________________________________________________________________
Ean Schuessler                                                Freak
Novare International Inc.                             Freak Central
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