On Mon, 29 Sep 2008, Josh Paetzel wrote: > Personally I'm all about choices. Give me the freedom to choose > proprietary closed source software, open source software, or free > software. I use a mixture of all three. Me too. I strongly prefer FOSS solutions but I need to get things done and sometimes there is a good proprietary program and nothing even close to it in the FOSS domain. > Restricting my freedom to choose, whether it's proprietary closed > source, Free Software, or Open Source software leaves me feeling > unsatisfied and unfulfilled, and if I want to feel that way I can always > download a linux distribution. I don't need someone telling me I > shouldn't listen to mp3's simply because they aren't "Free" ;) Stallman isn't trying to restrict freedom of choice, he just doesn't want a FreeBSD user to think "hey what can I use for photo editing" then have FreeBSD return some options like this: GIMP ImageMagick Photoshop (In reality there probably is no Photoshop for FreeBSD and it is expensive, but...) He wants the list to look like this: GIMP ImageMagick I agree with him. If someone wants to find a proprietary program and install it, fine, but we shouldn't write FOSS code that includes suggestions that people use non-FOSS code. Why? By the way, I used to do certain photo editing batch jobs in Photoshop, but now I use 'convert' from ImageMagick, and ImageMagick does a better job for me than Photoshop. It's all about the settings: Photoshop "actions" are just harder to work with than command-line arguments, so I didn't really optimize the Photoshop settings, but I did that with 'convert' because it was easy and the final result was excellent. Mike