New GUI frontend for windows

[Werner Koch]

On Thu, 26 Dec 2013 13:00, jerry at seibercom.net said:

> I certainly don't want to start a flame war here; however, if you are so
> unequivocally anti proprietary software, then why do you even allow a
> version of your product to be created that will run on it. That is

If you mean why we create software which runs on proprietary operating
systems like VMS, AIX, Ultrix, HP/UX, SunOS, Windows, etc. there are two
related reasons for it: In the early days of modern free software, there
was no computer which entirely runs on free software.  A few hackers
worked on making that a reality and succeeded by ~1992 by introducing
GNU/Linux and freed BSD systems.  Unfortunately by that time the major
operating system was Windows which was entirely different to the now
free Unix systems.  To help people, who were forced to use Windows,
several software projects were ported to Windows.  This helped Windows
users to get _some_ freedom back - Mozilla is probably the best known
example.

If it sometimes sounds like we are all anti-proprietary software, this
is likely caused by the rules the GPL camp implies on their software.
The goal of the GPL and other copyleft licenses is to keep the software
free and avoid a re-proprietarization of it.



Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

-- 
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