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Freedom impinges mainly on the process, i.e. how you would address this issue (writing a macro to help underskilled users, versus changes to the spreadsheet itself to avoid them in the first place), or what checks and balances apply to the software development and release process.
Agreed, though in the case of the geneticists, they have no right to be unskilled users in such a mission critical environment, for gawd's sake. That is unprofessionalism verging on criminality.
Say if the spreadsheet vendor's developers insert a huge easter egg, or make what would be unacceptable compromises for some users on the algorithmns for which table cells to recalculate, or fail to support your preferred platform, as random <sic> examples.
In contrast I suggest Outlook's security problems would not have persisted so long in the free software world, as people who needed more security than the base product offered would have fixed it and made those fixed available to others. There are situations where this process is slow but I think is demonstrable.
If there is a general trend it is to free software being more rounded, more interoperable, less buggy.
You expressed concern at free loaders in an earlier post, rather harshly naming Redhat despite the huge development efforts they have funded. But free loaders aren't a problem generally (although I have an issue with GNU Chess users whose PCs have viruses, where I see a small -ve cost per ~ MS Windows user to myself). But the point is freeloaders cost other users nothing, and they may always discover (and in some cases even fix) an obscure bug before you hit it, or request a useful feature you hadn't thought of.
Maybe I was being harsh (it was me not John Daragon said that) both with respect to Sun and Redhat. On the other hand we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that both organisations have already made a great deal of money from their funded projects. They effectively stand to lose nothing at this stage but have everything to gain. My real point was not to single out either of these companies but to make the point that in the £&P world of business, the time will come - very soon, when commercial bodies will realise that there is a massive free source of R & D out in the world, who will contribute willingly to the cause of open Source. When that happens then the world everyone here is trying to create will go to the pan as it is subjugated to the will of Mammon.
No matter what great intentions we start out with (the Internet is a good or bad example) it will be corrupted into a corporate money making tool eventually. The only grace may be people's general reluctance to pay for software. Interestingly Bill Gates recently painted a picture in a keynote speech of a world in the near future where hardware will be free and only software will have a price tag. Yeah! great world in which we sink in a quagmire of free, carcinogenic, environmentally polluting waste motherboards, while Bill gets richer. I can only presume that the CEO's of Intel and AMD have keynote speeches prepared in which they paint a picture of a world in which software is free and only computer hardware costs money. Oh, err, didn't Richard Stallman already do that one?
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