Comment by wiz21c
10 hours ago
Free software will win in the long run. But it depends on what you call "win". For me it means that, provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others. They will write free software and each year, that free software, although years behind commercial offerings, will be better than the software of ten years ago. With the GPL, that software will stick and won't be appropriated. So in the long run, free software will produce value.
See KiCad, Inkscape, emacs, etc. Are those better than commercial offering ? Sure not. But compare that with 10 years ago: it's much better.
And in the long run (say, 50-100 years), it will come out positively.
Just keep the spirit alive.
> Just keep the spirit alive.
And to do that, blog posts like this one are necessary.
> provided idealsim is still a thing, there will be dev/scientists that will want to open knowledge to others
They don't spawn in a vacuum and rarely arrive at a significant formed idea of Free Software from first principles, so providing education and awareness into that direction is important. In the last decade free software discourse (at least in my perception) has significantly quieted down, to a point where I'm not sure that newcomers to the topic satisfy a replacement rate.
If one wants to keep the spirit alive, now would definitely be a time to push!