The Sikh Geek

Those zealots over at the Free Software Foundation have just launched the BadVista.org site. It’s a site whose aim is to expose the great evil that is Vista, that will corrupt you, take your women and children and be revealed in the Final Judgement day as the Anti-Christ! Okay, a bit strong I know but the fundamental question is whether Software Freedoms as defined by the FSF are Absolute Rights? Are they some Universal Human Truth which it is a sin to go against? They are most definitely not and while I like the GPL, it is a License Agreement just like the Microsoft EULA is a License Agreement. The Absolute Freedom people have is to chose whatever License Agreement they want to distribute their own Intellectual Property. This pseudo-religious or quasi-religious crusade (not sure of the right term here?) is quite ridiculous and why Linus Torvalds the creator and maintainer of the Linux Kernel has become increasingly frustrated by the FSF and won’t change to the GPL v3 when it is released.