Ah, you may be right. I don't like either one so they're just kind of generically in that category in my mind. Which ever.

But could a Freetard play a proprietary game without having to kill himself afterwards? What would Holy Messiah Stallman say to such an act of blasphemy? Would he not at least require the sacrifice of a thousand Tux penguins?

I see you have lost you faith. Sad.

If it can be shown that a proprietary program won't hack my computer, I suppose it's OK, but "proprietary" kind of precludes that.

Heh, its older than windows 95

OSX is quite different from OS7 afaik. I played with OS8 or OS9 a bit, I did not enjoy it. Apparently if you change the network settings, it doesn't apply them till you reboot derp?

OS X is much different than OS 8 and OS 9 too. What doesn't apply network settings until you reboot?

If you're a Free Software zealot, you're not running non-free software, ever, and Steam does not change anything about that. I think Stallman's stance would be that commercial games are fine, as long as they don't violate your freedoms, but proprietary ones are not. Why would games be any different from any other kind of software? This means that Steam on Linux would be allowed only if it came with source code and guaranteed you that you could get the sources for anything you download, that anything you download and installed can be shared with anyone you like, legally, and that you can modify and redistribute anything you download, as well as Steam itself, in any way you wish (with the optional limitation that redistributed copies must be published under the same license as the original to prevent non-free redistributions).

Personally, I'm not such a zealot, but I am definitely not going to let this thing come anywhere near my "serious" partition - I trust it about as much as I trust internet porn. Most likely, once the dust settles I'll install Ubuntu on a separate hdd and use that only for gaming, or maybe I'll just stay away from gaming for a while longer.

OS X was a rewrite from scratch and shares practically no code with OS 9, apart from the filesystem (and that too has been heavily revised I think), and the backwards-portability stuff, which is basically OS 9 running in an emulator IIRC.

OS X uses a Mach kernel (based on NeXT code), BSD userland (which makes it a UNIX for all practical considerations), and a whole bunch of proprietary stuff to make it shiny and fluffy and all that.

I kind of feel like Stallman's zealotry makes companies afraid of Linux. It comes with all this elitist, anti proprietary (often confused with commercial) sentiment. Its just a huge bone-r-killer for corporate entities.

I am however liking all the new swag coming out (docks, GUI control panels, and compositors), which debunks the thought that Linux is ugly and difficult to use.

Plus I just bought a printer and a webcam (from goodwill ): they had separate driver CDs for Vista and Windows 7... on Linux I just plugged them in and they worked immediately.

You can always pay for RedHat and sue them

Most proprietary vendors also have "ABSOLUTELY NO LIABILITY" "AS IS" clauses in their licenses so to the extent permitted by law most proprietary vendors are also immune to such lawsuits. You have to pay extra for them to take liability in your operations, and in doing so they're likely to send people to set up and keep things running smoothly. I imagine that's talking about 6 or 7 figure contracts.

The real reason people are afraid of open source is because (a) they aren't familiar with it and/or don't know anything about it; and (b) they are usually already cornered by vendor lock-in and think that they're satisfied with what they have.

I mean, fuck, half of the time the SQL Server instances on my development box don't come up by themselves and I have to start them manually. Our administrator assures me that it happens to the production servers too. That's fucking unacceptable.

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