I just thought to try out the Fish while emailing a friend to explain what Free Software is all about. She just got her very first computer, running the very non-Free Windows XP.
If you ask the Fish to translate "free software" from English to Spanish, it correctly gives "software libre". But I thought to see if I could trip it up, so I tried translating "software gratis" from Spanish to English. It said "software free". Translating "software libre" from Spanish to English gave "free software".
I'm too old to have any appreciation for Open Source. I view its founding principles largely as a way to enable business to take advantage of naive, yet hardworking programmers. I was a Free Software advocate while most of you were still crawling around in diapers. Well, actually not that old, but I first learned GNU Emacs - and read its source code - I think in 1988.
For me, Free Software is all about the creation of a wonderful community for the people who write it and who use it. I don't think IBM invested a billion dollars in Linux because they cared a whit about community values. One doesn't invest that kind of money without making a coldhearted calculating business decision.
So in my email to Yvonne, I went on at some length to explain what Free Software was all about, but I made no mention of Open Source.
One thing I do have to credit the Open Source movement for is that it has been much more effective at publicity. I doubt that Free Software could ever have been explained in terms that would have excited Wall Street the way the Red Hat and VA Linux IPOs did.
However, I feel the real value of the Open Source movement is that it got a lot of people to learn more about the reasons the GNU General Public License says what it does than might otherwise have been the case, so that despite the fact that RMS complains endlessly about Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds stealing his thunder, I think the Free Software movement has many more real supporters now that would have been the case if the Open Source movement hadn't happened.
iRATE
I sent this email to Yvonne to explain to her that I wanted to install a particular piece of Free Software called iRATE on her computer, so that she could enjoy easy-to-use downloads of music files, without violating anyone's copyright. From iRATE's page:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other peoples to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free downloads of their music.
That "large database" has records of 46,000 music files - all of them legal to download.
iRATE is a Java program - it is known to work well on Linux and Windows, and there is a report it works on Mac OS X. I'm going to give it more thorough testing on OS X myself when I get some free time.
It is still a very new program, and although it works well there are some glitches. But I can see that iRATE has the promise of being the killer application that puts the RIAA out of business.
Why would I say that? Because there is so much high-quality music available for free, that's legal to download, that I think most people on the planet could get all the music they ever wanted to listen to off the Net - and they wouldn't be breaking the law.
That would not only devastate the major record labels' sales, but the RIAA would have no grounds to complain about it - the music is all legal to download. The people who would profit would be the indie musicians, who would get more gigs and sell more CDs directly to fans, without the labels getting their greedy cut.
Let me make this clear: the way to get rid the RIAA's threats of lawsuits, and the government's threats of prosecuting the music downloaders, is to get everyone downloading legal music instead. But the RIAA doesn't want you to know that because they will make even less money if people download the legal music, because the RIAA makes no money from the indie musicians. I'm sure the RIAA is well aware that some downloaders do end up buying CDs after downloading a song or two, so despite their bitching they do still make their money.
That's much the same reason that Microsoft views Free Software as a much greater threat than software piracy. Most software pirates are as locked into Windows as legitimate users, and through lawsuits and legislation, Microsoft knows they can eventually the pirates to have to pay for software, software that will be published by Microsoft. That's not the case with Free Software.
The music has been out there for years but it has always been difficult to find it and much of what is available is just not very good. There is the same problem with writing on the web - the record labels do provide a useful function, just as editors do in journalism, by selecting the content that's worth paying attention to.
The solution for web publishing is of course moderation. The articles published at Kuro5hin are mostly well-written. But if you're not a K5 member you'll have no idea of the collosal drivel that's often submitted to the moderation queue there. K5's moderation is done by its members, who take the trouble to moderate well because they care about the site. Similarly the articles at Advogato are mostly well-done because you have to be certified to publish them here. They may not be as well-written as Kuro5hin's, but are almost always well-informed technically, which is appropriate to the purpose of Advogato.
iRATE solves both these problems - finding the content and selecting the good stuff. You only need to access iRATE's server to locate the content anywhere on the web, and iRATE's collaborative filtering system takes care of picking out the kind of music that you're going to like.
I found that iRATE started doing a good job of finding music for me after downloading about a dozen songs. Bonita is much more selective about her music, so she had no success in about a half dozen. I told her that iRATE will probably work, but will take longer to learn her tastes. She's willing to give it a try so she's left it downloading overnight while she's been asleep.