On Thu, 1970-01-01 at 05:59, Peter Jaros wrote: ^^^^^^^^^^ Birth of Unix :)?
On Jan 15, 2004, at 6:32 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Sascha Noyes wrote:
That is because of two reasons: 1. "toolbars" are spyware in most cases. Spyware targets people who don't know much about computers, which happens to be people that use mainly non-free software.
To me, that should actually generate demand for a GNU-free alternative, right? People can trust that it's not doing anything evil, because the source is publicly available.
Unfortunately, most people in the toolbar market don't care.
People in my domain 'Tamil' should care.
To define free as in freedom (specific to the need to translate for Wikipedia front page and the GFDL I consulted the most central place where many Tamil literary/linguistic interests lie.
I was amazed to find out (while getting some proper definitions by the way) how much people who care about software futures are worried by current practices.
They generally might not know the exact specifics of how source code is compiled etc. but it is abundantly clear that the proprietary players are pushing black boxes and that too along the ugliest global divides like economic wealth to further such division. That includes support for oppressive practices.
Most probably don't know what GNU means,
Well GNU's Not Unix.
If they do not know yet soon they will.
or even what free software is.
This people in non-English and non-German domains generally know. (free and frei (?) have dual meaning here...)
Many probably don't know what source code is.
BTW, this isn't to say open source isn't worth it in this effort. It's mainly just a rant about, well, whatever you call the uninformed masses of the computer world.
Windows users?
I do not fully understand what is said here but I disagree:) MS-Windows user however conned out of the bottoms they might be ... they cannot be written off.
Mozilla toolbar technology (XUL based I think) seems to be well supported. Mozilla works on MS-Windows. If we do anything with a Wikipedia toolbar then probably we have to have a good informative piece of writing under the 'help' -> 'about' section.
There is hope :)
Ramanan