Free software alternatives: What good is choice if you don't use it?
Look through a list available packages for any free OS and you’ll find a sometimes bewildering choice of browsers, mail readers, editors, desktops and tetris-clones available. Despite this many will just blindly install the first one they’ve heard of. Is this a good policy? What good is all this choice if we don’t use it and what are those choices?
Choice: good or bad?
Choice has been trumpeted as both an advantage and disadvantage of free software. Being able to choose what software you use and how is a good thing as is not being restricted to particular package because of vendor lock-in. The opposing argument is generally using a free OS excludes the user’s from using common proprietary software. Of course in this case the choice or—more accurately—availability of software I can run on my free OS is not made by me but by a business running scared from freedom.
It is true that too much choice can be frustrating: try ordering a cheese sandwich in a sandwich bar. But when it comes to software I’m of the opinion you can’t have too much choice. When I’m developing websites I like it that I can—freely—run different browsers to check how things look.
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