[jordigh]

The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most.

Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins. GNU R has completely dominated most areas of statistical computing, for example. The ideology is there not because we think you're "impure" or "evil" or something if you use non-free software, but because we think you'll be happier if you do, because you deserve it, because we all deserve free software.

[Crinus]

> Indeed, for software of good quality, free software wins.

What is good quality differs between people. Personally i consider good quality to be desktop software with a good and simple (but not patronizing) UX and responsive UI that does not abuse my system's resources.

The vast majority of FLOSS fails hard there, at best you get a single aspect of the application to be very good at what it does (e.g. some 3D renderer might provide a very accurate light model) but suffer at everything else (e.g. be usable only through the command line, using only a custom format, no support for the 3D authoring tools that everyone else uses, etc).

There are very few FLOSS applications of good quality and of course that is what i consider good quality (someone might consider the command line part i mentioned above as a sign of quality because it would be easier to drive via scripts, e.g. for setting a render farm).

[Funes-]

>The ideological reasons are practical reasons. We don't want to give you software freedom because we believe in some abstract ideology. We want to give you free software because we believe this is the way that you will eventually get the best software that will let you do the most.

While I wholeheartedly agree with this particular stance--doing away with ideology and sticking with ethics and pragmatism--, I am not sure that everyone in the FOSS community, if such thing exists, adheres to that same premise.

[the_af]

In fact, that's only the ideology of Open Source software.

Free/libre software (e.g. GNU and the FSF) believe in "free as in speech" for ideological reasons, not for tech quality reasons. In fact -- they argue -- one should sacrifice convenience and sometimes even short-term quality in favor of freedom. I certainly see the merit of that line of thought, though it's also a very hard road, and harder still to convince people.

Ideology is not a bad word :)

[jordigh]

I'm not saying the quality of the software is the most important thing. I'm saying that software freedom is a pragmatic goal. Being able to fix your own software or bring it to anyone competent who can repair it is a practical thing. Giving the software to your friends is a practical thing. Being able to modify the software is a practical thing. Knowing that your software won't spy on you is a practical thing.

Software freedom is not some abstract ideology with no relation to pragmatics.