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Agreed - It shows tremendous lack of vision and leadership on the part of the FSF to continually push for "clones". The pursuit of mediocrity that is endemic in

• ajross 15y ago
  I think that's vastly overgeneralized. By that logic we'd have no free compiler, no free kernel, no free userspace. It's all clones. True innovation is rare (and it certainly does happen as free software). The goal of the FSF is to promote the use of free software. If people won't or can't use free software because they need some proprietary program, then the goal of the FSF becomes to eliminate that need. Sometimes this involves writing software that is better than proprietary equivalents (c.f. emacs and gcc in their early days). Sometimes it means just cloning what's there so you have something to use (most of coreutils falls into this category).
  • greenyoda 15y ago
    The difference is that there were no high-quality free C compilers available before gcc, so it filled a real need. Lots of people couldn't afford to pay hundreds of dollars for a compiler. However, an open source version of Flash would be replacing software that any Linux user can already get for free (and would probably be of inferior quality to Flash, at least for the first several releases).