> No one is claiming having an open source application will cure cancer. What? I thought they were!!1! > When in fact, if you have a piece of free software th

> No one is claiming having an open source application will cure cancer. What? I thought they were!!1! > When in fact, if you have a piece of free software that's old and unmaintained and the code is complicated and no one understands it, your software is by all definitions "free", but it doesn't really give you the freedom you are seeking, unless you are a developer yourself. Well obviously knowledge is power, but criticizing the GPL for users' lack of education is like criticizing the GPL for users dying of cancer. Actually, it's less reasonable: users are free to fix their own ignorance, while it's a bit harder to fix cancer. > Most of the time, you will get more freedom if the developers had documented their data formats and provided tools to liberate your data. ¿Porqué no los dos? I'm not sure why you seem to think that ensuring license freedom is mutually exclusive with documentation and tooling. If anything, I see a positive correlation with open source and well-documented, migratable data. Have you ever tried to pull data out of an Excel spreadsheet into a database?