KLEPAS.ORG

Winter seems to be approach­ing us here in Can­berra little earlier this year. It was quite chilly today, though I liked it. Gave me an excuse to put the fire­place on and now I am sitting here infront of a blazing fire of red and orange and yellow, which is rather nicely warming the room. Chewie is lying next to me and I am sitting on a fat pillow to avoid the cold wooden floor while leaning against one of the two bean bags. Def­i­nitely a nice place to browse the net and study from. Def­i­nitely very comfy and nifty.

Today while I was working on my laptop at college I attracted a few odd glances from people who were obvi­ously not aware of the soft­ware I seemed to be using. Some of them came up and asked me what this thing was and I quickly toured my desktop and explained what Linux, Ubuntu and the GNU idea is all about. The guy seemed rather lost and noted that nothing is free. He then went on to ask whether Microsoft Word works on this and I answered I don’t use any Microsoft prod­ucts, or pro­pri­etary prod­ucts at all. I showed him Abiword, Gnu­meric and OpenOf​fice.org. This seemed to inspire him to ask whether you can save into DOC format or other pro­pri­etary formats, such as WMA and so forth. I answered that yes, to an extent you could and he seemed rather frus­trated by this. He obvi­ously missed the point of freedom number two and three from the GNU philos­phy. You might as well say he didn’t get the entire thing, but oh well.

This brought me to think about his earlier comment at the start of the con­ver­sa­tion where he stated that nothing is free nowa­days. Lis­ten­ing to some nice tunes by Dire Straits on the bus home, I came to con­clude that his comment could have been for two reasons. Firstly, people believe the only reason some­thing could be free is because it’s crap and the person trying to give it to you obvi­ously wants to get rid of it. Sec­ondly, it’s could oth­er­wise only be ‘free’ because there is some fine print attached or it is oth­er­wise ben­e­fi­cial for the person/company that is giving you the ‘free’ thing, what­ever it may be, and with it make a gain in some form, directly or perhaps further down the track. More and more I see people around me believ­ing in either or even both of these exam­ples. It’s gotten to the point where some people are afraid of the word ‘free’ or ‘freedom’. No thanks of course to certain indi­vid­u­als, gov­ern­ments and com­pa­nies that tend to make money or gain power when people no longer want their freedom.

I think that looking back into the past and the having a closer look at the promises and such that polit­i­cal parties going up for elec­tion have given their pop­u­la­tions one can make a few inter­est­ing obser­va­tions. Note that several decades ago we were promised by parties wishing to lead and ‘rep­re­sent’ us, that they would better our lifestyles, or improve the economy, or perhaps lower taxes and so forth. Nowa­days polit­i­cal parties are taking away our free­doms, both social and intel­lec­tual in order to ‘protect us’ from evils such as the infa­mous ter­ror­ists and other such satanic groups who con­spire to maim, torture and kill us, which they, inter­est­ingly enough, trained and set loose them­selves. Is it all to be a diguise for some­thing bigger, or is it that these ter­ror­ists are just evil to begin with…?