Evangelism gone wrong

While searching for Frozen Bubble I found this request to “not port software to Windows”. Nice, a another person who doesn't understand what “free software” means, and esp. doesn´t know what “good” software is. So here is my response:

Free software for me means freedom of choice, Felix von Leitner (Author), obviously doesn´t, he excludes Windows. Windows may be crap, it may be propietary but if we exclude it from the list of possible options we are behaving just as bad as Microsoft. But what´s really is that he kinda implies everybody should use linux, but as of now Windows IS the better choice for most people. The linux desktop has advanced a lot but it just isn´t ready for joe average yet. And what about the Windows only software? Should we discard it and use some mediocre but “free” software? Nice, but absolutely unrealistic.

Many people using Windows don't care about their freedom. They do care about quality software and for that reason try to replace all the user space software from Microsoft with better free alternatives. This is the sole reason for the existance of cygwin.

This is the worst sentence of his request, he implies that “that if you care about quality and use cygwin you do not care about freedom”. Wrong, just wrong, caring about freedom and caring about quality is not mutually exclusive. In fact if there wasn´t cygwin there would be less freedom, less choice. With the help of cygwin the can use some unix tools and windows at the same time.

My stance on “quality” is as following: If you are looking for software which does a specific job, go for the best software don't hinder yourself by thinking “must be free, must be open source, must run under linux”. It should simply do its job, and be easy to use. Writing software for linux or windows is nonsense, software is written for users.

To sum it up in one sentence: I think he wants to limit choice under the disguise of freedom which is contradictionary and highly suspicious.