GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web

Posted Jul 29, 2010 8:09 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183)
In reply to: GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web by thedevil
Parent article: GUADEC: Luis Villa points GNOME at the web

> Libre / Open Source was about users' freedom to fix or tweak the code they run to their satisfaction, or pay someone to do that for them. If the code runs on a server in a data center somewhere, how does the source code help?

See also my comment further down. Today, at least I get most of my software from the repositories of a private company - Canonical Ltd. Nonetheless, the source code is available and I have fed at least one patch back, via upstream, to Canonical's repositories. (Not to mention the software I work on in my paid time, which is also sitting there.) As long as you can also run the software locally for testing purposes (and to be honest, testing a patched version of a system component that lies a bit deeper down the stack is a bit of a pain even with an Ubuntu desktop) you can improve it and contribute back your improvements. Then you just have to choose a provider that plays the game.