Many tens of thousands of words have been printed over the years in attempts to answer the question “Why would anyone want to code for free?” Sometimes it is phrased more bitingly, like “Richard Stallman thinks programmers should work for free and starve to death!” With rare exceptions, various pundits, analysts, and random passersby have tried to explain these issues without asking any actual developers, or having any coding experience themselves. And thus in a daring deed of the blindingly obvious, I asked several experienced, professional developers for their views on the subject. These will be published next week in Part 2. Today I’m going to look at the value of Free/Open Source software to the non-coder, us lowly end users.
自由软件四大优点
Let’s start back near the beginning, with Richard Stallman’s famous Four Freedoms:
