Friday, April 27, 2007

What is this freedom?

Hi,

All of us may have used some free software sometime or the other. So what is this freedom? I will try here to explain a not so easy concept, in simple words...

At the top level, there are two types of freedom - financial and intellectual. Financial freedom is analogous to saying "I do not have to pay anyone to breathe". Intellectual freedom is analogous to saying "I have the freedom to assert 2 + 2 = 4 and no one else can dictate me to assert anything different". My experience is that many IT services companies function like factories and try to curb intellectual freedom of their employees.

In IT industry - both in products and services, you will find both types of freedom that creators give to the users. Do you think I should explain this in greater detail? Please let me know.

K Venkatesh

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice articles KV. The topic you chose are the ones that we really wonder about (especially in the moneyshades blog).

Thanks for enlightening us. I would like to hear more in the services & product companies practices.

Venkatesh Krishnamurthy said...

Thanks, anonymous. Will try to blog more frequently on the topics of your interest..

KV

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