Comment Re:freedom: control versus convenience (Score 1) 573
The difference is that you are in a child-like hypothetical that lacks any of the real issues involved in free software.
On the contrary, I was asking about what type of software provides most freedom: software that I can control completely, but which does not exactly do what I want it to do (yet) or software that I cannot control completely but which I can reasonably assume performs the task that I want it to perform quickly and cheaply.
You also make a bunch of assumptions that show you don't know anything about free software, why it even exists, much less, what makes it free.
I program Free Software for a living and I use mostly Free Software and have done so for more than ten years.
For example, you suppose that people who use Free Software don't have any software to choose from, and that they will have to write it yourself.
I do not assume this. I do assume that often it is necessary to adapt the Free Software to make it work according to my wishes. If there really is this glut of software and no need to write any more then all computer programmers would be out of a job. Yet, there is still demand for more and better software, both free and un-free.
In a market for closed software, a developer can anticipate a demand, write software for it and distribute the development costs across many customers. In FOSS, this is very hard. One customer can not achieve some useful improvement to an application for the price that is normally paid for an un-free application. One can group funds and then order software from a developer, but this will yield a very different quality of software and it will create it only after a delay. In the un-free market, an entrepreneur has anticipated my demand, loaned money to implement it and tries to make a profit by selling the software after creating it.