From: Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>
To: misc@80x24.org
Subject: not just Free Software, but freedom from software
Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2016 08:28:37 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20161227082837.GA3850@starla> (raw)
Whenever possible; I'd rather not rely on specialized software
or complex data formats, at all. Less code means less auditing,
less security bugs, less bandwidth, and less storage space
consumed.
In other words, I prefer to use basic/common/reusable tools
instead of specialized, less-used ones which require more
auditing, take more time to download, or won't run on old
hardware.
7-bit clean US-ASCII text is universal by now, and has been for
several decades. So I'm happy I can read my own writings from
the early 90s with just about anything. Had I chosen some
complex format, I might not be able to read those anymore, or
would have to run some unwieldy, possibly proprietary software
to decipher it. So I'm glad I made that decision to use plain
text back then, even before I'd heard of software freedom.
As an aside; I do use UTF-8 nowadays for preserving peoples'
names in attributions (and only that purpose). I often do not
have the correct fonts installed, but fortunately my editor
seems to preserve unrenderable bytes anyways.
reply other threads:[~2016-12-27 8:28 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: [no followups] expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20161227082837.GA3850@starla \
--to=e@80x24.org \
--cc=misc@80x24.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).