There have been a couple of interesting questions asked recently on LUGRadio, and I thought I'd make a quick stab at answering them for myself. No, nobody has shown any interest in my answers - and I don't really expect them to - but I'm going to inflict them on you anyway!

LUGRadio Top Trumps

For this segment, the LUGRadio blokes scored themselves on a number of attributes, representing the factors which bring them into the free software arena, and showing each of their biases towards certain benefits or features of free software. For me, the scores are:

Freedom crusading: 7
I care quite a lot about freedom, but in a practical way. Over the past 12 years or so, I've got used to having complete control over my environment, to doing things the way I want to do them. As an example - I choose to use neither GNOME nor KDE, sticking with Afterstep, which I've been using for something like 10 years now. Also, and this will come up again below, I'm very used to not worrying about buying licenses for software, to just assuming it works. In my current project, we have some complication because the tools being used were purchased as a bundle - which ends up meaning we can't use one tool unless we also install the others on the same machine. That's just alien to me.

Cheapness: 6
I don't care about paying for software, as such. What bothers me is the idea of saying "I can't use tool X because my company won't pay for a copy". Again, I've got very used to the idea that if there is a tool I need, and someone has already created it, I can use it - I don't have to worry about buying a copy, about time limits on trial licenses, anything like that. One way to look at it is that I'd be reasonably happy in a world where all development tools were free of charge, but it was necessary to pay for deployment - because then the cost of software gets bundled in with the cost of actually providing a product or service, rather than the cost of creating it.

Supporting the underdog: 5
I think this was a lot more important a while ago, but frankly, Linux isn't really the underdog in my world. I just assume that Linux (or possibly another Unix-ish system) would be the normal thing for networked servers, and even in the end-user world, I think Linux is pretty much up to parity now. My flatmate and I have approximately 7 x86-type computers between us (don't ask!), all but two are running Linux, and one of the Windows PCs is almost unused, because it's almost unusably slow and overloaded with crap. She is not a techie, even if she is happy with gadgets, but owns one Linux machine herself, and quite happily uses my home fileserver and both my xbox, running freevo, and her Windows laptop to play entirely legal video files from it.

Community: 5
Again, I used to be a lot more interested in community stuff, but to some extent I think I've grown out of it. I work with computers all day, I tinker a bit at home, and use them a lot, and I'm getting less interested in hanging out with computer people for fun, if being computer people is all we have in common. Honourable mention goes to #Python on Freenode, which is a relatively smart community, and even, sometimes, has smart newbies. One problem I have with community events is that I am relatively advanced, and if I'm not going to learn anything in an event, I find it boring - I want to be a student as well as a teacher. I find I have less patience with dumb newbies than I used to, and I often can't be bothered to answer simple questions where a simple Google search would have saved both their time and ours. I should admit that this also has something to do with having moved to HK, where the community is not as strong as in the UK, and having managed to get somewhat of a real life instead...

Tinkering: 7
This is a slight cheat. I don't really tinker as much as I used to - see above about growing out of stuff, getting a life, etc. - but that's partly because I have done my tinkering and I have a system and a setup I'm really comfortable with. On my work laptop, on my home PC and laptop - I am running a very similar configuration, which I've worked out over years and, while it does change if something better comes along than I have now, that hasn't actually happened for a while. One sign of this is that I've done very little tinkering with the Eee PC - that's partly because it comes pretty well setup out of the box, but partly because I can't be bothered tinkering and just want to use the thing!

So, them's my scores. I didn't really know what scores I was going to give myself until I started writing this, and I suspect I'd have given quite different scores a couple of years ago. The other interesting question was what would cause someone to leave the community, which can be interpreted as switching to proprietary software, or just stopping any active participation in the community. I can think of two reasons why I would leave:

• Because some of the choice in the community was lessened - the particular examples I'm thinking of would be if one distribution, one desktop environment, something like that, got so entrenched that people who chose not to use it were effectively excluded. At the moment, I am not using the most 'mainstream' of free software technologies - by choice - but that doesn't mean I miss out on much. In general, I can do whatever anyone using, say, GNOME on Ubuntu can do, even if it takes me slightly more work. If that ceased to be the case, I'm not sure I'd stick around. This is quite unlikely...
• Much more likely would be because some new, widespread technology was completely unusable with free software. An example would be something like DVD decoding, or 802.11n support - if someone managed to get such a technology widely adopted, and also managed to completely exclude the free software world, that might be a deal-breaker for me. There have been times over the past few years where things like that looked possible, with things like DVD decoding, 3D graphics support and so on, although thankfully it looks a lot less likely now as Linux has become more mainstream.

Anyone else want to answer?