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From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.python
Subject: Re: Installing PyCharm on Windows
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2015 08:54:35 +1100
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On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 4:15 AM, Josef Pktd <josef.pktd@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Mine was not a snide remark, but the truth.  Those other operating syste=
ms I
>> was talking about do give users more freedom.  For example, the freedom =
to
>> use it on as many different machines as you like without an extra licens=
e,
>> to see the source code, to modify it, and to redistribute the modificati=
on
>> including an attribution to yourself.
>
> "Richtige M=C3=A4nner nehmen Pitralon"  everything else is "unreal"
>
> I'm writing BSD licensed software, but I never felt the urge to change mo=
re than a few options in the operating system, and was never interested in =
the "freedom" to fix the kernel (and I was never interested in fixing my ca=
r either).
>

That's true of me, too. I run Debian Linux on most of my systems, and
for the overwhelming majority of packages, I simply accept the
precompiled binary that's available from their repositories, rather
than tinkering with it myself. But the mere possibility that someone
recompile their own software forces authors and vendors to remain
honest; it's pretty useless adding in nagware or ads if anyone can
simply compile them out again. Plus, the general culture of GNU,
Linux, *BSD, and similar ecosystems means that when you *do* want to
compile your own software, it's really easy. Want to run CPython 3.6
on Windows? Go hunt down a compiler, fiddle around with it, and see if
you can get everything to work. Want to run CPython 3.6 on a Debian
system? It's probably as simple as:

$ sudo apt-get build-dep python3
$ sudo apt-get install mercurial
$ hg clone https://hg.python.org/cpython
$ cd cpython
$ make

Want to try out that interesting-looking patch off the bug tracker?
Same as the above, plus one little 'patch' command to apply the patch.
Either way, you end up with the main "python3" command still being the
one that Debian provided, and "./python" running the brand new one you
just built. (If you *do* want to replace your system-wide Python,
that's just one more command; but it's easy to keep them separate
until you're done testing.)

I'm not going to force anyone to abandon Windows, but freedom does
benefit even people who don't directly exercise it, so I would still
encourage people to consider a culture of freedom.

ChrisA