In the OSS community, people often refer to “the two kinds of freedom,” Free, as in beer (or your favorite beverage, mine is Pepsi) and Free, as in speech. These mean, respectively, “free, as in, it doesn’t cost any money to use,” and, “free, as in, you’re free to do whatever you want with it.”

However, there’s another kind of freedom that, for me, at least, is even better; especially at this point while people are still learning to grasp the concept of OSS. That is the “freedom of choice,” meaning, you’re free to pick whichever tool works best for you.

Its my opinion that some excellent products won’t be created unless there is a reasonable return on investment expected. I like it when commercial products give me the freedom to use whichever tool I like without using tricks to keep me tied to their product. Once a vendor feels they can control their customers in this way innovation goes directly down the tubes.

I appreciate that tools like Gaim, python, OOo, firefox and inkscape work well on a variety of operating systems. It gives users a choice. Not only are the above tools free, but they use (mostly) formats in such a way that if you decide to switch to another tool you can. For example, Inscape uses the well-understood, standards compliant SVG format. OOo worked with standards organizations to create a truly open and free to use format that any office suite can use.

They’re saying, use our product because you want to use our product – not because we’ve somehow compelled you against your will.

But this goes a step further, and this is my motivation for writing this post. The above tools respect your wish to choose the operating system you like. If I’m a Windows user, I can keep using Windows. Mac OS? They work. Linux? You bet. Choice is good.

At the moment, unless you’re writing web applications, creating apps to target multiple operating systems is tricky. Supposedly Java was going to be our salvation – maybe it will yet. Supposedly, .Net was going to be cross platform – maybe it will yet. Python could do it, if it were easy to create cross platform GUI applications, but its not.

I still hold out hope that someday soon it will be easy to create useful, cross platform applications.