On Saturday 11 March 2006 08:56, Sick Twist wrote:
I'm guessing that what he really mean is that Stallman is an extremest
_similar_ to a communist ruler. At least that's my view. Not really
communism, which I've lived under during some periods in Europe. Though in
practicality they liked to control your thoughts too, not just sharing
things. Besides it's easy for me to argue that communism was just a theory
implemented by ALL of them (rulers), in order to have complete control of the
population. So to that degree he would have been totally right about ideas
being subject to attempted control. (Trying to walk a fine line not to start
a political thread.)
> The requirements of GPL 2 and the draft of GPL 3 are that everyone should
> always have access to code without legal and/or technical barriers and that
> they are required to return the favor. Basically, everyone (even those who
> don't write the code) own it equally. Now if we were talking about a
> tangible good then yes it would be similar to communism in some ways.
> However, we are talking about ideas like recipes or how to tie a shoe lace
> that come with the added benefit that they can be replicated very easily ad
> infinitum.
>From my experience Linus have the insight of someone who have lived close to
the real evil empire, former Russia, to know to stand clear of such
temptations. Both of us actually lived with enough of a proximity to Russia
to feel their impact.
> RMS does not want Free Software hackers to dig their own graves by writing
> code that is used by companies (like Dish Network) to enslave them and
> other users. The reason that he created the FSF is to empower the user by
> ending their reliance on software that is controlled by others. The draft
> of GPL 3 is completely in line with what his goals have always been--to
> protect the Freedom of software users. There is simply some added
> clarification in order to better protect users from companies who have
> tried to take advantage of what might be considered bugs in GPL 2.
Again pulling from my own experience, it's always dangerous to use laws and
regulations to dictate things. It's backwards. People have an innate sense of
right and wrong. Which is followed to various degrees by each person.
The more laws you have the worse of that society is for needing them in the
first place.
An example. Each city, county, state, federation has it's laws. In Clearwater
it's illegal to set up a car tent on your property. In other cities if you
have an unregistered car you have to keep it under such a tent or get fined.
It does not matter what the condition of your car is. Could be brand new,
still needs that tent. It probably came about as an arbitrary method of
keeping junk cars from lowering someones elses property value. At least thats
an argument I hear from city officials.
So there's a law that's not subjective enough to see when it makes sense to
apply it. But many suffer if they have an unregistered car. Same thing with
the Millenium Digital Rights Act, or whatever. It was not intended to be used
as some does, yet even pre teens are sued for downloading music for their own
use. (Which the fair use law supports as long as no monitary exchange is
involved.)
I like the idea that people are not able to abuse someone elses creation, but
not at the expense of everyone elses freedom.
--Steve Szmidt
"For evil to triumph all that is needed is for good men to do nothing. Edmund Burke
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