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Re: Freedom. . . NOT


From: Alexander Terekhov
Subject: Re: Freedom. . . NOT
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:24:12 +0200

Hyman Rosen wrote:

[... The FSF doesn't care about programmers ... ]

Right.

http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/gpl/gpl.pdf
(Why Not Use the GPL?)

------
The main benefit to society and the economy of such intellectual
property notions as copyright and patents is the creation or
encouragement of a class of professionals. Allowing somebody talented in
a certain field to make a living directly from that field has a number
of advantages: the most obvious is the ability of talent to concentrate
on what they are good at, rather than requiring them to undertake other
tasks to support themselves; additionally, specialization is permitted,
leading to a feedback loop where skills are honed and improved. Prior to
copyright, those wishing to be inventors, authors or other creative
artists had to either find a patron or have additional means.

[...]

The upshot is that open-source, at present, gains the benefits of both
amateur enthusiasm and inventiveness and professional knowledge and
discipline (and income). This blessed state of affairs exists while
there is a pool of professional programmers able and willing to use
their spare time to produce open-source software. I would suggest that
the aims of the FSF will reduce this pool enormously, and the effects
will be catastrophic. Eric Raymond has argued that open-source culture
is essentially a gift culture; resources are in abundance and you gain
status by the bestowing of gifts on the community.[22] The absence of a
large supply of well-paying professional jobs in software—more or less
predicated on a large scale commercial industry— will re-introduce the
economics of scarcity to the software culture.

[...]

So, the GPL is an attempt to restrict freedom and the economics of
software production suggest that a pure free-software model will
restrict access to software. Does this leave anybody any room?

[...]

If people want to make software free, then they should release it into
the public domain without restraint. The MIT license provides a template
for such terms.
-----

regards,
alexander.

--
http://gng.z505.com/index.htm
(GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can
be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards
too, whereas GNU cannot.)


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