The rise of the new inquisition as a respondent has aptly described is worrying. A person loses all their merits as a consequence of one error, controversial opinion or belief. An intellectually brilliant person like Stallman is more than one opinion or belief. The several decades they have lived for and the work they did to improve software accessibility to lower social classes can never be denied: this is a fact. Free open source software is more financially accessible to the lower classes. Besides that, software lock-ins are quite rare if not completely not present. I can only write about my particular case, in which free software has increased my ability to experience different types of applications without spending thousands of Euros.
The new trend to discredit completely anyone who makes such controversial claims, is more like a modern socially accepted way of humiliation of anyone not adhering to what must be 'obvious'. There are other ways of admonishing anyone besides 'accepted' character assassinations. In my opinion, this is a move towards the past when beliefs challenging the accepted status quo were publicly chastised. The proper reaction should not be one of a complete character devaluation and assassination, but one which points out any possible problematic scenarios as a direct consequence of such an opinion or belief. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng