On 12/17/07, Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Free Software as Richard Stallman uses the term is BSD. > > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html > Uh-huh. Sure. Whatever. Zzzzz.
>From the above-mentioned url: "In the GNU project, we use copyleft to protect these freedoms legally for everyone." That's all that matters - lose the GPL (a legal instrument) and the rest is hot air and hand-waving. The point of my original post was to suggest language that cuts out the hot air. The GPL is only one example of covenanted software; there are many similar legal instruments, and we are all free to write and offer our own covenants. There's nothing wrong with covenanted software. The problem is the claim that "freedom" is /only/ possible via covenant licenses. That's hot air based on a philosophy that wouldn't last 10 seconds in a graduate-level seminar at a third-rate university. To put another way, Stallman's pitch is something like "Freedom freedom blah blah, therefore GPL". I prefer something more straightforward like "use a convenant license if you want others to give you something in return for your code; use a laissez-faire license if you don't want anything in return; if you want instruction on freedom, try Plato, Augustine, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Jefferson, Bentham, Austin, Hart, etc. Stallman, if you really think he belongs in that company." Pretty simple. The nice thing about OBSD is that in general it makes no grandiose claims about the nature of freedom or "the community" or "protecting our freedoms" from various boogey-men. The nice thing about the term "laissez-faire" is that it derives directly from a long tradition of political and economic thought that has made a major contribution to the construction of societies whose citizens enjoy a great deal of practical freedom. You know, rule of law, private property, the right to enter into contracts, personal privacy, little stuff like that. That's where freedoms, rights, justice, etc. come from. Neither the GPL nor any other legal instrument has the power to affect those things in any way. The government is another story; had RMS spent more time trying to bring sanity to the US laws governing IP instead of pushing amateur philosophy he probably would have made a lot more progress in expanding the "free software" space. FWIW, I'm profoundly uninterested in debating the merits of your/rms' notion of freedom. I'm only posting to try to clarify my goal. You can educate yourself, I don't have time to do it for you. Start with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (online). You might not like it though. You may find it necessary to think Real Hard to understand such stuff.
