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> It definitely included thriving, organized, collaborative efforts
> supporting complex software ecosystems. Those definitely qualify as
> movements.
We are persistently miscommunicating.
They are not movements as I understand the word.
You're using a much looser definition of "movement".
The free software movement is a campaign for a moral goal:
to end an injustice. Compare with the civil rights movement,
the environmental movement, etc.
Do you have any evidence of that? Specifically, that they didn't have
clearly articulated goals aiming at furthering what they saw as the
common good and behaved consistently with achieving these goals?
I think this is another misunderstanding.
Maybe SHARE did have goals of that sort. I never said it didn't.
That's not the distinction I was making.
What I mean by a "moral goal" is something stronger than that. It
means a goal of fighting to end wronds, of ending some sort of harmful
practice. A moral goal is one formulated in moral terms.
There are goals that are good but not matters of right vs wrong. For
instance, a school educates people, and that is good to do.
But educating people is not a matter of eliminating a wrong.
Ignorance is a lack, not a wrong.
The free software movement is a campaign against the injustice of
software that gives certain people power over the users. That goal is
a matter of good vs evil -- a moral goal.
> Incidentally, a more neutral and less emotionally charged word
> than "moral goal" like "principled stance" doesn't fit the
> situation of both those and the FSF?
I never had anything to do with SHARE. Did SHARE have a principled
stance? If so, what was it?
However, not every principled stance is a moral goal.
"We will not do nasty practice X" is a principled stance, but not a moral
goal.
"We will set an example of not doing nasty practice X" starts to adopt
a moral goal.
"We will put an end to the nasty practice X" is a real moral goal.
I explain this in the hope you may understand better what I have said.
--
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
