> Nope, I don't think he does. No where did he suggest that creators of > proprietary software be punished by the government. He simply issues a > call to action. Gandhi did the same. Was he being unreasonable when he > asked the India people to stop working for a system that oppressed them? > It's the same thing.
I find it very insulting to compare Gandhi and Stallman. Gandhi was opposing oppresion in the form of laws and violence against the Indian people under injust dominion by the British Empire. Stallman's strive started out of simply being upset for not being able to copy a printer driver. > Some proprietary software writers, however, are going too far. They are > doing everything they can to outlaw/marginalize F/OSS. If they can't win > hearts and minds, but instead have to resort to laws and threats; if > their arguments aren't more effective than the seemingly extreme > positions of RMS; there's something seriously wrong with their model. Some of them do, but Stallman is throwing all of them in the same sack. I don't defend M$, I like their products but they are monopolistic sometimes and that goes against free market. I don't think that non-free software is a wrong model. I think that both an Open Source distribution model can coexist with a non-free one. I think that the laws of supply and demand will give the victory to the best, regardless of the model in use. I don't think I should feel bad for producing non-free software, but again, I doi't intend to do so for a while. I would attack as vehemently any attempts to ban OSS as I would defend those who attack non-free software. My whole point is: I don't think that writing either OSS or non-free software is immoral. And I do think that copyrights are OK. I think that not wanting to copyright your stuff is OK as well. I personally don't care about copyrighting my stuff that much, but I won't start a witchhunt against those who do. Chris Alvarez -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
