Post by David BrownPost by SJSPost by chris at seberino.org ()It doesn't do this because it supports the current copyright system but rather
as a method of attack.
I don't recall ever reading anything by RMS that claimed this.
I'm sure you can provide a citation of RMS claiming that his purpose in
creating the GPL was to subvert copyright, and not to ensure that users
had the source code to the programs they used.
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html> especially where he
In the years that followed I was inspired by that ideas, and many times I
would climb over ceilings or underneath floors to unlock rooms that had
machines in them that people needed to use, and I would usually leave
behind a note explaining to the people that they shouldn't be so selfish
as to lock the door. The people who locked the door were basically
considering only themselves. They had a reason of course, there was
something they thought might get stolen and they wanted to lock it up, but
they didn't care about the other people they were affecting by locking up
other things in the same room. Almost every time this happened, once I
brought it to their attention, that it was not up to them alone whether
that room should be locked, they were able to find a compromise solution:
some other place to put the things they were worried about, a desk they
could lock, another little room. But the point is that people usually
don't bother to think about that. They have the idea: "This room is Mine,
I can lock it, to hell with everyone else" and that is exactly the spirit
that we must teach them not to have.
Sheesh, RMS is an ass.
What *really* happens is that someone is _told_ "This room is YOURS. YOU get to
decide who gets in and who doesn't." They are told this by the people who paid
for the building, the cleaning, the lights, the air conditioning, the computers
in the room, and the power to run those computers. The people, in fact, who
*get* to say "this room is yours".
RMS does not *know* why the appointed owner chose to lock the room. He does
not ask. He simply *takes* what he wants, and to hell with the people who
own the building, the room, the computer.
This is the thinking of a thief:
"You have something. I want it. I *need* it. Therefore, it's immoral
of you to keep it from me."
I'm surprised that he didn't smash open desks and lockboxes for the
same reason. Wait, he all but said he would, didn't he?
Jmr: I am looking for a microphone, and someone tells me it is
inside this locked box.
Rms: Now in the old days at the AI lab we would have taken a
sledgehammer and cracked it open...
Hmm.... farther down gets interesting too...
But that danger we managed to defend against, only to be destroyed by
something we had never anticipated, and that was commercialism. Around
the early 80's the hackers suddenly found that there was now commercial
interest in what they were doing. It was possible to get rich by working
at a private company. All that was necessary was to stop sharing their
work with the rest of the world and destroy the MIT-AI lab, and this is
what they did despite all the efforts I could make to prevent them.
RMS thought it a good thing to keep hackers from rushing off and getting
rich? That explains a lot about the GPL.
Post by David Brownfeels that copyright on non-material objects is morally wrong.
Ummmm... copyright is all about non-material objects. You copy
arrangements of letters, or notes, or blobs of pigment....
Ah, here it is.
But the analogy that was chosen was the analogy with books, which have
copyright. And why was this choice made? Because the people that had
the most to gain from making that particular choice were allowed to
make the decision. The people who wrote the programs, not the people
who used the programs, were allowed to decide, and they decided in a
completely selfish fashion, and as a result they've turned the field
of programming into an ugly one.
Yup. Ass.
But then, I'm a bibliophile. I *like* the idea of programs-as-books.
They're little stories well tell our idiot children.
And I want my favorite authors to be fabulously rich, so they can write
all the damn time.
Post by David BrownHowever, he's kind of changed his position a bit, and feels that the
copyright system can be used to protect the user's right.
He might have acquired something worth owning now.
--
I'll take Knuth over RMS any day of the week. Knuth *likes* books.
Stewart Stremler