[LAU] Some disturbing news

David Kastrup dak at gnu.org
Mon Jun 4 12:43:32 CEST 2018


Louigi Verona <louigi.verona at gmail.com> writes:

> Hey Thorsten!
>
> Thank you for your comment. I have not only read Stallman, I have studied
> his writings very closely and wrote a large work on his philosophy which
> can be found here:
> https://louigiverona.com/?page=projects&s=writings&t=philosophy&a=philosophy_freedoms
>
> Note, the work is largely critical of Stallman's philosophy. And also note
> that I am a huge supporter of FLOSS, I just disagree with the moralistic
> philosophy behind it.
>
>
> "The problem starts once you do anything that encourages another person to
> use non-free software, because in doing so, they will give up the 4
> freedoms."
>
> This is not a convincing argument, because you first need to prove that
> these 4 freedoms matter. What problems are they solving?

This is the lynch pin of your diatribe.  You pretend that the 4 software
freedoms were picked out of thin air and made up arbitrarily.  They
weren't.  They were the result of an analysis of Stallman's experiences
with companies disenfranchising programmers and users from control of
their devices and him creating a framework of views and terminology, a
philosophy, that captured the distinction between moral and immoral
practices and empowering and disenfranchising practices to a good
degree, basically a philosophy focused around Software Freedom.

It's not like he doesn't describe this process in the GNU Manifesto.

Starting from that perspective and considering current laws and
tendencies (and after getting fscked over by Gosling with Emacs), he
then crafted the GPL because he figured that philosophy would not keep
others from misappropriating his work for purposes in direct
contradiction with his persuasions.

If you take a look at Stallman's own web page you'll find that he is
politically active and opinionated in a whole lot more areas than just
software freedom, but he has kept his take on "software freedom"
remarkably isolated and well-defined.  Also, the GPL as a legal document
is quite restrained in what it tries to do and not to do, again being
remarkably constrained and well-defined in light of its inspiration.

All of this is a very cleanly focused way of making the bulk of his
intent survive without requiring people to share his views and policies.

This layered approach means that Free Software depends only to the
necessary degree on Free Software philosophy, and Free Software
philosophy depends only to the necessary degree on Stallman as a person.

That makes it comparatively cheap endeavor to feel self-important by
attacking Stallman personally.  It also achieves less than you might
think it does.

-- 
David Kastrup


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