[LAU] Some disturbing news

David Kastrup dak at gnu.org
Mon Jun 4 21:57:54 CEST 2018


Thorsten Wilms <self at thorstenwilms.com> writes:

> On 04.06.2018 15:48, Louigi Verona wrote:
>
>> You bring up an interesting point: if I understood correctly you say
>> that we should start with the 4 freedoms and then show that not
>> having them is bad.
>
> No, actually I wanted to point out that you got the order
> wrong. "non-free software is immoral" is not the root.
>
> The 4 Freedoms are _not_ postulated as a solution to a problem, they are
> descriptive of the situation Stallman experienced as status quo early
> on. Which then got eroded.

Well, there is <https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html> if you want
to see the order of things.  First Stallman describes the old state of
things, then how it got eroded and he decided not to play along.  The
formal definition of software freedom that tries capturing what was
being eroded comes later on.

> One may argue against all of those; I don't think this can be reduced
> to pure reason, as you always run into doubt of what may or does
> actually happen and at some point you require value judgements.
>
> I'm curious how your "anything must be proven" approach fares with so
> called basic human rights.

Frankly, the kind of history and reasoning Stallman gives that he was at
first disturbed at how things were going, and later pissed off (the idea
of the GNU project was inspired by the initial MIT events, the GPL is
basically his answer to getting pissed off by Gosling turning Gosling
Emacs proprietary after Stallman had already invested considerable work
into it).

It's really much more a practical philosophy in reaction to events he
could not condone than some theoretical construct.  Just a bit
overengineered.  Turns out that overengineering pessimism is actually
hard to do in our world.

-- 
David Kastrup


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