On Fri, Jan 10, 2003, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote about "Re: RMS over Humous - meeting summery": > "Nadav Har'El" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Book libraries existed and nobody thought that paying $10 a year for a > > library subscription (when one book costs more than that) was cheating > > the publishers out of their earning. > > Libraries still exist, last time I checked.
Of course book libraries still exist. But what about the new kinds of media that have been invented in the last two decades? How come they did not appear in public libraries? CDs? Videos? DVDs? Software? And excuse me for being pessimistic, but I have a hunch that if the current trends continues, book libraries will also be a thing of the past in 20 years. How long do you think the book publishers will agree to stay out of the pay- per-use or pay-per-eyeball party? Why should they agree to have their books lent out, when the CD and DVD publishers don't let you do that (unless the rental place pays them percentages?). Already, various forms of "EBooks" (slated to replace books printed on sheets of dead trees) prevent you from lending out your ebook, using all sorts of tricks of binding a copy of a ebook to one machine. Software also does it. > But charging money has nothing to do with freedom. The fact that Stallman repeats this over and over, doesn't necessarily make that true. Charging money does have something to do with freedom, at least the specific sense we're discussing now (being free from corporate control). If a person has a billion dollars, he doesn't care that he's not free to move his DVD collection from the US to Israel - he just leaves them in the US and has his servants get the same ones for him in Israel. Or he pays a million dollars to the studio to have a special all-zone DVD made just for him. A person without money is obviously not free to use that option. Returning down to earth for a moment: when I was a kid and we didn't have much money, I was free to read any book I wanted, because (among other things) we had a very cheap library (in fact, it was a library-on-wheels that came to our street once or twice a week). However I was not free to watch any movie I wanted. Why? We didn't have a VCR (those were outrageously expensive in Israel), and even if we did we would not have been able to afford to buy videos. And because VCRs were too expensive to afford, video rental stores also did not exist in Israel initially. So certain things costing too much *does* effect the people's freedom to use them. In a short lecture I gave in Haifux about free software (see http://nadav.harel.org.il/essays/chofesh/lecture.html) I discussed the advantages of free software (including, but not only, freedom), and I pointed to another freedom given by free software that Stallman always hides because of his "it's about freedom, not no-cost" mantra. Here's a translated quote from what I wrote there ... The fact that free software can be copied without cost (or at a tiny cost) grants the user another type of freedom: Even a person who agrees to spend money on buying software usually has a limited budget. He can not afford dozens of different commercial softwares costing tens or hundreds of dollars each. For example, a curious child might want, in order to learn and develop himself, to buy an operating-system, a word-processor, a painting program, software development packages for a few programming languages, email software, and more. Should he want to use commercial software without breaking the law, he would have to give up some of his ambitions. On the other hand, if he were to use free software, he could afford all of them, and even try a new free program every day. The freedom to learn, experience, and act is especially important to children, but obviously also for curious adults who are trying to learn. ... (and yes, MosheZ, I do know that quoting myself doesn't make what I say true :) ). > Please don't take it as my disagreement with everything you wrote - I > do in fact agree with much of it, I am just avoiding "me too". And please don't take what I just wrote as a disagreement with you. You're a very interesting person to debate, to be sure :) (please take that as a compliment). > Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] > "There is nothing more practical than idealism." > [Richard M. Stallman, quoted with permission] I like the "with permission" brag :) -- Nadav Har'El | Saturday, Jan 11 2003, 8 Shevat 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Life can only be understood backwards but http://nadav.harel.org.il |it must be lived forwards. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
