On Wednesday 05 December 2007 16:55:46 Noah Slater wrote: .. > I have no idea what your argument is, sorry. Could you rephrase?
It's a new one on me, and it's possibly the first new one on me in 10 years of seeing these arguments & I quite like it. Not sure I agree, but I like it. On 05/12/2007, vijay chopra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Actually I'd compare free speech; it's not free speech unless it difficult > to hear what I'm saying. The argument appears to be this this. If you truly have free speech, it should be possible for someone to say something you find difficult to hear perfectly legitimately. For example, someone calling for a <insert religion>-extremist state. Not only that, if you truly have free speech, you can argue that you can take anyone's words and use them against their intended purpose. <thought experiment, to show the point> For example, you include this quote: "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results." - R. Stallman By that definition, the contents of FSF.org is not a useful social contribution because every web page on FSF.org contains the following footer: "Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved." This is equivalent to CC-BY-ND - which is, I suspect, considered non-free by some, and therefore society is not free to use the contents. </thought experiment, to show the point> That's intended to show something that may be hard to hear, and I'm sure that the FSF have good reasons for that license. My guess is to prevent distortion of the messages they wish to express, which does of course mean they are restricting free speech of others. (but then society allows them to do this) Now, the second part of vijay's point was this: On 05/12/2007, vijay chopra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Similarly it's not software freedom unless it's hard to bear what I'm doing > to your code. Now, if code is speech, then free code should have the same properties as free speech - that is someone must be able to take what I write and use it in a way I find difficult. Specifically this includes using it against me. As an example, consider the recent debacle over the wireless drivers from BSD. Closing the drivers and selling them with no comeback is something many people would find uncomfortable. Similarly forking the code and including in a GPL only codebase making it difficult to merge back into the original BSD codebase is clearly also uncomfortable. (I'm not even going to think of addressing the validity here - I got tired of reading the arguments on both sides and figured eventually they'd make up and play nicely - I'm just using both directions as an example). Clearly the same would hold for public domain code as well. Those are both clearly re-uses of the "speech" in ways uncomfortable to the original author. I'm not saying if I agree with it or not - I'd never considered that way of looking at it before and it's quite fascinating. It's certainly a definition that defines the GPL (esp v3) as non-free because it designed to prevent particular "speech" being used in particular ways. (eg tivoisation) I'm not sure I agree with it, or want to, partly because I'm not sure I actually have __that__ flame retardant a suit. Also, after all, most societies don't give complete freedom of speech anyway - there's plenty of restriction on speech - both legally and by etiquette. (hate speech, incitement to riot, blasphemy, trolling, etc) It though *is* a fascinating (and to me new) way of arguing the point. (freedom being a philosphical point as well as others and the day people stop arguing about things, philosophers are out of a job. 42. 9*6 and all that.) If I've misread the point I'm sure Vijay will correct me :) Regards, Michael. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
