On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 07:26:14PM -0800, Todd Walton wrote: > >We have to resist the temptation to use Freenet to make political > >points. > This is rather funny, coming from the man who, when asked why he started > the Freenet project, said, "In terms of the ideological reason, I believe > in total freedom of information," and wrote the software to "force the > issue."
Freenet makes one "political" point, that communication between people should be unrestricted, it doesn't mean that we should spend the money donated to us to advance other political points of view, such as "GIFs are bad", or "You may not criticize the government of China". > Freenet *is* politics. No one's asking anyone to put "We Support Bush" on > the gateway page. This is a fundamentally different issue. "I think that > if you do believe in total freedom of information, you can't have half > measures." You either have it or you don't, and the patent issues mean > that GIF *doesn't* have it. Neither does Windows, in fact, neither does Sun's JVM. Neither does the BIOS on which Linux operates. Without a pragmatic attitude towards issues of IP, we would be paralyzed. > No matter how remote the possibility that > these patent issues will affect the Freenet project (it's not true that > encoders and decoders are the patent holders' only available targets) the > political and ethical issues must be recognized. Really? So you wish to restrict the usefulness of Freenet based upon one country's dumb laws? > In this case these are one and the same issues. Freedom of communication > means that intellectual products cannot be treated like property. Is that so? And in what way could those that hold the GIF patent impose their flawed expectation of property rights upon the Freenet project? Please be precise - I am curious. Ian. -- Ian Clarke ian@[freenetproject.org|locut.us|cematics.com] Latest Project http://locut.us/ Personal Homepage http://locut.us/ian/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://emu.freenetproject.org/pipermail/devl/attachments/20030131/a22972d7/attachment.pgp>
