On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 11:54 PM, Matthias Kirschner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [After this message, I will only reply off-list, because I think it is > off-topic on the technical dwm mailinlist -- and I do not want to annoy > others. If you would like to continue the discussion in public, let's > move to another mailing-list like [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Given the fact that you've already indicated the topic shift in the subject, and the fact that others seem to interested in it as well (given their replies), I'm continuing it on-list for now. > - For whom? The individual or the society? Society is just a bunch of individuals. When a license forbids the individual to use the code in a closed source product, it forbids society as a whole to do so. As I've said before, that may be morally justified, but it's a restriction of freedom nonetheless. > - Which dictionary should I believe? Yours or my political dictionary, > which says a lot more about the term? Is there a master human > dictionary somewhere? For which language? No there isn't. But here is a pragmatic approach: I've shown you some examples that clearly indicate that MIT/BSD provide more freedom than GPL does. Can you show me at least one that shows the opposite (no cheating by making up your own please)? > - "Not just 'people'"? Who writes dictionaries? People, or God? People write dictionaries, last time I checked. But since the FSF definition of freedom clashes with each and every definition of freedom I've seen in any dictionary, the FSF's definition seems to be comparable to Microsoft's "standards" to me: for some skewed definition they're right, but for any common definition they're not. > I had university seminars about the term "freedom", and I do not think > that we should stop thinking because a dictionary says something > (otherwise the dictionary takes away your freedom, doesn't it?). Or do > you look up "life" in your dictionary? Ah, so university seminars is where the real thuth comes from... Your remark about not stopping thinking misses the point: I can spend my entire life thinking about the meaning of the word "tree", only to figure out that there is none. Words have no innate meaning, they are given meaning by humans for the sole reason of easing communication. Once we start attributing different meanings to the same word, we are impairing communication. Sure, dictionaries are not perfect, but they're the best we currently seem to have to resolve differing opinions about the meaning of a word. "Freedom" is defined in every dictionary I've seen so far as something that MIT/BSD provides more than GPL does. It may be so that there's something more "moral" about GPL, but if so, you'll have to use a different word to describe it; "freedom" is already taken, and it describes something that GPL is less about than MIT/BSD are. Best wishes as well, Sander/who probably couln't stop thinking even if he wanted to