> Coming up one-sentence rebuttals will be pretty difficult and most people > willing to open the link and read that will most likely be willing to > read the one paragraph response.
I expect that some of these responses will be models for copy-pasting into forums, as a quick way to ensure blatant falsehoods don't stand unopposed. That said, I agree that "one sentence" is arbitrary, when what I mean is, "as concise as possible" for use in situations like these: Many of these arguments occur on Twitter. I have no intention to promote the use of that platform, but it would be useful for those that do use it to have good responses that fit into far less than 140 characters. Many of these arguments occur on IRC. It's very bad form to paste a paragraph into a chat. A short reply followed by a link may be best. > Giving people paragraphs to use (either at a party or in an email > discussion) may give the impression it is a sales pitch. Maybe the guidelines would be better written: - A very short, concise reply, for a person unwilling to spend more than a moment, or for use on platforms like Twitter. Followed by - Longer replies, addressing details with evidence, but prefer linking to articles rather than writing one of your own here. For disagreements on the Internet, short, reasoned, evidenced, polite, and considerate of the other's position is best. - For those that are interested enough to "engage", a link can take them to longer multi-paragraph articles that do not clutter the conversation with "walls of text". > "companies really don't like GPL" > > "Isn't that only true for companies who are making and selling > proprietary software? Hmm. I think I disagree, this "exact phrases to say" style sounds more like a sales pitch to me, or a call-center instruction manual. I prefer the "list of facts" style reference. But! I don't think it matters: I may be very wrong, and there's plenty of room for both. I don't think we need to legislate that here. Let's just collaboratively build out some pages keeping the "target audience" in mind, and see how it goes. Unless you feel very strongly about it? If so, I'll defer to the list's opinions. > Did you know that companies in many industries > that don't produce software themselves find GPL attractive?" (I'm unsure about this specific response myself. Many non-software companies have indeed been convinced by software industry propaganda and license-compliance analysis tools that GPL is a "risk," even if the product they sell has nothing to do with software. High-profile companies like Google institute blanket bans on the AGPL. Other businesses, even non-software ones, look to the Silicon Valley giant as a model of success. The argument given is that they'd be "giving away their competitive differentiation point." This trend is yet another thing I want to counter with this resource; I think non-software businesses _should_ find the (A)GPL attractive, and for entirely selfish reasons too.) >> I mocked up some examples here: >> https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Datagrok/Misinformation I placed these pages in this location under the assumption that if the idea is viable, we could with one command move the whole structure out of my /User:Datagrok/ page and into LibrePlanet Wiki proper. Can anyone confirm that this is actually a thing that MediaWiki supports?
