On Sat, 2016-02-27 at 12:19 -0800, Aaron Wolf wrote: > > > > Practice Rapaport's Rules here and everywhere: > > > > “First, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so > > clearly, vividly, and fairly that your opponent says, ‘Thanks, I wish > > I’d thought of putting it that way.’ Then, you should list any points of > > agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread > > agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from > > your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of > > rebuttal or criticism.” > > > > To clarify about Rapaport's Rules I just quoted, this approach is orders > of magnitude more persuasive and damning than others. Showing how much > you understand someone even better than they understand themselves and > then respectfully showing where they are wrong, this is the most > devastating critique you can make.
I have heard a similar argument, which I like a lot, that you aren't arguing sincerely unless you can describe the circumstances in which your opponents argument would convince you to change your mind. Along these lines I think it might be persuasive to also gives examples of when we think another license might be better a choice than the GPL because it better serves the end of protecting user freedoms (which would counter arguments about zealotry etc). We have already seen the example here about licensing template files, where the FSF recommendation is to use a permissive license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#WMS). Another I can think of is the example implementation of a (truly) open standard. Here I think a GPL compatible permissive license, CC0 etc would be the best choice as it allows the greatest number of different implementations. This could help protect users freedoms as it encourages widespread adoption of the standard while guaranteeing interoperability and allowing decentralization and the ability to run the software yourself etc (making certain assumptions about the contents of the standard). We have seen examples, in this regard, of large corporations deciding to open source parts of their proprietary software in order to try to preempt open standards that they did not control. For example a GPL compatible permissively licensed implementation of an OpenId alternative that addressed some of its perceived problems and was also decentralized and guaranteed interoperability might be preferable to F******k deciding to release the sign-on mechanism under the GPL as a "standard". The latter would be likely be heavily tied to their implementation of other services which are not GPL'd, likely very difficult, if not impossible to actually install and run yourself and could be useless if you did without a well specified way to point to your own server. It would also cede control of the "standard" to their control in a way that would allow them to freely change the implementation that meant other attempts to implement it are constantly out of sync and not in a position to persuade people to do otherwise since they did not have the great mass of existing users etc. Note, this is largely a strategic argument (in a way that the use of the LGPL can be). Paul M.
