A spectacular vision of Eben Moglen on Free Software and the promise it holds for the future. The complete story is at http://jeremiad.org/moglentext.shtml
Thanks to Pravin A who forwarded the link. A must-read-many-times document that will last for pretty long period. CK Raju ------------------------- "By 1979, a compromise consensus had seemed to have been reached in the United States, and on the basis of a Blue Ribbon Commission, the (??) Commission came the general tendency, trend, or step in American legal thinking to assume that software was protected, if that's the correct word, by the law of copyright.Thus, the initial rules for sharing undertaken by the Free Software Community, Mr. Stallman and his allies, the initial rules for sharing assumed that only the law of Copyright need fundamentally to be considered. And what was achieved was, within the vocabulary of the community, a very pretty hack." "A hack in the sense that the word is ordinarily employed in our, if I may call it, our community, an unexpected result achieved by creative deployment of existing parts in an unexpected or unusual configuration. The hack to copyright law was the recognition that the purposes of Free Software could be achieved by subtracting from the rights exclusively given to the author by the law of Copyright as it applied to Computer Software." "The difference between us and all of those who've struggled for the freedom of thought in the past is of no particular credit to us. We are not smarter, we are not stronger, we are not more indefatigable. We are merely lucky. We are lucky because along that long scale of the struggle to know and to share, and to improve humanity by the control of nature for the benefit of all, in that long sequence of people, many of whom died unlamented or unwished, because of their adherence to our goals in all that long period what distinguishes us is merely a contingent fact of our role - this time, we win."
