(Posting to main thread in order to reset thread indentation that gone wild.)
It's like comparing the constitution to actualities of life. Both sides have their point, but no constitution can achieve a perfect system, and no irregularities of actual life invalidates a good constitution.
Sticking to one POW at the cost of ignoring the other, leads to parallel monologues instead of a dialogue, and nothing useful can be expected to come off of this.
Heyjoe I admire your intelligence and the way you handle an issue in its width and depth. But please don't overlook the subtle difference between the theory (of freedom, aka the constitution, aka 4 freedoms) and the practical problems that arise in real life.
I am fully with you in that there *are* some serious security and privacy problems yet to be solved in FOSS, and I am not claiming that the 4 freedoms make for a perfect constitution, but it is the best so far man has developed. It's still in evolution.
So, on one hand, pointing out some actual problems (which are indeed serious) is not an excuse to throw the whole constitution. To be able to do that, one should invent an alternative better than the original. And on the other hand, having a good constitution is not an excuse to take real life irregularities lightly. Both sides need to look from both angles, I believe.
Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater (for both parties), it might be more fruitful to try to *tune* the thing. A new rule needs to be added to the constitution? One of the rules need to be changed in some way? These are all good subjects for discussion. Rules can be pitched against actual problems, and vice versa. From this, better rules - hopefully - emerge. I'm all in for it. At least it can lead us to grasp just how big a quagmire the freedom issue is. That it cannot be completely and simply solved by a short list of rules, that the constitution only provides for a base to build sophisticated eco-systems on, that a web of peripheral rules (continually tuned with changing times) is necessary, etc.
Either top-down (from constitution to real life) or bottom-up (real life to constitution) design is possible. But before trying to replace the 4 freedom rules we happen to have, I think I ought to point out that there should have been an *immense* cumulative brain-power invested in those rules, which are evolved, tested and rugged by time. We can point to a specific real life problem and make an adjustment to the rules accordingly - only to find later out that our modification backfires on many other fronts. So, it must be a very, very delicate process to tune it.
But the whole subject is a very good food for thought anyway.
