Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!utgpu!watmath!uunet!daitc!IDA.ORG!roskos From: roskos@IDA.ORG (Eric Roskos) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: A small analysis of the GNU Manifesto Message-ID: <1989Jul28.131434.1844@IDA.ORG> Date: 28 Jul 89 13:14:34 GMT References: Organization: IDA, Alexandria, VA Lines: 21 You have made some good points. I truly wish it were possible to discuss these philosophical issues in an objective forum, but there is not one here. A basic principle Stallman sets forth is "if I like it, I want to share it." Interestingly, this is the same concept which is set forth in an intriguing, anonymous book of philosophy from the 70s. But that book goes on to observe that this is only true of ideas, that only ideas are increased by sharing (I think it uses some more generic term than "ideas"). Underlying the Gnu problem is a hard economic problem, that ideas are not sufficient for software to exist. And thus there are the requests for donations of the resources that are necessary for it to exist; at this point, the whole idea collapses philosophically, since those resources are not ideas, but tangible things. I wish I had time to go into this in more detail, but I am out of time. -- Eric Roskos (roskos@CS.IDA.ORG or Roskos@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL) -- Eric Roskos (roskos@CS.IDA.ORG or Roskos@DOCKMASTER.NCSC.MIL)