Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Changes to Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies Message-ID: <651@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 31 Jul 89 12:34:56 GMT References: <12348@altos86.Altos.COM> <4439@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <1960@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 39 In article <1960@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> ned%cad@MCC.COM (CME Ned Nowotny) writes: >However, internal consistentcy does not imply correctness. Correctness? Do you really expect FSF (or anyone) to prove their politics is correct? Arguments that some policy is good or right can go only so far. >It is the "guilt by association" implied in the current license that >gives me reservations. I find it difficult to understand just what it is that bothers people about this. Maybe if I did understand it I'd agree with it, I don't know. Is the General Public License felt to be illegal, immoral, deceptive, inconsistent, or what? Why don't people say "well, the FSF restrictions are too strict for what I want to do so I can't use their software and will have to use something else" and leave it at that? I could see the point of saying there might be a better way to further the FSF's goals than the methods they're using, or of saying that one disagrees with their goals. But there seems to be an undercurrent of ill feeling as if the FSF were cheating in some fashion, that their methods are illegal, immoral, or deceptive in some way. >2) Calling a binding copyright a "copyleft" is little more that newspeak > and once again calls into question the FSF use of other common English > words (e.g. "free"). 1. "Copyleft" is just a silly pun. Some people like such puns, others don't. It's not part of some plan to subvert the English language. 2. Every time I've gotten FSF software, I have not had to pay anything for the software. So it was free, in a perfectly straightforward sense of "free". Now, it's understandable that one might also want "free" to mean "no restrictions on use", but it shouldn't be surprising that the FSF doesn't mean "free" in this sense. Just as some people put use restrictions on software so that they can make money, the FSF puts restrictions on software in order to further their goal of software sharing. The FSF has decided that having certain restrictions is a better than making their software public domain as a way to further that goal.