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From: rms@prep.ai.mit.edu
Newsgroups: net.emacs
Subject: hoarding thwarted by technicality?
Message-ID: <818@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 20-Dec-85 16:45:07 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.818
Posted: Fri Dec 20 16:45:07 1985
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From: rms@prep.ai.mit.edu (Richard M. Stallman)
    How would you like it if someone took something that you had
    worked on very hard and was planning to make a living from,
    and declared that through some technicality, everyone could
    have it and no one had to pay you for it?

If someone was making plans like that, he was already planning to do
something wrong: software hoarding.  If he was stopped, by a
technicality or by other means, that's great.  We can rejoice because
the public has been saved from being victims of hoarding.

Software hoarders complain when thwarted, but we should not give them
our sympathy.  Mafiosi, welfare cheaters and make-work bureaucrats
also complain if their funds are cut off, but we don't sympathize with
them, because that's what they deserve.

If a person you care about is a software hoarder and you want
to have good wishes for the person, the right way to do it
is to hope the person comes to understand the wrongness of
hoarding, and stops making plans to base his livelihood on
hoarding.  Success in ill-gotten gains is not really a good wish.