Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!shelby!polya!shap
From: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: more bullshit
Message-ID: <9600@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 May 89 09:30:33 GMT
References: <9599@polya.Stanford.EDU> <8905310809.AA01988@yahi.stanford.edu>
Sender: Jonathan S. Shapiro <shap@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro)
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 35

In article <8905310809.AA01988@yahi.stanford.edu> tiemann@lurch.stanford.edu writes:
>
>   My damn tax dollars payed for your machines at MIT.

>Let's get facts and fantasies straight here.  Your tax dollars are a
>consequence of your income, which you derive from your job as a
>computer professional. [...] MIT opened up computing.  They made
>it possible for us to play with, then to study, then to work
>computers.  The portion of your taxes going to MIT are but a small
>fraction of the money you owe them for making your job possible.
>Let's not forget that connection.

Whether this is "fact" is seriously debatable.  MIT as an organization
has done absolutely nothing of the sort.  Certain individuals at MIT,
acting on their own behalf, have done a tremendous amount of laudable
work of the kind you describe.

I have no objection to FSF being supported in part by my taxes, by way
of DARPA, NSF, and other funding mechanisms facilities that payed for
most of the machines and the supporting networks on which the FSF work
is done.  I think it is money well spent, if for no other reason than
the fact that FSF has promoted some competition which has led to
generally better compilers.

What I do object to is when people use that revenue for the sort of
fascist bullshit that our friend at tut and a few others have been
engaging in.  Kindly do that on your own dollars, not on mine and the
supporting dollars of over a thousand companies across the US and the
world that pay directly for the transmission of the newsgroups.

Newsgroups and mailing lists cannot rationally be said to "belong" to
a group that isn't the sole funder of the relevant newsgroup or
mailing list.

Jon