Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!bionet!net.bio.net!lear From: lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear) Newsgroups: gnu.gcc Subject: Re: Two separate issues Message-ID: Date: 7 Jun 89 19:03:58 GMT Sender: lear@NET.BIO.NET Lines: 52 [In response to rms's message of Wed, 7 Jun 89 13:21:46 EDT] First of all, you cut me off in mid stream, taking me out of context and then posted a reply to a large group of people. > I disagree. Your definitions of ``free'' and ``freedom'' intrigue me. > Here you are conducting a holy war against ``evil software hoarders''... If you look at the rest of the sentence, I said (in essence) that you would encroach upon others' livelihood by their talents. I don't really agree with Apple on this particular issue because I believe ``Look and Feel'' is an idea. The argument here is whether one should have the right to protect her ``intellectual property''. > Free software contributes more to society than proprietary software, > with the same amount of work. Therefore, free software should have > more incentive than proprietary software. In your argument for the good of society, you place the responsibility for its good on the good nature of individuals. Additionally you burden them with the requirement that they find some other means to make a living which, by the way, could be just as bad or worse than ``software hoarding''. What makes you think this will succeed? The goal of the copyright laws was to protect and advance the good of society by having that good rely on greed, part of human nature. So far, this has worked quite well. Any attempts to change human nature would be artificial and temporary, at best. So why bother? And again, what is wrong with the current system? What is the difference between software hoarding and hardware hoarding? And how are all the ``hoarders'' to survive if they may not use their resourcefulness to make an income? What about people who work towards the creation of weapons (wittingly or not)? They may not hold any copyrights. I don't really have a problem with what FSF is doing. But there has yet to really be a good argument against the free market system. If the price on a decent product is overinflated, then there is room for others to produce, and others will. FSF is just another competitor to the commercial compilers. What bothers me is that so many people have put so much time and effort into the FSF only to have their work not be used, thereby causing others to have to expend more effort into writing yet another piece of software. In the end, this is self defeating. [Incidentally, there are interesting articles on the subject of Look and Feel in last month's CACM, and the SIGCHI Proceedings. Should people be allowed to copyright books?] Eliot Lear