GPL and Squeak and Stuff

Ed Heil uncorrected at yahoo.com
Thu Nov 8 10:18:46 UTC 2001


Andrew,

I'm not sure if you remember this, but after posting that
"freedom/slavery" post, and before you replied to it, I had made
another post conceding that you knew more about the situation than I
did and apologizing for muddying the waters with my ill-informed
statements.  Given that, I'm not sure why you felt it necessary to
pull up an *older* post of mine and continue the argument.

I think I have some good responses/arguments to some of your points,
and perhaps not others, but in any case I realize that anything I do
have to contribute would not be very topical, and the parts that I
actually have anything to say about have been debated to death in
venues where they are much more topical than they are here, in any
case. 

Just a note, though, that I wasn't trying to establish that the GPL
was "more free" than a BSDish or other such license, only that a good
case can be made either way and certain paradoxes enter into the
reasoning, analogous to the paradox of whether a person is "more free"
if they are not free to enslave others.  (I did not mean to directly
compare non-GPL free licenses to slavery, only that the same kind of
paradoxes arise and that's why people can have strong opinions on
either side and either can think that the other side is transparently,
obviously, foolishly wrong.)

Sorry to have raised such a hubbub over this -- I really am.  I do
respect your views on the issue and think they are reasonable; I only
think that reasonable folks can also hold the views you reject, and
that's why it's so difficult.

-- 
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"A. We're not evil.  B. We're not an empire."
 --Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, lying through his teeth
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Ed Heil ....................... uncorrected at yahoo.com
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