On Wednesday October 22 2008 08:37:06 am Joshua Radke wrote: > Impressions from the lecture; followed by comments: > > I've read tons of philosophical summaries from the FSF, the Open Source > Initiative, and various other sources, which left me a bit confused. I > was most impressed with Richard Stallman's clarity, and would recommend > one of his talks to anybody interested in understanding the FSF's position. > > With regards to freedom, ethics, and software, the conclusion I drew > from last night's presentation is that one must accept that the four > fundamental freedoms (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) are > (or ought to be, for you) inalienable rights. If one accepts that these > are inalienable rights (see http://bostonreview.net/BR24.2/waldron.html, > second paragraph for a good discussion of what this means), then the > rest of his conclusions are just ... truths. I suspect that many of > those who take issue with the FSFs philosophy simply don't accept that > they ought to have these rights, in which case the rest of the arguments > fall flat. I agree wholeheartedly. > His comments on device software were interesting. I especially liked > his statement that if it's a computer, meant for using and customizing > software, than the ideas of freedom apply. If you can't tell if it's > got a computer, or if the logic is deployed in circuits, he doesn't care > about freedom. It was interesting that he also said he wouldn't take a > pacemaker that wasn't running free software ... I must say, I found contradiction in this. After making such a point about non-free software in DVD players particularly (which to me is in no way a computer), how could one then claim that the freedom to modify the software inside one's (presumably fairly advanced, if we're talking about acquiring the source code to it) television is somehow less relevant? I did, however, find the "pacemaker" comment to be brilliant. -p. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20081022/44fa5bfd/attachment-0001.htm