Resonant Information - Free Software and Time: a difference in philosophy with Richard Stallman - Comments

Hammer analogy

Zed — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:03:01 -0500

The point was more that society places various accepted restrictions on freedoms on usage (by virtue of making certain actions crimes), and less that the restrictions on the use of hammers work exactly the same way as the restrictions on proprietary software. It's certainly fair to argue about whether one restriction or another is a good idea, but I am rebutting the idea that it is unacceptable to have to give up any freedom whatsoever in order to use a tool of any kind.

There are, in fact, tools with modification restrictions, however. Cars come immediately to mind: if I buy a car, there are limitations on how far I can modify it and still drive it on a public street. This is actually a fairly good analogy to proprietary software, since such software doesn't generally prevent you from modifying it locally (there are unofficial patches for many software packages), but only from redistributing it or (in the case of client/server style software) connecting to certain servers after it has been modified.

Hammers

Anonymous — Sun, 09 Jan 2005 11:09:58 -0500

"If I am given a hammer, I don't have the freedom to use it to remove the nails in my neighbor's house, nor may I use it to violently strip off my own clothes in the middle of a busy elementary school, whether or not I'm careful not to hurt anyone while I do so. As a society, we don't want people to have that kind of freedom. So if it's given that some freedoms should be restricted by society, why then is non-free software a social problem?"

A better anology would be a sledge hammer. Lets say you buy a sledge hammer along with some fence posts and put up a fence. A week later you are putting up a different fence and the sledge you have is unweildy due to the design of its handle.

In the proprietary model, you are prevented from using your skills as carpenter to modify the sledge in anyway. So, what other tool works the same way as proprietary software? I can't think of any.

In addition, which hammer actively prevents you from comitting certain acts? I'm thinking of lawful acts here, but while we're at it, which tools stop you from commiting crimes?

The rest of your article is quite agreeabale.

Free Software and Time: a difference in philosophy with Richard Stallman

Zed — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:01:39 -0500

by Zed Pobre, January 7, 2005

Richard Stallman did an interview with KernelTrap that is a fascinating read. I agree with most of his philosophy, and am involved in the Free Software movement myself, partly through my contributions to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, and partly through bits of code that I have written and released under the GPL. I reached one portion of the interview, however, that highlighted where I have to part ways: