Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: Slavery???

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>


    > Thank you for this opportunity to clarify my own thoughts.  

I encourage you to try harder.

For example, you seem to be a bit inconsistent here:

At first, you criticised my outrage at the BK free use license on the
grounds that it was an offer for contract.  Why should I feel outrage
concerning _your_ "right to contract" and "right to privacy"?

I answered the grounds for your criticisms quite directly and well, to
which you replied:

    > yada yada yada :-( 

and in the rest of your reply, made no further mention of those same
criticisms.  Should I be reading "yadda yadda yadda" as if it said
"Yes, you are right, mine was not a valid criticism"?


    > By the time you got to "outrage," you were
    > once again so emotional as to forget to explain why.  I still
    > don't get it.

I forgot to explain?

I pointed to a wealth of arguments at fsf.org, endorsed Andrew's
"natural rights" argument, and outlined some arguments proceeding from
the idea that there is objectively such a thing as "socially
responsible engineering".

Why you would call any of those arguments "emotional" is something I
can only imagine.


    > When the strongest direct argument you can come up with for your right
    > to copy is "Nyaah, nyaah, nyaah, you can't stop me",

I did indeed endorse the "natural rights argument" which seems to be
what you refer to.  The argument is not simply "you can't stop me from
copying software": it's a bit more sophisticated than that.  The
argument is that to make prohibition of copying _enforcable_ by the
excutive and judiciary, one would have to create an unreasonably
intrusive state ("a facist state" in traditional hacker speak).  I do
think it outrageous if you want to do business in a way that will
require facism to enforce your contracts.


-t