Re: [GNU-linux-libre] choosealicense.com fork with better wording, perhaps ?

[Riley Baird]

> Because you have to contextualize it in a social context: when he says
> “amplifies/restrict� freedom, he’s not only speaking about your, but
> anyone’s, the whole society’s, of each individual in it.

Agreed, this is what I was saying before. If we wish to preserve our
individual freedom, we have to give up the ability to take others'
freedom away.

> To take again your example: someone can probably (it’s an euphemism)
> increase your freedom in *so more many ways you can’t even wonder* alive
> than dead. Dead it’s just a pile of flesh, as you could obtain killing a
> simple animal, or even (bio)hacking with pluripotent inducted
> cells. Alive it’s quite surely an instance of the most fantastic and
> powerful autoimproving system produced by the universe.

What about people that are not autoimproving or powerful? Is it ethical
to kill them?

> Even if I don’t share the opinion of many on copyright legitimacy, I
> would notice go against it is not free speech: free speech is the
> authority-unregulated expression of *opinions*. Just transmitting
> others’ work is not an opinion, at least not your, thus it’s not free
> speech. Yet it’s still legal to express the same opinion of someone else
> who expressed it in a copyrighted work.

I think that free speech is much more than the right to express your
opinions. Wouldn't you agree that Phil Zimmermann's exporting of the PGP
source code was free speech?

>>>> Objectivity does not suppose an objective subject - in fact, it does
>>>> not suppose a subject at all. If there were no conscious beings, an
>>>> objective reality could still exist.
>>>
>>> *** That's debatable, but humans have been doing it since they have the
>>> capacity to do so, and still didn't reach any conclusion.
>>
>> Hopefully we'll take less than 20000 years. :) Can you imagine a
>> universe with no conscious beings? If you believe in the Big Bang
>> Theory, then such a time must have existed.
> 
> In the hypothesis objective reality wouldn’t exist without Subject
> (idealism) the Big Bang Theory would be a conception of the Subject, it
> would still be, but would just be dependent of it.

Would the subject themselves exist objectively, or would they also need
to be perceived?

> Yet you can’t prove what you see is real, because to prove anything you
> need material, and you can’t have material if you assume it is not
> real. Thus the fact objective reality exist can’t be a proven truth but
> only a postulate, an useful (even better: essential) assumption.

I agree that you can't prove that what you see is real. However, I
disagree that you need material to prove anything. You can prove the
existence of your consciousness - "I think therefore I am".

Even if some things are subjective, we cannot say that *everything* is
subjective, as it leads to a contradiction:

Assume that everything is subjective. Is everything subjective? If so,
then we have just made an objective statement, which contradicts our
original assumption. If not, then something must be objective, which
again contradicts our original assumption.

>>> And no, if I'm producing a guide on choosing a free software license,
>>> I don't want to hear about what proprietary software vendors have to
>>> say about it.
>>
>> Understandable. And, if you're right, really, you shouldn't have to.
>> However, note that this is a moral issue, and all morality, to some
>> degree, involves an arbitrary choice of what to value.
> 
> No it’s not up to moral but to ethic. Moral —coming from latin /mores/:
> habits— is the value of “Good� relative to a specific culture. While
> ethic —coming from greek “ethike�: a science of what is good— is the
> value of “Good� in absolute, not relative to any culture but objectively
> developed after the study of human.

You cannot base an objective morality upon the study of human. Why draw
the line at human? Why not include certain animals? Why not limit it to
individual races, as Social Darwinists do?

> Freedom being essentially defined after will, it matches
> happiness.

While I, too, support taking freedom to be the highest objective, I'll
just point out that this is not always true. Consider people who are
manipulated through guilt into doing something that they would not want
to do otherwise. They are still following their will, but it is not
bringing them happiness.

> Equality (to distinguish from “similar� or “identical�) being
> defined as being not superior nor inferior negates hierarchy, thus
> authority thus matches Freedom.

The problem with equality is that it needs to be enforced, which
requires someone in a position of authority to enforce it, who by
definition is now unequal to everyone else.

If we are arguing from a communist perspective, "from each according to
his ability" is incompatible with freedom. If I do not wish to work
according to my ability, then I am not free to do so. (I might be wrong
with my understanding of anarcho-communism here - if so, please correct me.)

> Every value of Good, at the end, matches
> Freedom.

But some don't, like many religious ones. They consider obedience to
authority to be a virtue.

> So at the end everyone thinking rationally is going in its own interest
> and will, so trying to reach more freedom… then where people begin to
> disagree is “*What* is freedom? *How* to be more free? *Why* aren’t
> we?�. That’s what mostly separate anarchists, authoritarian communists,
> libertarians, religious reactionary, etc. Yet at the end they all seems
> to be in favor of free software (yet we find more GNU hippies than
> neonazis or neoliberals :p).

Agreed.

>> Yes, I agree that copyleft is prevention of abuse. (I also think that it
>> is a restriction, for the reasons described above, but I agree that it
>> is not a good idea to frame it as such, at least not initially.)
> 
> It’s a restriction to power, thus a right to freedom.

Okay, *that* makes sense.

>> Gaza is such a horrible situation. I wish that Israel and Palestine
>> would just agree to make peace (although, to be fair, they are trying).
> 
> …it’s not like if it were a completely asymmetrical conflict :-°
> Actually it’d better help people that Israelis and Palestinians agree
> rather than Israel and Palestine would… it depend of your ability to
> trust an impersonal entity made of hierarchy, papers, power, property
> and money (after all, everything of that is the same).

Very often, states do not reflect the will of their people. However, the
states are more powerful than the people. For this reason, as long as
the Israeli state and the Palestinian state agree to make peace, the
number of people dying would greatly decrease. The people would still
need to make peace themselves before it would completely stop, but that
isn't the most important part of the way to peace.