Re: [tlug] Proprietary derivatives of FLOSS and other absurdities

[Benjamin Tayehanpour <benjamin@example.com>]

On 15 August 2013 05:18, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Adam Smith's device of the invisible hand, once again independently
> discovered by a socialist centuries after he did.  Gotta love it!

Socialist? I wouldn't call myself that, really. Sure, compared to the
US, everything is socialist, but that's just a matter of extreme
perspective.

> Despite your frothy words about "averaging extreme political
> positions", it seems to me that in practice these things are going to
> be determined by the interests of large corporations, not by RMS and
> Bono's widow.  Our best hopes for reducing the monopolies produced by
> patent and copyright (although the latter doesn't matter much to
> commercial software in practice) lie in IBM and Google lobbying[1]
> vying with Disney and Microsoft

You may very well be right. Time will tell.

> RMS's extremism, which is incoherent[2] and and unfair[3].

Ah, an interesting inversion of the old "Hitler ate sugar" logical
fallacy. "RMS has dubious opinions in certain areas, therefore all his
opinions and actions are dubious." Sorry, it doesn't work that way; as
I said, I want him to be a software freedom-fighter, not a Prime
Minister, so as far as my approval of him as such is concerned,
opinions in any other areas are largely irrelevant.

Personally, I use free software because It Works. Either because
someone had a use-case sufficiently close to my own and has fixed the
problem for me, or because I have the leave and means to make it work
myself. The ideological part of it is important, but the immediate
personal benefit is that free software enables me to do what I do. In
so many words: I use free software because non-free software sucks.