On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 19:37, Branden Robinson wrote: > > Philosophically, that speech isn't functional is controversial claim. > > It's not functional for Derrida and others of his ilk. > > For most other people, it certainly is. You'd better hope the speech > of, say, air traffic controllers is functional!
I do get what your saying, Orwell used his Newspeak to divide this kind of thing into Speech and Technical Speech, one provides material for debate and personal opinion the other provides a functional description of events or actions. It seems to fit right to me. FWIW I think RMS is right to insist that others cannot modify his political comments, but I think you are right to say that unmodifiable comments and texts (UTs) have no place being mandatorily included in the functional world of Free Software. Personally, I found a lot of the GNU philosophical texts included in emacs to be very interesting and educational, they led me to the GNU and Debian projects, it would be a shame to remove them simply to prove a point when they are fundamental in helping new users to understand the basis of the Free Software movement. Would a possible answer be that distribution of the UTs is not mandatory, so purely functional versions of the package can be distributed, but if the UTs are distributed then they remain unmodifiable? It looks like a sensible compromise to me. -- John Holroyd <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Demos Technosis Ltd
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