"Sergey V. Spiridonov" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> On Tue, 2003-08-12 at 16:00, Sergey V. Spiridonov wrote:
>>> Let's imagine infinite scale with absolute freedom(liberty) on one >>> side and absolute non-freedom on another. The border between free >>> and non-free will be at 0. > To find the exact value, one should find all possible aspects and sum > up all pros and cons for the majority of people on the long terms. It > is not something you can do in one day, sorry. > > For Debian purpoces it is enough to determine the sign. Ah! Now I think I understand your (rather confusing at first) description of freedom. You recommend that we assign values to all the pros & cons of a particular license, and call free any license in which the positives outweigh the negatives. Am I understanding you correctly? The problem with this* is that what you're really describing is the utility of the license, which is something completely different from the freedom of it. Take the simple case of a license that pays me to accept it -- it may be non-free in many ways, but a lot of people would probably think the positives (free money) outweigh the negatives (no right to modify or redistribute, for example). * If you ignore the (significant!) difficulty of assigning values to characteristics, since people will no doubt disagree. -- Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333 9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03
