On 8/3/05, Michael K. Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You've got a fair point, in that RMS doesn't see his arguments as > preaching economic superiority; and certainly many commentators have > contrasted RMS's "ethical" perspective with, say, ESR's "economic" > perspective. I don't entirely agree with the way this contrast is > portrayed, and in particular I think the "ethical"/"economic" > dichotomy is a false one. "Ethical"/"financial", perhaps; but that's > a calculus of personal motivations that isn't really all that fruitful > to discuss. Implicit in my perspective is the view that ethics is the > study of human motivation, and economics is the application of the > fruits of this study to the public sphere; finance is just > probabilities and algebra.
I agree with what you've said here (though I use different definitions for the terms "ethics" and "economics" than you). And I pretty much agree with the following paragraphs, until we get to a tangent: > RMS rejects the phrase "intellectual property", mostly for reasons of > legislative history and philosophy which I consider insightful and > with which I agree, but also partly out of a belief that whatever > exclusive privileges a creator of knowledge should have over his work > should not be codified as property rights. (He also seems to think > that they aren't currently codified as property rights, which > perplexes me; but that's another line of argument.) I think his point is that because of the nature of ideas -- that they don't exist in and of themselves, but are abstracts used to describe communication between people -- that it's impossible to codify property rights protecting them. There will always be cracks in the structure. On the one hand, you have "property". Property exists as matter, and we have reason to believe (the laws of thermodynamics) that mass is conserved. Ideas do not exist as matter, and while they can be associated with matter there aren't any conservation laws associated with them. There's physically no way to enforce boundaries around them, because in that sense they do not exist. Copyright laws are written to protect the tangible expression of creative ideas, but if you look closely enough there will always be problems determining what is and is not being protected. These boundaries are fluid, because it's simply not possible to survey them or map them -- they have no locations. Now, granted, these laws are sometimes enforced (when there's enough money involved). But, for example, RMS has made it a practice to deliberately avoid dealing with anything which has even a hint of this enforcement associated with it (for example, consider the emacs / xemacs fork). Some people consider him rather poorly for making these kinds of choices, but his loss of credibility in that sense doesn't seem to have much to do with the stuff you're talking about. Well, except that you're indicating that people seriously think of him as a saint. But... there's also plenty of people who think of him as something other than a saint. Personally, I just don't think that issues bearing on sainthood are all that interesting. -- Raul
