On Friday 04 April 2008, Michael C wrote: ... > There's the rub. There are practical/political impediments to the > exercise of genuine software freedom (the whole panoply of patents, > NDAs etc.) which no software license, no matter how "progressive", > could ever hope to effectively combat. So it follows that if there's > to be real software freedom, it would have to be predicated on new > and transformed social, political and economic arrangements.
I'm not sure we don't have a large amount of freedom now. Actually, I feel that more important than whether or not a a program is open source is the ability to pick which product we want for a specific need. In that way, I'd consider the current OS monopoly more of a hindrance on freedom than that same company selling closed source products. > But Stallman's is a utopian position, because in place of concrete > political and economic analyses of capitalism, all he really has to > offer politically is vague talk about extending Free Software's moral > example into other social spheres. I would agree, but on the other hand, I'll ask how we're ever to try to reach or build a Utopia if we don't have a few that dare to live and believe as if we are already there. Hal -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
