On Sun, Jan 19, 2003, Official Flamer/Cabal NON-Leader wrote about "Re: A response to Nadav's message": > The "problem" (with both RMS's and Nadav's) statements of the conundrum > is that they (the statements) are rife with ethical judgments. These >... > > respond, "You failed to deliver on your claim. You are wrong." But > > if he has learned the value of freedom from the free software > > movement, he will say, "How dare they do this to us!" > > This, in my opinion, is Richard's primary fallacy. I must add, of > course, that the fallacy is NOT Richard's fault. RMS is idealistic and > thinks (and hopes) that homo is indeed sapiens. Of course, he is right > to a degree, but only to a degree. I dispute that the vast majority of > people care or think about their freedom. Oh - they DO think about their > freedom and d care about it, but not really. Not because they do NOT
I think you misunderstood Richard Stallman's point. He's not saying that everybody cares about their freedom, but rather (if I understood him correctly) that everybody *should* care about their freedom. In fact, he's lamenting the fact that too few people think about their own freedom. He is trying to explain to them why their freedom is important, even though their government or corporate America is trying to tell them that they are already free. Moreover, you are missing Stallman's second point, with which I fully agree: Support for free software (or "Linux" or "Open Source", or whatever you prefer to call it) cannot be *only* about the software's quality - we haven't got to that stage yet. You said most people don't care about freedom, but similarly most people also don't care about the "quality" of the software. If people cared about the quality of their software, do you think Windows would have been such a success? :) But even more sadly, in some cases free software is perceived to have lower quality than proprietary software. Free word processors cannot read MS-Word files properly (because Microsoft hides the format's specifications, and to add insult to injury it frequently changes the format). Free operating systems cannot legally play DVDs or MP3s in the US (because of DMCA and patent issues respectively). Web-site owners consider free browsers (such as Mozilla, Konqueror, Lynx, etc.) as inferior and tell us that their sites don't work for us because of our browsers' "bugs". Many times, when I talk to someone about using GNU/Linux, they immediately respond saying that they already have Microsoft Windows, Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc., and all for free (or as I call it, "free as in can-be-stolen"). No argument about GNU/Linux's practical quality can convince them - they are already satisfied (more-or-less) with Windows' quality, and I would be lying if I told them that they can do on GNU/Linux everything they were used to doing in Windows, in the way they are used to doing it. In fact, before a relatively-lengthy learning process, they will preceive GNU/Linux as having a lower quality than Windows :( Maybe this will change some day, but that day still hasn't come. > care about freedom, but because freedom, to be had, MUST be exercised. > And this activity, the exercise of freedom, is something the common homo > sapiens is, mostly, not interested in - it is inconvenient. You know, in the 1960s blacks in some southern US states (Alabama, Arkansas, etc.) had to live under various segregation laws. They had to sit at the backs of busses, sit in special places at diners (or forbidden entrance altogether), and had go to special schools. They certainly felt this lack of freedom. Do you really believe all that was important to them was to exercise this freedom? Did they really prefer sitting in the front of the bus? Would a black feel comfortable in an all-white school? Did they really want to eat at diners owned by racists and Klan members? Probably not. But they wanted to have that choice, the same choice that the whites had. They wanted it really bad. "Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring." Does that ring a bell? (pun intended :)). I think you underestimate humans' need for freedom. Not everybody cares about it, some succumb to false freedoms (like the freedom to become addicted to consumerism, or the freedom to elect Saddam at a 99.99% majority), but freedom is definitely an important theme in human history. And I don't have to say that freedom is important in an Israeli list - after all we have a major holiday (Pesach) which is all about our becoming free from being enslaved at ancient times. We have another major holiday (Hanukka) celebrating our freedom to practice our religion and the heroic deeds of the men and women who stood up to those (Greeks, in this case) who tried to take it away from us. The most holy of our holidays, Yom Kippur, celebrates (if one can say that) our freedom to chose our own actions - a freedom that we are told to excercise thoughtfully and carefully, because we are accountable before God for our actions, especially towards other people. [note that I deliberately kept current Israeli politics out of this post. I suggest we keep it this way, lest this mailing list becomes an ugly battle-ground before the upcoming elections] -- Nadav Har'El | Sunday, Jan 19 2003, 17 Shevat 5763 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Windows-2000/Professional isn't. http://nadav.harel.org.il | ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
