On May 9, 1:42 am, Paul Rubin <no.em...@nospam.invalid> wrote: > Patrick Maupin <pmau...@gmail.com> writes: > > I certainly agree that RMS's language is couched in religious rhetoric. > > I would say political movement rhetoric. He's not religious. He uses > the word "spiritual" sometimes but has made it clear he doesn't mean > that in a religious sense.
Oh, I agree he's not religious. OTOH, I don't think bin Laden, or most of the Ayatollahs, or priests who molest little boys, or Mormon polygamists, or Branch Davidians are religious either. But what these people have in common (and also have in common with some _real_ religious people) is a fervent type of language and style of speaking and writing, designed to attract religious followers, and the ability and desire to frame disputes in black-and-white, moralistic terms. (And here in the states, at least, it's getting increasingly hard to separate religion from politics in any case.) This is not necessarily a bad thing -- it's what the religious leaders exhort their followers to do that makes them good or bad. As I have discussed in other posts, I think the GPL is a good license for some software and some programmers. In a perfect world with no proprietary software, it might even be the only license that was necessary, except then it wouldn't even be necessary. But in the messy real world we live in, I don't personally believe that it is the best solution for a large class of software licensing problems. Personally, I think the LGPL is a much better license for those who are worried about people giving back, but the FSF has now, for all practical purposes, deprecated it -- not directly, of course, but implicitly, by changing the name from "Library" to "Lesser" and damning it with faint praise by actually encouraging people who write library components to try to help the tail wag the dog by using the GPL instead of the LGPL. Regards, Pat -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
