Holy shit, rwzy, you took the words right out of my mouth, I agree 100% with everything you said.

Speaking about slavery, I remember hearing a talk by Stallman where he talked about permissive licenses. He said that copyleft licenses make your rights (the fundamental freedoms) inalienable. This is similar to the situation with slavery in modern times. Everyone is free to do what they want, as long as they don't violate anyone's fundamental rights, including their own. This means that they are not free to sell themselves into slavery, and definitely should not be. Similarly, it is wrong to make it possible for your program to be made proprietary, as this violates people's fundamental rights.

That linux.topology.org article really pisses me off, too. Especiall the bits where he says that Stallman didn't manage to write a whole OS before Linus did. What the... Linux - GNU = Not an OS, not even almost an OS. Apparently the GNU project "only" contributed:

Quote:just a compiler and a collection of reverse-engineered Unix utilities with non-standard extensions

THAT'S THE ENTIRE OS (apart from the kernel)! Because I was curious, I looked at the linked article http://linux.topology.org/lingl.html. Right. In his opinion, the kernel is exactly the same thing as an operating system. And he takes Stallman's logic "OS cannot run without kernel, therefore kernel is part of an OS" and "OS cannot be used without programs therefore some programs are part of the OS" and twists it into a shitty analogy.

Quote:A car cannot run without the road, but a road isn't part of the car.

That is such a flawed analogy it's just incredible. Yes cars can run without roads! Besides, in this case it'd be more like saying "can the car run without an engine? No because it's part of the car".

Jesus Christ, I wish I'd never seen these articles.

On a related note: none of my friends in real life care about ethical issues relating to software, they mostly just say "It's open source, so we can hack on it, so it's good". A view that lines up with mine, for the most part, but doesn't allow for discussions like this.