Verily I say unto thee, that Chris Ahlstrom spake thusly:
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Erik Funkenbusch belched out this bit o'
> wisdom:
>> What he's saying is that people shouldn't have to pay for software,
>> which is a totoally different argument from "feeding the
>> starving".
>
> He's talking about much more than software.
Fuddie strikes me as the kind of string vest-wearing goon who shouts
"liar!", without so much as cracking a smile, at a comedian who's just
told a joke.
The point of Stallman's metaphor, that Fuddie spectacularly misses with
his obtuse pedantries, is that we have a moral obligation to share,
rather than be greedy, selfish, cold-hearted, inhuman, megalomaniacal
hoarders - such as Intellectual Monopolists, for example.
Personally, I'd go even further than Stallman, and assert that knowledge
(which is all that so-called "software" really is) cannot possibly /be/
legitimately "owned" to begin with, therefore the premise of sharing it
is rather moot. It already belongs to all of us equally, by inheritance,
since knowledge is cumulative, and thus not exclusively attributable to
any one party, even if the provenance of supposedly "true" discovery
could ever be irrefutably established. But of course it can't, since
that would require the completion of an impossible task - consultation
with all mankind, both living and dead, to ascertain if that idea or
discovery had ever occurred before, yet remained "unclaimed" for
whatever reason. (And why should it be claimed anyway? Must every speck
of dust, and fleeting thought, in the universe "belong" to someone,
clearly marked with a monogrammed American flag staked into it?)
In that sense, the claims of "ownership" or "invention" of any so-called
Intellectual Property is simply a lie. The best one could ever claim is
"first to register", not "first to discover" or "first to deduce". And
that's "IP" in a nutshell ... it's nothing more than a "land /grab/",
with emphasis on the word "grab" - as in "to take possession of". The
only "right" here is the somewhat dubious "rights" of a predator to
attack its prey.
What "rights" should the processes of observation and deduction
intrinsically bestow, regardless of how much it costs to register and
publish the results? Well frankly, none, because the truth is that none
of this has anything whatsoever to do with "rights", but rather the very
antithesis of rights - power. "IP" should actually stand for Inhibitive
Power - the power to inhibit others from learning and utilising
knowledge. It's the power to subjugate others, for the purpose of
commoditising that which should never have been allowed to become a
commodity, but which fell prey to the predatory advances of Corporatism.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which
| the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf
| denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty.
| Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of
| the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today
| among human creatures." ~ Abraham Lincoln
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.26.8-57.fc8
22:30:16 up 19 days, 2:28, 4 users, load average: 0.08, 0.02, 0.01
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