🚀 go-pugleaf

Joseph N. Hall, like many others, completely fails to understand the issues:
) The use of "free" software as a kind of intellectual and economic
) cudgel ...  reminds me of the governments of countries whose faithful
) party members are rewarded with amenities denied to the masses.

To support your analogy, you'd better show us who are the masses who are
being denied the software rewards.

) If the FSF believed in "free software" they would express it by contributing
) software to the public domain, or by contributing software with a simple
) copyright (no commercial use, no unauthorized modification, or something like
) that), 

No commercial use?  That would deny the use of the software to exactly
those who could get the most economic benefit from it!  Forbidding
modifications would reduce the intellectual benefit derived by other
types of users.  And as for public domain, consider X-Windows again.
DEC took X and pissed all over it to make it smell DEC-like, calling the
result "DECwindows".  Now if I want to undo some of their compiled-in
defaults (like the need to click in a window to select it), how can I do
it?  I might have to buy their code from them at their price, or redo
all their work in porting.  They are not sharing their work freely.
They added some value to X by making it work on DEC machines, but the
subtracted some value by freezing many configuration options and
shipping the result in object form only.
________________________________________________________
Matt Crawford	     		matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu