🚀 go-pugleaf

| James Craig Burley:

| So while you have the freedom to despise them (or me), you have far less
| moral standing on which to do so than they have to not listen and to
| continue to write software protected by the GPL, in my opinion.  And
| given that you are trying to turn this into an argument of morals and
| hypocrisy, it strikes me as contradictary of you to despise someone for no
| good reason, since I think despising people for no reason is quite immoral.
| (Of course, you can argue that it isn't contradictory because you don't
| pretend to aspire to any level of morality, and simply point out that you
| feel the FSF does seem to so aspire and fails -- but I stand by my claim
| that we are not pursuing our morality through grounds of hypocrisy, and if
| you don't personally aspire to morality, perhaps that explains why you
| seem to have trouble discerning the morality of others.)
---
Without prolonging this (I also have other things I should be doing), I
would like to make it clear that James's responses have met every
standard I might want to apply to them (except, perhaps, brevity :-) ).
I would also like to retract the use of the word "despise," which wasn't
really the word I would have used if I had thought about it longer.

I will continue to have reservations about the Copyleft as at least
morally ambiguous, given the name "Free Software Foundation" (though
not nearly as ambiguous as I feel about the "Open" in the name of
another well-known Cambridge Foundation).  I don't know whether you
really appreciate the level of complexity you create for people who work
in major corporations with major corporation legal departments when you
do anything even vaguely unusual in your redistribution policy.  Even
things that are apparently benign and might appear to the layperson to
be clear, are hard to sell if they have not been tested.  Motorola has
enough assets that it is perpetually worried about putting them at any
increased risk; everything I have heard says that other major companies
feel the same way.

Finally, let me take exception to "despising people for no good reason"
in the paragraph above -- if people are too busy to think about what
they are going to say or to read carefully what they are going to say it
about, then they are acting in a way which deserves to be disparaged (in
other words, I don't believe my reaction was without reason).  People
who respond with flames to inoffensive comments deserve to be forcefully
reminded that silence is also an alternative.

scott
--
scott preece
motorola/mcd urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
uucp:	uunet!uiucuxc!udc!preece,	 arpa:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com