[POLITICS] Re: When is the Last Time You Booted to Windows?

[Joel Rees]

>>> Hey, you use linux, how do you feel about being a 'communist' and a
>>> 'cancer'?
>>
>> I'm neither. I'm a user. As it happens I have no leftists leanings
>> at all. Or even rightist. I'm no kind of socialist, and dislike
>> socialism altogether, whether left or right.
>>
>> But what has politics to do with Fedora, except incidentally?
>
> It does dump hundreds of copies of the COPYING file with
> it's redefinition of 'freedom' and implicit political
> statement on your hard drive.  They are pretty much inseparable.

There is no such thing as absolute freedom. That there are many 
possible tradeoffs is a fact independent of politics. Specific sets of 
tradeoffs are also somewhat independent of politics although political 
parties are very much dependent on the sets of tradeoffs they espouse.

You're reversing a logical dependency, and, no, the GPL does not 
attempt to alter the definition of freedom, even though it advocates 
sets of tradeoffs that are not in vogue in the current eco-political 
climate. It so happens that the tradeoffs the GPL advocates have a very 
large overlap with the tradeoffs advocated by the people who wrote the 
Constitution of the US, much more so than with any other set that has 
been advocated by any other group of political, economic, or social 
philosophers that I am aware of. The GPL is in sharp contradiction to 
the theories of communism and socialism. That the current society in 
the US has so far diverged from the spirit of their own Constitution is 
regrettable, and the contrasts between the GPL and current business 
practice in the US are much less a call to preserve the status quo than 
a call for Americans to start defending their own freedoms by making 
tradeoffs which make other people free instead of trying to gain all 
the money (and the illusory freedom therein) for themselves.

Freedom is one of those things that you don't get more of by keeping 
others from getting their share.

Sorry I don't have time to write shorter sentences today.