On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Vikram Vincent vincentvikram@gmail.comwrote:
Greetings, From http://www.gnu.org.in/board-statement-on-recent-issues Let us take things objectively to analyse, debate and come to some sort of an understanding.
Democracy, transparency and openness are considered the pillars of the free software movement.
Quoting from : RMS Essays
Chapter 15 Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism - page 93
Every decision a person makes stems from the person's values and goals. People can have many different goals and values; fame, profit, love, survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism. My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is—as a copyleft.
Dont know this information is relevant but i felt this might be a useful information
Quoting from RMS's Essays : Chapter 20: Free Software : Freedom and Cooperation paragraph 3: ( please understand the context in which this assay was written and then this paragraph will be clear) In this respect, free software is a new mechanism for democracy to operate. Pro- fessor Lessig, now at Stanford, noted that code functions as a kind of law. Whoever gets to write the code that just about everybody uses for all intents and purposes is writing the laws that run people's lives. With free software, these laws get written in a democratic way. Not the classical form of democracy–we don't have a big election and say, "Everybody vote which way should this feature be done." [audience laughs] Instead we say, basically, those of you who want to work on implementing the feature this way, do it. And if you want to work on implementing the feature that way, do it. And, it gets done one way or the other, you know? And so, if a lot of people want it this way, it'll get done this way. In this way, everybody contributes to the social decision by simply taking steps in the direction that he wants to go. And you're free to take as many steps, personally, as you want to take. A business is free to commission as many steps as they find useful to take. And after you add all these things up, that says which direction the software goes.
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