FS/OSS license: not quite enough of a requirement

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 5/11/07, Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat.com> wrote:

>
> This is precisely what I've been trying to talk about since I started
> this thread.  I don't understand why this has been so hard to
> communicate :-(
>

You are asking questions and using sentences that are very abstract.
You have particular pictures in your head towards what those
'abstract' concepts are but other people either do not or have
different pictures.

The words 'freedom', 'rights', 'people', etc are all very overloaded
terms in English and especially American English. Each of the terms
have multiple meanings because they are all considered 'good' things
and people want to associate what they believe in with 'good' things.
This means that the terms lose all conceptual meaning because ESR
Freedom is not the same as RMS Freedom which is not the same as Theo
d'Raadts Freedom which is not ... the same with the word 'Rights'.

All of this means that we end up getting angry with each other or just
devalueing the words even further that no one really cares anymore.

First off remember that humans are basically savage little monkeys
with a large nervous center on the top of their brains. That brain is
configured to be highly visual and wants to put 'pictures' towards
words. The brain is also very social and tries to group things into
'friend'/'enemy' and is easily tricked into thinking something is part
of its clan or not by word and image association.

The first image that comes to my mind of 'Freedom' is Captain
America... which I am betting isnt the image that comes to a
non-USA'er, or someone who doesnt read/like comics. So you sentence
'Is Fedora committed to respecting its users' freedoms?' brings to
mind Captain America going off to stop some evil Nazi ...

Hope this helps.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"