Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Martin Peach wrote:
Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
You see, it's normal to have systems sometimes. When there's an evil system somewhere, you shouldn't be worried about the fact that it's a system as much as the fact that it's evil, because, if you do, then the evil system has won, while all the potential good replacements lose.
Hmmm, I think all human systems become more evil with time: the more the system becomes established, the more humans work for _it_ and must adapt their behaviour to _its_ needs, even when it began as a user-friendly sytem whose purpose was to help the people who started it; so all sytems need to be thoroughly broken and rebuilt every once in a while before they become too despotic, wasteful, counterproductive. Of course systems in most need of reform are at the same time the most dangerous to meddle with...
So, linking this back to what we were talking about, I ask you, is the Free Software Foundation despotic and/or wasteful and/or counterproductive and/or in need of getting thoroughly broken and in need of being rebuilt?
No doubt it will get that way eventually. It seems to take a few decades for the rot to really set in. At the moment it seems harmless enough, but it _is_ encouraging the same belief system that the antipiracy league subscribe to: that licences to software mean anything at all in a real world where a file may be copied at almost zero cost. A physical object may be copied as well but the cost is usually prohibitive. That's why pragmatic people buy a real Cadillac instead of a copy: the cost is lower for the orginal, not because it's infringing someone's intellectual property to copy it.
Martin