[FSUG-Bangalore] [Fsf-friends] Statement of FSF India board on recent incidents

renuka prasad renukaprasadb at gmail.com
Sat Nov 29 14:42:18 IST 2008


> On Sat, Nov 29, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Vikram Vincent <vincentvikram at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Fsf-friends mailing list
>> Fsf-friends at mm.gnu.org.in
>> http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends
>>
>>
>
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