On Tue, Oct 02, 2001 at 12:54:04AM +0100, Aidan Kehoe mentioned:
> Richard Stallman's ideal world; writing a program, not releasing its
> source, and charging for the binaries is illegal. You're written the
> program, it *is* your intellectual property, and you can't do what you
> want with it?
He reckons that doing that is morally wrong. And the reason that laws
exist is to stop people doing what they want, when the are morally wrong.
It's like arguing that if you want to kidnap someone, someone that wants
to stop you is restricting your rights, in the name of standing up for
someone else rights.
The debate is whether or not you think that it's right to restrict
access to knowledge for profit. In the absence of laws to stop this nasty
behaviour, Stallman resorts to the imperfection that is the GPL.
Kate
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