Semantics

[Jim Cheetham]

On Thu, 2005-04-14 at 10:21 -0700, John or Margaret Montgomery wrote:
> I find no humor in the phrase 'Self-appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life'.

A benevolent dictator provides the most stable form of government, in
theory. Obviously the biggest problems are in maintaining both their
benevolence and their dictatorship.

However, I submit that you have missed the point a little bit. The GPL
and other Open Source licenses provide a method of opting-out from your
position as a "subject" of the SABDFL. The whole point is that you can
take all the source code, the whole toolchain and *everything*, totally
legally, and build your own little nation of software, where you can
choose the method of governance yourself.

This is a fundamental freedom of GPL and Open Source.

-jim