Free software users cannot be all developers anymore, was: GPL version 4

[M. Fioretti]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 08:34:33 AM +0200, Mario Vukelic wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 17:41 -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
> > In Richard Stallman's world view,
> > it isn't the user's freedoms that matter, it's the *software*s
> > freedom.
> 
> Wrong.
> 
> "Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy,
> distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it
> refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software"
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
 
Sure, but that proposal, like the GNU Manifesto and other papers, is
based on the implicit assumption that all software users are also
developers/ contributors of that same software, that they WANT to be
so, that it _must_ be so. This *may* have been true in the 80's (1),
but continuing to believe so and to propose today such a world in
order to spread FOSS may be a great mistake. I've written more on this
at

http://www.ukuug.org/newsletter/16.3/#help__marco

feedback (even privately) is always welcome, of course.

	 Ciao,
				Marco

(1) then again, maybe not, see the excerpt from the S. Wozniak
interview in Thing #5 of http://digifreedom.net/node/56

-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your own life heavily depend on
how software is used *around* you:               http://digifreedom.net/