Re: Richard Stallman as Seen via the BBS Scene

On 2023-02-16, John Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
> According to Blue-Maned_Hawk  <[email protected]>:
>>> is only used by communists like Richard Stallman who contribute little 
>>> more than noise and friction to the open source community."
>>
>>???When you use the term "communist" against someone derogatorily, do you 
>>use it with the literal definition term in mind, or do you use it as a 
>>generic insult, regardless of its literal definition?
>
> Stallman is the guy behind the Gnu Public License, which is intended
> to force software to be freely sharable rather than sold ...

Not quite. You can sell it. From the GPL 2, second paragraph ...

  "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price.  Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things."

> .... so in that
> sense I suppose you might argue that he's opposed to private property.
> But as far as I know, that's just about software. As anyone familiar
> with the history of computing knows, nobody even attempted to
> copyright software until the mid 1960s, and the computer business did
> just fine in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
> So in this case I think it's "communist" in the sense of "poopyhead".