Stallman's original intentions (was: Re: GMail is using Hspell!)

On Sun, 2006-03-12 at 11:59 +0200, Nadav Har'El wrote:

> At the risk of sounding a communist, I think that Stallman's original
> intention, and the intention of many free software authors, might have
> been the old adage
> 	"Each should give according to his abilities, and receive according
>          to his needs".
> By this, I mean the following philosophy is behind some people's use of the
> GPL: people who need software, should get it as much as they need without
> any limitations. But those who can provide software (namely, free software
> writers and software writers employed by corporations) are obliged to make
> the software they write available to the world.
> But as you say, this intention is not actually written in the GPL, whose
> rules are much more specific and much less "communist" :-)

I think that a better way to gauge Stallman's original intentions is to
recall the printer driver story.  Stallman could not use a printer
because he needed to have its driver modified to work as he needed, he
could not modify the driver because he had no access to its source code,
and the printer's manufacturer was not willing to modify the printer
driver for him.

If nominally Free Software is provided as a service, then in order to
preserve freedom in the printer driver sense, the service customers need
a way to customize the service according to their needs (for example, in
the GMail case, to have the spell checker use a custom dictionary).

On the other hand, putting no limits to customizability of public
services would be problematic for companies, which use such services to
interact with their customers.  They do not want the customers to be
able to enter orders with prices modified downwards, or with lengthened
payment terms, for example (assuming that Free Software is used for
order entry).
                                            --- Omer
-- 
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