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Re: OT: Free Software and politics (Was: Re: *UNAPPROVED* dpkg nmu)



On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 06:46:38PM +0100, Mathieu Roy scribbled:
> Marek Habersack <grendel@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> >> Blame the Excited States of America.
> > Will you cut that bullshit? All of you? What the hell does politics do on a
> > _developer's_ mailing list? First RMS stating that FSF/GNU was about
> > politics and now, as if it wasn't bad enough, people jumping to each other's
> > throats because of political (or rather pseudo-political) reasons. Grow up,
> > please. Don't forget that all of us here are not governments, countries,
> > nations etc. - we are developers supposed to work the fuck together. So if
> > you can't resist discussing (or shouting about, or mumbling, rambling,
> > whatever) politics, ethnics, ideology and whatnot else - go and do it over
> > the phone, on irc or in a pub. But do not let that affect this project and
> > (yeah, big words, I know) the open source (_including_ FSF/GNU despite the
> > RMS opinions).
> 
> 
> Well, I agree that this list is not a good place to discuss
> governmental internation policy, as it does not produce any goods. 
Definitely
 
> But please, do not pretend Free Software has nothing to do with
> politics. You can hide the truth behind the wording Open Source, but
> computers are now a central part of our societies, and how computing
> knowledge is shared (or not shared) have many many consequences on our 
> societies. And politics are about nothing but how societies are to be 
> ruled.   
I beg to differ. Maybe FSF or OSI or SPI or the Debian Project have
something to do with politics (I hope the latter doesn't, though), but
_software_ and creating software doesn't have ANYTHING to do with it. My
strictly personal opinion is that politics is mostly and usually about lies
and falsehood, I've never seen that in any C, Perl, PHP, C++ or Perl or any
other code. And I hope people writing the programs, the communities of
_programmers_ will stay that way - out of politics. And especially, that the
politicians will stay away from here.

thanks,

marek

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