On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 01:40:27PM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 02:53:01PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 08:55:41PM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > > > many of Erast's responses were at best antagonistic, > > > and at worst showed a complete disregard for what Debian is all about. > > Speaking of antagonistic... > Huh? "Kenneth's responses have ranged from being dismissive to hostile." That would be antagonistic in that: * it makes the problem overly personal -- I'd be making you, personally, out to be the problem rather than saying your arguments or claims are wrong and should be abandoned; * it's overly critical -- portions of your responses might have been dismissive or the OpenSolaris guys' work, and it might've been possible to interpret your responses in a hostile manner, but that doesn't mean such an interpretation is correct or the most important aspect of your mails; * it's also blatantly dishonest -- not all of your mails have been dismissive to hostile. The latter's the case for Erast too -- take [0] eg, which doesn't seem remotely antagonistic, let alone showing a complete disregard for what Debian is all about. [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/11/msg00165.html > > > This strikes me as a rather poor way to start a > > > relationship with someone, especially when you've just based most of > > > your userspace on that someone's source code. > > That's a very proprietary attitude about source code, don't you think? > Er, in what sense? "Proprietary" doesn't just mean "not open source" -- its more general meaning is a sense of ownership of something, which in turn means the right and ability to exercise some a degree of control over your property. One way in which people get proprietary about things is to charge rents and fees for their exploitation; the other way is to refuse them to be allowed to be exploited in various ways -- such as by using them for military or anti-government purposes, or by using them without helping make the author famous, or by using them without establishing a "relationship" with the author. Copyright law isn't the only way you can establish proprietary interests in software; patent law's another, as is establishing a monopoly on the tools you need to work on the software. Public opinion and moral suasion can work too, though; and while that's more democratic and less liable to certain abuses, it's still got many of the main drawbacks of proprietary software: it discourages innovation and reuse. Cheers, aj
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature