|| On Mon, 14 Apr 2003 14:15:25 -0400 || Peter S Galbraith <psg@debian.org> wrote: psg> So you want us to pretend that the work these Artists do is free psg> because writing is so much more artistic than coding? No. >> And unlike most works of art -- for which aesthetics or >> philosophical advancement is the use -- software derives its >> usefulness almost exclusively from its function. psg> I guess that makes us code writers much lower in the hierarchy. No. It is not a question of hierarchy. Different does not necessarily mean better or worse, it can be neutral. And in this case I think it is. Writing good programs is a very unique skill that not everybody has. It is very important if mankind truly wants to enter the "information society." So is writing good documents. The one statement that I made about the relationship of the two is that the two aren't identical. Being a friend of differentiated thinking, I think that warrants giving it some thought as to where and how they differ and what that means to us. Unfortunately it seems that because of the history -- of which I was not a part, by the way -- the issue is still very emotional to most people on this list. Also it is possible that my skills of explaining are not up to the task. In fact I never meant to start this discussion this way and at the current time. On the LinuxTag 2003 speaker list there was a Debian person stating that Debian was officially considering the GFDL to be non-free. As I had been told this was still more or less in discussion and not yet the official position, I inquired about it. From the middle of that discussion someone took one of my statements and cross-posted it here without first contacting me about it. So although I would have preferred to not touch upon this topic right now in this way, I felt I should at least try to explain some of the background for this. Unfortunately, I am too busy to do this discussion justice, as important as it may be. Because right now I need to set up a Free Software project with the European Commission, for which April 24th is the deadline. I am sorry, but getting that finished/to succeed seems to be the most useful endeavour for me to spend my time on, so please understand that I won't really take the time to participate in this discussion any longer. Regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve <greve@gnu.org> Free Software Foundation Europe (http://fsfeurope.org) Brave GNU World (http://brave-gnu-world.org)
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