On Mon, Jun 02, 2003 at 02:37:52PM -0600, Barak Pearlmutter wrote: > > > My understanding is that the FSF requires copyright assignments in > > > order to give themselves the ability to most effectively defend the > > > community against poachers and legal attacks. > > > > It seems perfectly plausible to me that the reason you cite was never > > the sole motivation for this policy, though it may have been the most > > frequently and publicly articulated one. > > Sure, and it's also perfectly plausible that RMS is a secret employee > of Microsoft and Chinese double agent plotting the use of free > software to assassinate the Dalai Lama. But this is debian-legal not > debian-wacko-conspiracy-theory. This is a straw-man exaggeration of my position. > Given the FSF's highly successful GPL enforcement activities and > prescient concern with optimizing the community's legal position, and > RMS's track record of both contributing to and founding the community, > it seems like Occam's razor dictates taking the FSF's explanation for > requesting assignments at face value. I do not question RMS's large and foundational contributions to the community. But we should not express our approval by suspending our ability to think critically and carefully, even about proposals from our luminaries. The GNU FDL is either problematic or it is not, and whether it is has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the FSF is promulgating it. At any rate, your citation of Occam's Razor is inapposite. Induction tells me that people engaged in persuasive speech often do not lay out comprehensive and exhaustive justifications for their positions. Instead, they choose the justifications that they feel are are most important and/or likely to persuade their audience. I believe RMS is a person, therefore I (parsimoniously!) deduce that he is likely to engage in persuasive speech in a manner similar to most other people. So far I have seen no evidence to contradict this (tentative) conclusion. Moreover, there are several points that RMS has frankly said he's unwilling to discuss with us, claiming that he perceives us as hostile interlocutors[1]. Therefore, by his own statements we know that his position is more developed than the "face value" remarks he has been offering this forum. Therefore I request that you lay off the personal attacks and charges of fallacious reasoning. You'll note that I have impugned neither RMS's personality nor his ability to reason. I am merely committing the heresy of being unpersuaded by the arguments he has offered to date that the Debian's endorsement of the GNU FDL is worth what it would cost the Project. [1] Message-Id: <[🔎] E19N359-0006ZH-2c@fencepost.gnu.org> -- G. Branden Robinson | Communism is just one step on the Debian GNU/Linux | long road from capitalism to branden@debian.org | capitalism. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Russian saying
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