Re: Bertrand Meyer challenges some open-source assumptions.
On Tue, 30 May 2000, Joseph Carter wrote:
> On Tue, May 30, 2000 at 11:52:48AM +0200, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> > > Eric Raymond comes under fire for being a known gun owner and
> > > activist.
> >
> > As I already said here, I agree with Meyer on this issue, and you should
> > be aware that it is a very common argument in France against free
> > software ("Free software proponents are also gun lunatics because they
> > want freedom, every freedom, freedom to steal software and to kill
> > people. See Raymond for an example.")
>
> Does that make everyone who's ever fired a handgun or owns a handgun or
> practiced firing one at a range a "lunatic"?
No. The point is that the guy who wrote this a lunatic:
: There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to
: reveal who you really are. Life or death in one twitch --- ultimate
: decision, with the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices. It
: is a kind of acid test, an initiation, to know that there is lethal
: force in your hand and all the complexities and ambiguities of moral
: choice have fined down to a single action: fire or not?
And, to continue the point, above bullshit can be found on a site
advocating free software, <http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html>.
This is a problem.
[...]
> I personally see no reason to distance myself from Eric Raymond because he
> is a gun activist. What do handguns have to do with software? That's the
> point. If people can't make that distinction, the problem is theirs, not
> mine.
True. The only thing others can do is to ask Eric to please keep the two
rhetorics separated from each other.
The interview is very interesting, indeed. There is, however, no reason
to feel in any way offended. So why worry in this list?
Regards
-richy.
--
Richard Kreckel
<Richard.Kreckel@Uni-Mainz.DE>
<http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~kreckel/>
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