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
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