Re: Inconsistencies in our approach
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
> On Sun, Aug 03, 2003 at 05:12:55PM -0400, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
>> John Goerzen wrote:
>> > 1. Would removing the manual for Emacs, libc, or other important GNU
>> > software benefit our users?
>> Yep. I'm very unhappy with having non-free software (and software means
>> 0s and 1s -- so nearly everything Debian distributes except the
>> physical CDs) in Debian; as a user, I chose Debian at least partly for
>> the Social Contract, which this violates.
>
> That's an overly-expansive view of software. You would include anything
> that is digital in that description -- audio CDs, DVD movies, off-air TV
> signals, books on disk, etc. I find it very hard to quantify Beethoven's
> Ninth Symphony as software, even if it was recorded digitally, given that
> the invention of software postdated its composition by a LONG time -- and
> that the invention of software postdated early recordings by a long time as
> well.
Nobody is claiming Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or the King James
Bible, to be software. Quite a few of us are claiming that this MP3
over here, beethovens_ninth.mp3, is software. So is this file bible.txt.
> I see it as fallacious reasoning to conclude that anything that is binary is
> software. If I use some sort of binary "Morse code" to send a message
> manually, why is it more of software than if I use the real Morse code?
Oh, come on. He was clearly referring to the argument that computers
are hardware which contain software. If you have the message, in
ASCII, binary morse, morse, or Urdu, on a computer, it's either
software or blocking the vents.
> I agree that this is good. But how does it promote Free Software to strip
> manuals from Free programs?
Nobody's suggested stripping manuals: merely replacing them with Free
versions, such as replacing the Emacs 21 manual with an edited Emacs 19 manual.
-Brian
--
Brian T. Sniffen bts@alum.mit.edu
http://www.evenmere.org/~bts/
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