Re: Comparing Lisp conditions to Java Exceptions

Seems to me you're blaming the wrong thing. It seems to me the
entity to put at fault here is the profit motive itself.

I applaud Stallman for the FSF. It makes software highly accessible to
users.

What pisses me off is that such provision to society isn't considered
something which justifies survival in our society.

If I want to just write free software that I know many people can make use
of then that's not enough to justify my being able to eat. I have to
market it, attribute it a price and attempt to legally force people to pay
for it. If people choose to use the software without paying for it and
without my being able to track them down then I don't get paid and society
lets me starve for not having contributed in a way through which I was
able to extract my livelihood.

Likewise, if my wife decides she wants to devote all her time to caring
for sick, underprivileged children she will herself starving unless she
can somehow convince people to fund her expenses.

Do these things contribute to society? Of course. But does the holy
"invisible hand" of the market give it the provisions it needs? No.
Because a market, despite the propaganda, isn't a good yardstick on what's
valuable in society. To the market, things aren't valued according to
utility or human expense, they're valued according to how well people are
brainwashed into paying the highest price for garbage they don't need.

Stallman, regardless of his personal vices, is contributing something good
to society. What's a shame to me is that we can't all contribute in a
similar way without setting up charity funds and marketing divisions. Why
can't we all just do what needs to be done and have everyone share the
wealth?

I'd much rather just code software and give it away. Fighting for a higher
place in the pecking order seems to me to be a big waste of time and
effort that'd be better spent writing more code. Perhaps you'd be happier
too, Kent, if you didn't have to keep worrying yourself over profit.


On Mon, 02 May 2005 14:26:01 +0000, Kent M Pitman wrote:

> In fact, it's the GPL people who are all about me, me, me and what I as an
> individual have a right to. If you talk to Stallman, and I have many
> times (though happily not terribly recently), he will probably tell you
> pretty directly, as he has me, that he's not in this as some form of
> altruism. People assume he's some sort of generous soul that's out to do
> mankind a great favor. He is, as he's expressed it to me, and alas I'm
> just paraphrasing so I might err, but I think this catches the sense, just
> protecting his concept of his own way of life. Which is no different than
> what I'm doing.
>
> He called me up at my house one time and harangued me about my not having
> made the CLHS a GPL'd document. I told him it was still very useful to
> people in its current form, and was paying for the expense of its
> production by providing much needed advertising. He said he didn't care
> about any of that, including that it was helping people. All he seemed
> focused on, and he was pretty direct about this, was that HE wasn't able
> to use it for what HE wanted. Stallman seems to me to want a world in
> which users have more rights than creators. Sure, he wants to create
> something. That's fine. Let him. He's no worse off with something that
> is restricted (for a time, I wish, if copyright would sunset instead of
> keeping getting longer--that's another problem I do worry about) than if I
> didn't make it at all. But he doesn't see it that way. IMO, he's just mad
> that he doesn't have it his way. And it's bad enough that the presence of
> GPL in the community drives down prices (something that affects me)
> without having him complain that the remaining things I do FREELY (which
> don't affect him one iota, other than to deprive him of toys he wishes he
> could afford, and that he might be able to afford if he just charged money
> for things like the way the economy is designed to do) are not to his
> liking.
>
> All I'm saying is that the pendulum used to be swung the wrong way. He
> didn't like it, he (to his credit) took personal political action, moving
> it a lot in the direction whose initial signpost said "better". And now, I
> think, things are not "all better". I think he overshot. Or maybe it
> wasn't a good solution in the first place. I think it's gone too far and
> needs to back up. Or, at least, we need to reconsider what we're trying
> to achieve and whether the existing mechanisms are capable of getting
> there at all. But he and others just continue to push this one thing, as
> if it leads to All Good. It's that single-mindedness of Rightness, not the
> fact that there may be Some Good out there along with the Some Bad, that
> disturbs me.

.

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