Quote:
Originally Posted by rocket357
So the BSD license affords MORE freedom to developers (who aren't strictly required to release their improvements...no matter how you cut it, x+|y| is bigger than x...any restriction over "do what the heck you want" is **less freedom**), and yet, it is somewhat "lesser" of a license in Stallman's eyes.
I really don't get his philosophy.
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The problem is to pin him to your definition of freedom, freedom as freedom from restriction in what one licensee can do with the software, and then taking him to task for not being consistent with that. This is the way this debate often goes in BSD circles. It's a bad line of argument because he's very clearly defining his terms. If he bandied about the word freedom without defining what he means by it you might have a point, but that's not the case. He and others also make it fairly clear when describing copyleft as a clever community legal hack that the aim is to control how the licensing propagates freedom (as he defines it) not just to one user but to who he or she distributes to and so on through the world and that a goal is to actively avoid providing anything for use within proprietary software.
It's common for people to define the word freedom in different ways. I've been trying to learn more about traditional philosophy. You talk about freedom in the way that Hegel meant it vs. how J.S. Mill did and you're talking about pretty different ideas. Think of it that way with rms. It doesn't mean you have to agree with him, but it may help you understand where he's coming from.