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Comment by access_denied | Hacker News Reader

You have the historical facts wrong re Stallman's motivation.

I disagree. What he says is totally and absolutly irrelevant compared to what he actually does accomplish. The purpose of a system is what it does. Reduction to the barter system is what application of Stallman's philosophy accomplishes. THAT is his purpose.

According to Stallman, one should only be able to trade software artifacts for other software artifacts. This is even worse than a barter economy. Its as if an egg producer could only trade his eggs for other eggs or a potato farmer could only trade his potatoes for other potatoes. This in one simple step eliminates a division of labor economy with all of its attendant benefits and multiplication of productivity.

But the result of GPLed software is also that it can be freely modified by anyone who cares. I think your stance is to one-dimensional, while remaining interesting. I also cannot prove you wrong. I will think about it. My guess at the moment is, that RMS changed his views over time.

Again, I don't care what RMS says, what he does is what is important. Simply read his re-re-revised EULA. His focus is to prohibit useful and valuable combinations of proprietary and OSS software by requiring the free distribution of the proprietary intellectual property content and abandonment of any applicable patents.

Which result has the most fundamental impact? The restriction to trading software artifact for software artifact no matter what or allowing modification by anyone who cares. For the former, there is no choice. For the latter, there is the choice to modify or not. I suggest the former has a far more profound effect on the final result.

Perhaps our disagreement is that I think the results are mostly detrimental and you think they are mostly good. The question is good for whom and for what reason?

I don't think that I am the one who is being one dimensional here.

> The purpose of a system is what it does

Therefore the purpose of the internal combustion engine is to waste the 82% of energy? :-)

The result of an internal combustion engine is the transformation of heat energy into kinetic energy. Thermodynamics says this conversion cannot be 100%. Hence some of the heat is not converted. The "wasted" heat is not lost. It is simply not used.

To say the purpose of an internal combustion engine is not to use heat energy distorts the meaning of the words to the vanishing point by implying that the purpose of everything is not to use heat to the degree they don't do it.

The statement is "what it does". Its not "what it doesn't do".

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