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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

This is one of Richard's recurring topics, and I agree with matt__rose and higherpurpose that there is some irony since China, along with a few other countries like the USA, Iran, Russia, could do with a more free and open internet. The Internet should be basic infrastructure, inexpensive, and very secure. That is the goal.

I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages.

Edit: typo

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free/open Internet in China? No way!

- You do not have choice of service providers. All providers are government department and there's nearly no competition.

- Try to use Google in China, lots of fun!

- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc. Good luck.

- If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)

Specific to RMS: I'm the translator of Free as in Freedom (Chinese edition.) Until now, I have no idea if the word "free" (自由) could appear in the title when we publish it.

Edit 1: grammar

I think the parent commenter was agreeing with you. The English idiom "could do with" (which I think is somewhat uncommon in California, where I live) means something like "could benefit from", "still needs", or "would like". It suggests that someone doesn't yet have the thing that they "could do with", but that it would be good if they did, at least from the speaker's perspective.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/could_do_with

Thank you! I didn't know thus expression before. (I can always learn a lot from HN.) Upvote for the Wikipedia link.

Thanks for your comment. I did overstep in making my comparison, and I appreciate the feedback.

I desire a highly secure and unfettered Internet, and I just get frustrated by countries, and companies, that get in the way of achieving this goal.

"- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc. Good luck."

Try to access the internet in China. Good luck! (But Baidu always works)

If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)

Would you elaborate? This is very interesting. How did they get out of that situation?

Yes because the interwebz is all about the Web.

Like one said, the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

> I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source

Yes, only FSF doesn't use the term "open source," except to disavow it.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...

Another explanation of this is included in the "rider" that someone linked earlier this week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7754412

Gavin, I understand the FSF's position. Even though I am actually wearing a FSF thirty today, I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful. Really, it is up to creators to license code the way they want to.

They don't have any such position, at least not so absolutist. In fact, that was the whole point behind LGPL, to bridge the gap between GPL and BSD licensing. RMS also approved of the Ogg Vorbis library using the BSD License.

They do make exceptions when there is strategic sense.

> I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful

There are two inaccuracies with this statement:

1) The FSF does not disapprove of the use of non-copyleft free licenses. They encourage the GPL, but as pointed out below, they themselves have both released code under other licenses and approved of the use of other licenses.

2) You seem to have missed gavinpc's point, which is that the FSF is the Free Software Foundation, not the "Open Source Software Foundation". They don't say that "other open source licenses" aren't useful, because they don't refer to their own licenses as "open source" licenses. They dislike the term "open source" and don't use it themselves.

Please try using the Internet from China before you put it in the same sentence as the Internet in the USA.

BTW, by "all kinds of open source" I meant to say that there are good use cases for GPL, Apache, etc. licenses, depending on the projects and the desires of the creators.

The USA has a great firewall like china, Russia, and Iran? Well, til (or you could be exaggerating a connection between the USA and Chinese Internet, which would be very much BS).

I know I have the minority opinion

Is that really the case on Hacker News? I often feel like a rebel outcast here for thinking that technology being proprietary is a desirable thing.

Now that's interesting. Could you lay out, or point to, some arguments?

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