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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

Your invocation of slavery to generate sympathy for your political goals is disgusting.

A law that prohibits slavery was just the first - and now after thinking about it a very good - analogy for the situation at hand. A better one is welcome :)

I wasn't advertising any political goals. I just thought that the idea behind the GPL wasn't understood and wanted to make it clearer.

No, it's quite similar. The GPL doesn't inhibit freedom, it inhibits the power to erode freedom.

No, the GPL inhibits the power to make use of software. Its not really the same...

Freedom is something we are born with, and I am free to do what I want with any software. The GPL asserts rights based on societal understanding to the contrary. Most nice licenses just ask for credit if its appropriate.

This idea that having priority in solving a problem entitles you to something is harmful for the whole of society for the whole of the future.

The only way you can consider this "quite similar" is if you are using a rhetorical flourish to manipulate the listener emotionally. Which is, of course, what is being done here, and not for the first time on this particular topic.

Just remember, hyperbole serves no master. Employ it at the risk of having it employed right back against you.

The way I consider it quite similar is that the freedom to own slaves isn't a real freedom, neither is the freedom to use my code to restrict other people's freedom in computing.

Can't you just accept that other people are honestly seeing something that you're (not seeing/see but don't agree with) rather than accusing people who disagree with you on this of being cynically dishonest?

Are drivers licenses also a form of slavery because you're not allowed to drive with out one, and in order to keep it you have to follow most of the rules of the road?

Most people would say that it's ridiculous to compare drivers licenses to slavery, even libertarians will tell you it's a loss of freedom but few would compare it to slavery, because for the most part drivers licenses and slavery have nothing in common.

Slavery is discussed in political philosophy all the time, even in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" by Nozik (with which I happen to disagree, but that's nor here nor there). I did not read the first message as an hyperbole, but simply as a consequence of the fact that "enjoying freedoms while preventing others from enjoying them" brings slavery to mind quite often. It's an unfortunate, possibly unnecessary metaphor, but not necessarily a piece of rhetoric (although, like everything under the sun, it surely has been used to that effect as well).

You're the one who brought politics into this.

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