Essay RFC delayed.

[Brian DeSpain]

Kyle Rose wrote:

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> >           The real challenge is in getting them to see profit in working with
> >      the community while discouraging parasitism on their part.  I don't
> >      see you doing this.
> >
> > This is precisely what Eric does.
>
> Does he?  That's not the impression I get.  "Discouraging parasitism"
> with respect to the free software community means to me "understanding
> and respecting the ideals of the community."  Eric isn't telling them
> that issues of freedom are important to the vast majority of us
> hackers; in fact, he actively downplays the importance of such issues
> in his writings.

Why is our freedom to hack important to corporations? The answer is it isn't and
they couldn't care less. By making the arguments the way Eric does is that it
becomes palatable to corporations and the other freedoms  we get are sorta slid in
under the radar.

>
>
> My point is that Eric is giving them an easier way out, by
> representing a part of the community that is more palatable to them.
> Instead, companies should be made to know that their participation is
> contingent on their understanding of and respect for the principles of
> freedom we follow.

Their successful participation in contingent on their understanding of it. They
can pull an Apple (or a Sun with it's "community" license) but this doesn't mean
that this will fly with the developer community and the blow back on the
corporation will be considerable. The free marketplace of ideas in the free
software community assures that really pig-headed ideas don't fly very far. They
should respect the community, they should play well with others. The fact is that
many of them won't and many of the them will get burned by the community.
Corporations often make very dumb mistakes and then draw the wrong lesson from it.
"We tried our Bobo Community License and no one liked it, no made improvements
etc" The lesson the corporation will learn, "open source doesn't work." Then of
course the movement will flatten them with a free product is better, faster and
bundled with every linux cd.



--

Brian DeSpain

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