From owner-freebsd-chat Tue May 23 22:50:54 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from sharmas.dhs.org (c62443-a.frmt1.sfba.home.com [24.0.69.165]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E56F737BBE7 for ; Tue, 23 May 2000 22:50:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from adsharma@sharmas.dhs.org) Received: (from adsharma@localhost) by sharmas.dhs.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id WAA17442; Tue, 23 May 2000 22:47:31 -0700 Date: Tue, 23 May 2000 22:47:31 -0700 From: Arun Sharma To: Rahul Siddharthan Cc: Doug Barton , Brett Glass , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The Ethics of Free Software Message-ID: <20000523224731.A16545@sharmas.dhs.org> References: <4.3.1.2.20000523191700.049c5260@localhost> <20000524101006.A29351@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 0.95.6i In-Reply-To: <20000524101006.A29351@physics.iisc.ernet.in>; from Rahul Siddharthan on Wed, May 24, 2000 at 10:10:06AM +0530 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wed, May 24, 2000 at 10:10:06AM +0530, Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > Doug Barton said on May 23, 2000 at 18:34:55: > > On Tue, 23 May 2000, Brett Glass wrote: > > > My purpose in posting to this thread at all was merely to point > > out that there is another view, so that people who don't have a background > > in economics are not tempted to take the "There's only one pie, and it's > > always going to be the same size" argument seriously. > > And this, by the way, is the archetypical communist argument. They > want to redistribute wealth because they think you can only become > rich at the expense of someone else. I don't have a formal training in economics. But common sense tells me that if everyone multiplies their wealth by 100x, the world is essentially unchanged and the economy would've expanded by 100x. Strategic inflection points, as Andy Grove famously called them, don't happen everyday. I find the communist bashing and repeated references to their stupidity a bit amusing. Even Meyer's article had references to it. After reading some of these discussions, "You're a communist", sounds worse tha "you're a filthy dimwit bastard, with no morality" :) Stallman, Linus and every major personality seems to be afraid of the term, even when they share some of the same philosophy. http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/main/0,10228,2574952,00.html BTW, Mr Leibovitch makes the mistake of equating open source with GPL in his reference to Pedro's Daemonnews article. Slashdot gets away with it repeatedly. Does anyone have good suggestions to make the distinction clear to the masses ? Web page button ? gplisnotopensource.org ? -Arun To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message