Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 13:19:16 +0100 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> Cc: Trent Waddington <s337240@student.uq.edu.au>, David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Stallman stalls again Message-ID: <20010302131916.G37575@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <xzppug148r9.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>; from des@ofug.org on Thu, Mar 01, 2001 at 07:57:46PM %2B0100 References: <Pine.OSF.4.30.0103020435210.6243-100000@student.uq.edu.au> <xzppug148r9.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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Moved to -chat Dag-Erling Smorgrav said on Mar 1, 2001 at 19:57:46: > Trent Waddington <s337240@student.uq.edu.au> writes: > > I say it is worse than that. He doesn't even know what he is embracing. > > I think he does. Judging from his prose and my email exchanges with > him, he's the most deliberate person I know of - almost compulsively, > pathologically so. I haven't yet found any topic about which he does > not care enough to have an opinion. The guy has extreme views. But I've begun realising only lately (in the last 2 years, say) how far to the opposite extreme the rest of the world is going -- ridiculous excesses of content protection and the like. When I first read his "right to read" story it looked like some doomsday scenario, but now some real-life news item along those lines seems to appear every week. This is something that definitely worries me, and I'm quite happy that RMS exists because his extreme position looks infinitely preferable to the direction the corporates are taking us. Moreover, if these mega-content-providers (the RIAA, MPAA, you name it) seek to tie down all content, including books and journals, the way they're currently tying down DVDS and such things, I think the only future for our culture will eventually lie in a sizeable group of people breaking away from such a system and releasing creative material under open content licenses. Even that is made difficult if the big industries, who monopolise production of storage devices, force you to use some absurd copy protection restrictions on every device they produce. Day by day, all this does look more and more likely to happen. I admit, though, that RMS would make a better advocate of the causes he espouses if he were a bit more balanced, like Lawrence Lessig for example. R To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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