Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on January 19, 2004 08:30 AM
Just skimming this article, I see that he accuses his opponents of justifying themselves on spurious grounds of "name calling, exaggeration, law, natural rights, and economics". Ironic since these are some of the exact same techniques he uses to justify his own positions, even in this article where (for example) he compares the SPA to the Communist authorities in the Soviet Union.
Stallman is an expert manipulator of public opinion. This is not necessarily a bad thing; most successful politicians and corporate CEOs are the same. But people have to learn to think for themselves and not accept his arguments as gospel, because many of them are as fallacious as the ones he criticizes. Even the name "free software" is highly misleading, because companies that incorporate so-called free software in their own products are advised to have it vetted thoroughly by intellectual property attorneys (whose time doesn't come cheap, and even then their answer is usually ambiguous), lest they risk lawsuits from Stallman's nonprofit organization. Shouldn't "free software" refer to software that has been released into the public domain with no restrictions?
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typical Stallman
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 19, 2004 08:30 AMStallman is an expert manipulator of public opinion. This is not necessarily a bad thing; most successful politicians and corporate CEOs are the same. But people have to learn to think for themselves and not accept his arguments as gospel, because many of them are as fallacious as the ones he criticizes. Even the name "free software" is highly misleading, because companies that incorporate so-called free software in their own products are advised to have it vetted thoroughly by intellectual property attorneys (whose time doesn't come cheap, and even then their answer is usually ambiguous), lest they risk lawsuits from Stallman's nonprofit organization. Shouldn't "free software" refer to software that has been released into the public domain with no restrictions?
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