Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Throwing a curve ball
Author: Larry Rosenstein Posted: 9/12/2000; 3:05:03 PM Topic: Guido and Richard Msg #: 21268 (In response to 21069) Prev/Next: 21267 / 21269
"how can you be philosophically pure and run open source software on Windows or the Mac"I think the answer is the same as the answer to "Why does the ACLU defend someone who makes hateful remarks?" Freedom of speech requires that people be allowed to speak even if you do not agree with them. In the same way, RMS' philosophy regarding Free Software requires that people be allowed to port his code to Windows/Mac OS, even if he would prefer that they not do that.
As I think Eric mentioned, there isn't a fundamental difference between RMS and other software developers, except for the specific terms. RMS writes software and releases it under GPL to promote his Free Software philosophy. Dave provides free web hosting (a valuable service) to promote his "philosophy" of content management, namely Manila. At a high level, there's really no difference.
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