RE: Defintion of exchange (was: [ox-en] RE: Open Money?)
- From: "Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson subjectivity.com>
- Date: Sat, 19 Jan 2002 11:57:16 -0800
Stefan Merten:
* Exchange means that something is exchanged between two parties. I.e.
both party get something.
This delimits exchange from unidirectional flows such as we see in
Free Software.
Thanks for the clarification, but I'm still not convinced.
Richard Stallman himself has denied that Free Software is based on
"unidirectional flows." In an article called "Pragmatic Idealism", he
argues that the GPL is in fact explicitly designed to force the users of
free software to compensate its creators with free software in return:
<Stallman url="http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html";>
If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism is not
enough--you need to choose a method which works to achieve the goal. In
other words, you need to be "pragmatic." Is the GPL pragmatic? Let's look at
its results.
Consider GNU C++. Why do we have a free C++ compiler? Only because the
GNU GPL said it had to be free [...] The benefit to our community is
evident.
Consider GNU Objective C. NeXT initially wanted to make this front end
proprietary; they proposed to release it as .o files, and let users link
them with the rest of GCC, thinking this might be a way around the GPL's
requirements. But our lawyer said that this would not evade the
requirements, that it was not allowed. And so they made the Objective C
front end free software. Those examples happened years ago, but the GNU GPL
continues to bring us more free software [...]
The GNU GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy. It says "no" to some of the things
that people sometimes want to do [...] The GNU GPL is designed to make an
inducement from our existing software: "If you will make your software
free, you can use this code." Of course, it won't win 'em all, but it wins
some of the time.
</Stallman>
Nor am I convinced by the "Selbstentfaltung" theory of political economy.
If I've understood correctly, the argument restates a platitude [Klischee]
that we sometimes encounter in English as "If you do what you love, you'll
have what you need." If that principle is to work as the basis of an entire
society, a lot of people will need to love jobs like garbage collection and
coal-mining [Abfallbeseitigung und Kohlenbergbau]. That's unlikely. As
they say in the movie business, what everyone really wants to do is direct
[Regisseur sein].
Kermit Snelson
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