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Stefan Seefeld wrote:
Patrick Anderson wrote:Are you saying the GNU GPL is unimportant to the current and future health of the Free Software movement except only as a psychological carrot?No. I'm saying that in our current economical context everything gravitates around 'property'. The GPL uses this concept as a weapon to break out of this confinement. I.e., in using the current legal / economical framework, it transcendents it. However, you seemed to argue very much within the bounds of that model / vocabulary, and, as many others, try to explain the world purely in those terms.
The reason I confine my argument to the somewhat brutish concepts of property ownership and contract law is because those avenues are realistic 'handles' or 'footholds' or maybe even think of them as a way to form a 'petri dish' that we can then use in Juijitsu manner (as RMS's GNU GPL does with Copyright) to work against those that currently use ownership in immoral ways to subjugate others. Instead of simply condemning property rights and any Terms of Operation that may be enforced through that ownership, I am trying to use them to our advantage by: 1. Recognizing that owners RULE. When there is a question as to who has the final say, it all boils down to ownership. It is easy to be angry about ownership, and so many want to eliminate it entirely (such as saying "ownership is theft"), but ownership in and of itself is not the actual problem - just as Copyright in and of itself is not the actual problem. We all know the GNU GPL could not be enforced without copyright, so why be upset about utilizing property law? It is not even a new concept; it is just syndicalism. 2. Admitting that each step in the GNU 'immaterial' revolution hinges on some person willing to invest (for software that investment is primarily the time and effort toward programming) in production and then sell or give away the product to a user while insuring the 'immaterial' sources (the source code) are available to that same user even if that user does not have the skills needed to operate (program) those sources. The reason this is so important is because it allows the consumer to always "go around" the would-be Capitalist because the consumer has "at cost" access to the 'virtual' Capital called "source-code". 3. The GNU 'material' revolution will require investment both in labor AND in any 'physical' Capital that is too expensive or just meaningless to own by a single person. This co-owned Capital (the physical 'sources') can be constrained analogous to the GNU GPL's requirements that perpetuate User Freedom. The contract (or maybe a corporate "Terms of Operation") applied to those collective holdings must somehow insure users (consumers) gain "at cost" access to the physical sources of production. 4. One way to insure consumers gain access to the physical sources of production (the Capital or "Means of Production) is to treat all price above cost (profit) as an investment from the consumer who paid it so that current and future users become the literal owners of that production while profit (price above cost) approaches zero [for when every consumer has sufficient ownership in the physical sources of production, while they must pay any real costs (including wages), they cannot pay profit - for the own the product even before it is produced. Your peer, Patrick _________________________________ Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/ Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/ Contact: projekt oekonux.de
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