First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 19:46 UTC (Thu) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link]

In 2000? He was hardly the first man to come up with the concept of an electronic online encyclopedia written by a vast array of far-flung writers updated (semi | in | )frequently. Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide, anyone? That was 1978.

Sorry, that's the GNU/Hitchhiker's Guide. RMS had the same idea, therefore the idea is his.

Posted Mar 23, 2007 1:30 UTC (Fri) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link]

You claimed that RedHat is a counterexample, but are they. They have no problem with copyright. In fact claming that they have "intellectual property". Really? Since when are government granted monopolies property?
http://www.redhat.com/legal/legal_statement.html

Property Rights and Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K.Levine
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/coffee.htm

"All of this brings us to what intellectual property law is really about - a reality that is simply obscured by analogies to other types of property. Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea - this is a right that we have just pointed out, does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea."

"The closest case is that of slavery. That is, the courts will not enforce a contract in which you sell yourself into slavery. In the case of slavery, as in the case of intellectual "property" we believe that the economic and moral arguments point in the same direction for the same reason. Your labor is irrevocably bound to your person. To enforce a contract in which you sell yourself to someone else requires them to enforce the contract by intrusive, expensive, and morally offensive measures. Hence we allow you to rent your labor, but not sell yourself."

> RMS predicted Wikipedia the same way he predicted a free Unix?

It is not merely about prediction. It is about setting out to work and trying to do it. "A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Related_projects

Not just that, trying to come up with the principles of how it should be licensed etc... is important. I gave a link to the essay because he explains the principles clearly and I found them useful.
e.g "Permit mirror sites." Seems trivial right? Not fully. I tried to get images in wikipedia and you cant download them. Because some of them are there under fair use, wikipedia is trying to weed out "fair use" images as much as possible even if it costs them a bit in quality. Why? Because then anybody can build mirror sites with images at that point. I want to donate such a mirror site to a school without internet access. (want kids to view images also, text is so boring)

"The last and most important rule for pages in the encyclopedia is the exclusionary rule:

If a page on the web covers subject matter that ought to be in the encyclopedia or the course library, but its license is too restricted to qualify, we must not make links to it from encyclopedia articles or from courses. "
Wikipedia follows a similar rule.

This is not about praising RMS. It is just that he is thoughtful and what he says has a lot of utility. We must consider his arguments both on rational and moral grounds. Whether we agree or not is a different matter.