Godwin's Law [LWN.net]

Godwin's Law

Posted Sep 27, 2006 1:22 UTC (Wed) by mingo (subscriber, #31122)
In reply to: Godwin's Law by GreyWizard
Parent article: Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process (Linux.com)

You compare people who argue in favor of the GPLv3 draft to mass murderers [...]

That's not what he said, at all - please read his comment.

[ I'm wondering where this insta-attack mentality of some GPLv3 proponents comes from. It looks really ugly and vile, and makes our community seem childish. I've seen more mentions of "FUD" in this thread alone than in most Slashdot discussion about Microsoft ;-) ]

to post comments

Godwin's Law

Posted Sep 27, 2006 2:30 UTC (Wed) by robilad (guest, #27163) [Link]

I know. My apologies for invoking the F-word.

I think that both sides lionize their 'leaders' a bit too much, and ignore how similar they (and their respective leaders) are, both in their tactics employed in the discussion, and their agendas. But then, people focusing on what separates them, and projecting the other side as vile, and evil, is not a particularly new human condition. ;)

Anyway, your arguments on the DRM clauses have made me think more deeply about my own position on the issue, and I'll add some comments to the second draft to propose some changes as a result. I'd encourage you and others interested in having a GPLv3 that does not suck to do the same, as the current draft carries less then a dozen comments even for the most controversial issues debated here.

Insta-attack Pot-Kettle-Black

Posted Sep 27, 2006 13:23 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link] (2 responses)

Why don't you try reading his comment yourself. Here, I'll make it easy: "Well from reading many of the comments that get attached to anyone who disagrees with the GPLv3 you would come to feel that person is a heretic who needs to be taken to a Gulag for some serious Reeducation in good old Stalin/Mao ways." I don't know what kind of evasive parsing you are using to see this as something other than a comparison of people who make comments you and smoogen disagree with to mass murderers but please go ahead and explain. That should be amusing.

Insta-attack Pot-Kettle-Black

Posted Sep 27, 2006 17:10 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (1 responses)

Well for the first part.. my grammar is atrocious. It is hard to figure out what I was meaning in my rambling without the proper usage of ,;.

I will try to edit it better to as the following:

After reading many of the comments on this and other forums, anyone who disagrees with the GPLv3 seems to be labeled as someone who needs serious time at a re-education Gulag like they had in the good old Stalin/Mao days.

It was meant to be a serious attempt to quietly invoke Godwins' law. It was also a reference that used to be told quietly from older Gnu/FSF people to new Gnu people. When I posted a comment in 1994 about building a GPL for patents, I got a private email from either Tom Lord or Tom Bushnell that was a subject that got one sent to the Gulags by RMS. There also seemed to have been a whole internal joke structure about who in the FSF was Trotsky, Stalin, Lenin and Mao depending on which way the winds in the Politburo (aka MIT AI area they were in) was blowing.

http://lwn.net/Articles/59147/

About Godwin

Posted Sep 28, 2006 2:00 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026) [Link]

The reason I object to these comparisons is not that the Free Software Foundation isn't a fair target for mockery or that Richard Stallman can't be autocratic. As Godwin argues in his book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, comparing mass murderers to people who are at worst obnoxious trivializes their crimes. The argument you are making is not fundamentally unreasonable but it would be stronger without exaggeration.

Godwin's Law

Posted Sep 28, 2006 15:42 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]

I have no strong view on the matter - but from here, the rabid-looking ones are the antis. It's apparently not enough to say that the GPL is not what I want for my software, the comments I've read here have (bypassing the question of whether it's a worthwhile licence in its own right, or legally even an option for Linux) gone straight to attacking the FSF and RMS personally (and you've done that yourself, Ingo - come on, regurgitating Ulrich Drepper's second-hand bile... how the hell is *that* relevant to, or useful in deciding, the question of the GPLv3's merits?)

Meanwhile, about the most malicious statement I've seen from the pro side is that the kernel developers don't appreciate freedom (which, in the RMS sense of freedom being the foundation upon which all progress is based and the most essential value in any ethical system, they don't - Linus has always taken pragmatism over freedom, as do well over 90% of people every day). No personal attacks, certainly nothing saying "well, Linus is a control freak who can't be trusted and backstabs" from key FSF personnel; just advocacy, and a weary acknowledgement that not everyone shares their values or understands why they deem them so necessary.

Yet it's the antis who call the pros "rabid", or accuse them of an "insta-attack mentality". Why is that, I wonder?