Insta-attack Pot-Kettle-Black [LWN.net]

Insta-attack Pot-Kettle-Black

Posted Sep 27, 2006 13:23 UTC (Wed) by GreyWizard (guest, #1026)
In reply to: Godwin's Law by mingo
Parent article: Why Torvalds is sitting out the GPLv3 process (Linux.com)

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.

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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.