> I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts.
Nobody will disagree with that. The question is where to draw those lines.
> Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive things.
As Cicero pointed out (in "De Republica"), these things would prevent humans from living together in cities.
I am a classicist. I look back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero far more than I do Locke. As far as I see it, the goal of the economy is to serve the household, not the other way around.
> A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had already been approved, became enough to strike the act."
And yet Quakers have shown an ability to make a universal veto work. The key thing though is what you pointed out: universal vetos weaken central authorities and return the power to small regional entities where people can more easily work together. This is a good outcome.
The question really is how to define Freedom. Stallman tries to follow in FDR's footsteps of four freedoms. But in both cases you have logic which then requires centralization as a matter of policy, and then freedom in the service of freedom becomes self-consuming.
Here's my radical idea: freedom requires limits, to be sure, but freedom is defined by the space within the limits. I.e. freedom is a matter of partitioning, physically or metaphorically, something in order to give people a right to control their own space. The freedom which then matters is economic freedom, and by this I mean the right to engage in economic production and trade without micromanagement from outside. To put it another way, it's one thing to have to do the dishes. It's another thing to be told not only to do them but be micromanaged in how one must do them.
Evaluating software licenses from this perspective then gives one the sense that those licenses that the FSF is willing to call Free Software Licenses do not universally as a group deliver more freedom than proprietary software licenses. The AGPL places many more restrictions on products and services delivered with the software than does the license for the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library when obtained as part of development tools.
So the question is: what can someone produce? What are the limits there? Who is making those decisions? So I side with the BSD folks.
In my opinion small regional communities can only exist in isolation. I don't see how such communities could defend against an aggression by a strong state-backed military. Putin is having a great time picking off countries one by one. Maybe if someone comes up with an anarchist religion, something that strongly motivates people to seek out and destroy governments before they grow.
I think it's like snipers in FPS games - the only thing that can REALLY stand up to a sniper is another sniper.
Nobody will disagree with that. The question is where to draw those lines.
> Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive things.
As Cicero pointed out (in "De Republica"), these things would prevent humans from living together in cities.
I am a classicist. I look back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero far more than I do Locke. As far as I see it, the goal of the economy is to serve the household, not the other way around.
> A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had already been approved, became enough to strike the act."
And yet Quakers have shown an ability to make a universal veto work. The key thing though is what you pointed out: universal vetos weaken central authorities and return the power to small regional entities where people can more easily work together. This is a good outcome.
The question really is how to define Freedom. Stallman tries to follow in FDR's footsteps of four freedoms. But in both cases you have logic which then requires centralization as a matter of policy, and then freedom in the service of freedom becomes self-consuming.
Here's my radical idea: freedom requires limits, to be sure, but freedom is defined by the space within the limits. I.e. freedom is a matter of partitioning, physically or metaphorically, something in order to give people a right to control their own space. The freedom which then matters is economic freedom, and by this I mean the right to engage in economic production and trade without micromanagement from outside. To put it another way, it's one thing to have to do the dishes. It's another thing to be told not only to do them but be micromanaged in how one must do them.
Evaluating software licenses from this perspective then gives one the sense that those licenses that the FSF is willing to call Free Software Licenses do not universally as a group deliver more freedom than proprietary software licenses. The AGPL places many more restrictions on products and services delivered with the software than does the license for the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library when obtained as part of development tools.
So the question is: what can someone produce? What are the limits there? Who is making those decisions? So I side with the BSD folks.