Verily I say unto thee, that Matt spake thusly:
> Homer wrote:
> So you said you wouldn't use computers if you didn't have a FOSS OS
And you're /still/ lying.
I have never stated that I "wouldn't use computers if [I] didn't have a
FOSS OS". I stated that I wouldn't use them if the only OS was provided
by /Microsoft/. It is entirely possible that, in some dystopian future
which lacks Free Software, there would be still be proprietary operating
systems provided by vendors /other/ than Microsoft.
Note that it is /also/ entirely possible to write an operating system
/without/ an existing operating system at all, if I were so inclined.
Think about it.
> Have you noticed that if everybody except MS thought that way, we
> wouldn't have any FOSS now?
Well I would if your claim above was actually true, instead of a
complete fabrication.
Stallman developed Free Software on MIT's ITS, which may have been
proprietary, but it /wasn't/ a Microsoft product, therefore I have no
problem with that development, and might have done the same as Stallman
under those circumstances, with a clear conscience.
I have a particular distaste for anything relating to the concept of
"Intellectual Property", and as such I prefer Free Software and Open
Standards, but that doesn't mean I think /every/ proprietary software
vendor is a "bad guy", as you put it. There is only one "bad guy" here,
and that's the one convicted of antitrust violations in both the US and
EU, and which has a litany of thuggish and criminal behaviour three
miles long.
You do /get/ that, right? Or are you one of those denialists and
revisionists who think Microsoft "ain't so bad"? Maybe you just suffer
from terminal apathy, or worse yet, you're an incurable pragmatist. For
whatever reason, Microsoft's criminal behaviour doesn't seem to matter
much to you. It does to me.
> But your quote above goes even worse and implies that you wouldn't
> build the first FOSS even if you could do it without using the bad
> guys' OS. I don't quite remember your reasoning on that point.
The clue is in the phrase "bad guys".
>> My response to your suggestion was that this is not just about the
>> principle of using proprietary software to build Free Software, but
>> that in this instance the required proprietary software was
>> provided by a company which operates like gangsters, and I was
>> categorically not prepared to support those gangsters by helping to
>> fund their criminal activities.
>>
>> Your response to this was:
>>
>> "It would be crazy to swear off computers simply because using them
>> would require you to pay some money to bad people."
>
>> At which point the conversation is clearly over, because there is
>> obviously no way to bridge the divide between my principles and
>> your utter lack of them.
[...]
> I would be very surprised if you know much about history and the hell
> that people had to go through in order to build whatever good things
> we have now.
Does that "hell" include betraying one's own principles?
Did the allies defeat Hitler in WWII by funding the Nazis?
Well, there's your answer.
> If you feel that you need to write a four-kilobyte rebuttal, go ahead
If you didn't require a four-kilobyte explanation, in order to
understand such "esoteric" concepts as simple logic and moral
principles, then I wouldn't have to.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It
| is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." ~ William
| Pitt the Younger
`----
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.25.11-60.fc8
23:29:49 up 77 days, 7:12, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00
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