Re: Free software, proprietary software and Stalin

[Suresh Ramasubramanian <r.suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thus spake Arun Sharma: 

>Either way, in a free market economy, you're "free" to go sell your own
>software at a fair price to kick the over priced software company out
>of the market.

The GNU project is also about freedom of choice - having a cost effective
alternative to being locked into forced, high priced upgrades every other
month for software which tends to crash more than function properly.

> capitalism. Capitalism is a system based on
> the recognition of individual rights, including

Objectivism ... Communism ... GNU is ~not~ an "ISM" for God's
sake.  Take free market economy to its extreme limits and you get the
slumlords and sadistic overseers of the Industrial Revolution (or Fritz
Lang's classic "Metropolis").

Get communism and you are forced to give up ALL rights to the state - and
have no freedom of choice at all.  George Orwell's 1984.  

Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" is, at best, an extremely ill defined and
rambling concept - a "plague on both your houses" rant rejecting both
communism and capitalism.

> also rejects the current "mixed economy" notion
> that the government should regulate the economy

Utopian.  The GNU is not out to take control of your life, and arrest you
for using non GNU products.  In fact, open source means much better
integration with proprietory products (like those M$ trots out).

Nor is it a movement to suppress intellectual property - or else, within a
few years, people would forget the original author of the program - and
just think of it as "Written by GNU" as in "Produced by M$".  This is
clearly false.  

In fact, the GPL is an extremely powerful guard for intellectual property.  
If it is free - there is NO incentive to rip it off / pirate it :)  I've
never seen warez / cracks of GPL products :)

-- 
Suresh Ramasubramanian     | President, CAUCE India
r.suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx   | suresh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.india.cauce.org | Stopping Spam In India
--
You have a tendency to feel you are superior to most computers.