On Jul 26, 2008, Antonio Olivares <olivares14031@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > If there was no kernel, the GNU operating system would not have gone > anywhere It would have completed it eventually, or someone else would have developed another kernel that would work with GNU. ATM we have at least 4. > without the GNU tools, where would Linux be? Who knows? It might not even have come to existence, since it was developed making extensive use of GNU software, and it depended heavily on GNU software to be usable since its inception, and nobody ever tried to change that. > An analogy for the GPL would be the farmer who receives the gift of > a GPL cow from a neighbour. The cow is completely free, but all of > the milk from the cow must be given away for free, and all of the > cow's calves, and the calves' calves, yea, even unto the thousandth > generation, shall be given away for free. If the cow is completely free in the same sense as in the GPL, then it can't have been given as a gift, for gift amounts to ownership, which is slavery rather than freedom. I perceive an overloaded-word fallacy here: using 'free' with two very distinct senses, one that tries to bring the subject closer to the Free Software free, while all others have to do with cost. > Now what kind of use is such a cow? You can eat it. You can use its pieces to build other objects and sell them. And you can expect to get more "free" cows from the neighbor, so you could run a business until the neighbor realizes what you're doing and realizes he can do that himself, and kills his own "free" cows. There's a fable about a farmer who kills the goose that laid golden eggs somewhere. Of course none of this bears any significant resemblance with the way the GPL works. > This is quite interesting and the points are very well stated. Yep. Clever use of fallacies and dependence on public ignorance and gullibility :-) -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
