Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : David Golden
Date : Sat Sep 03 2005 02:29 pm

Gerry Quinn wrote:

  
> The way I look at it, free enterprise / capitalism, whatever its
> faults, decentralises power.  Command economies centralise power.  The
> end result tends to be the difference between a galaxy and a black
> hole.
> 

Heh. But you get all stroppy when the decentralisation
of the net and libre software numbers the days of centrally administered
monopolies on information...

"The anthrax panic, preceded by the events of September 11, has
amplified the manner in which patents subvert the market and
invite-even require-further central planner tinkering."  
--Ilana Mercer
http://www.mises.org/story/812

"Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate
themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to
own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas
to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our
world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and
distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no
longer requires your factories to accomplish." 
-- John Perry Barlow.
http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

"Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist,
fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic
criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people
to be controlled and those who have no such desire."  
-- Robert A. Heinlein
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Heinlein

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the
notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the
public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged
with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the
face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This
strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither
individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask
that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
-- Robert A. Heinlein  again.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Heinlein

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