Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : David Golden
Date : Mon Sep 05 2005 09:30 pm

Gerry Quinn wrote:

> Destroying IP is a communist act insofar as the IP was 
> owned by private individuals.
> 

You bandy about the word "communism". I think it's been adequately
demonstrated at this stage you don't know what you're talking
about when you use it.

> It's exactly the same as if land ownership (i.e. the monopoly of a
> landowner on its use) is 'decentralised'.

Land is rivalrous. Information is not. You can rant and froth about it
all you want, won't change the fact that my knowing something doesn't
prevent you knowing it.

You simply want to destroy physical property rights, steal sovereignty
over physical property from everyone else.

> fails to address the question of
> why future Cipros should be developed.

Because there'd be demand for them.

> [More irrelevant quotes.  I do not recall ever hearing that Robert
> Heinlein placed his SF books in the public domain.]
> 
Not irrelevant at all.  And do try to separate the message of the quote
from the man who said it.   Jefferson was a slave-owner, doesn't mean
he was wrong when he wrote 

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the
possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of
it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less,
because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea
from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who
lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."

.