Re: New OPL Draft

[Terry Dawson <terry@animats.net>]

Branden Robinson wrote:

> I think you are overly enamored of your own analogies, so much so that
> you're asserting a slippery slope argument with a JATO engine strapped to
> your back, but I'll take the "please don't" part under advisement.

.. and I don't even understand yours. What have I asserted? Where does
this slipper slope lead to? What is a JATO engine? Is it good or bad
that it is strapped to my back?

> Flowery language about artistic expression and brush strokes upon the
> canvas is well and good, but these concepts are subjectively evaluated.  I
> wonder if you read my earlier remarks in this thread, where I asserted that
> one man's art is another man's recipe.  Nowhere did I assert or imply that
> programs cannot be works of art.  My premise is: qualification as art is
> *irrelevant* when it comes to the license evaluation process of the (for
> want of a better word) consumer of a work.  For the author, considerations
> of art are likely to be paramount in guiding his or her selection of an
> appropriate license.  Perhaps I did not make this point sufficiently clear.

I agree completely, so why treat them differently? Why should the
definition of "acceptable" license differ depending on whether the work
is "executable" or not?

> Finally, I think you need to reflect on why we consider the freedom of the
> user to modify and redistribute software our core principle.  Is it so we
> can realize some collectivist utopia of artistic collaboration?  No.  It's
> because we want computer systems that work as we desire.

Isn't it about artistic collaboration?
Isn't the freedom to modify and redistribute the very enabler of
artistic collaboration that isn't hog-tied to the temporal domain or to
the vision of one or few people?

That aside, isn't the freedom to improve/customise/redistribute
documentation (or datasets) as important to a working computer system as
the freedom to improve/customise/redistribute software?

Terry


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