Re: [GNU-linux-libre] choosealicense.com fork with better wording, perhaps ?

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2014-09-23 at 01:53, Riley Baird wrote:
>> Murder is not a freedom, it's a crime.  Freedom
>> amplifies possibilities, and does not restrict them.
>
> If freedom is that which amplifies possibilities, but does not restrict
> them, then why doesn't murder fit this description?
>
> If I am able to murder someone to use their flesh in cooking, then that
> increases greatly the number of different dishes which I can make. It
> does not restrict my freedom, since I am not forced to cook using their
> flesh, it is just an option available to me.

Because you have to contextualize it in a social context: when he says
“amplifies/restrict” freedom, he’s not only speaking about your, but
anyone’s, the whole society’s, of each individual in it.

Then if you still want to see from an individualist point of view, you
have to consider that when we say “freedom is being able to do whatever
you want without restricting other’s freedom” it’s not an arbitrary
principle, but it’s because the freedom of others *increase* your
individual freedom. If most of animal species (everything after mammals
for instance), and notably cultural animal (monkeys and /homo/ genus),
live in society, it’s simply because society, collaboration and
solidarity is an objective advantage in struggle for staying alive
(struggle against circumstances most than others, contrarily to a common
misconception of Darwinist evolution).

To take again your example: someone can probably (it’s an euphemism)
increase your freedom in *so more many ways you can’t even wonder* alive
than dead. Dead it’s just a pile of flesh, as you could obtain killing a
simple animal, or even (bio)hacking with pluripotent inducted
cells. Alive it’s quite surely an instance of the most fantastic and
powerful autoimproving system produced by the universe.

> Yes, but you haven't established why helping the authors make money in
> an artificial marketplace is more important than protecting my free speech.

Even if I don’t share the opinion of many on copyright legitimacy, I
would notice go against it is not free speech: free speech is the
authority-unregulated expression of *opinions*. Just transmitting
others’ work is not an opinion, at least not your, thus it’s not free
speech. Yet it’s still legal to express the same opinion of someone else
who expressed it in a copyrighted work.

>>> Objectivity does not suppose an objective subject - in fact, it does
>>> not suppose a subject at all. If there were no conscious beings, an
>>> objective reality could still exist.
>> 
>> *** That's debatable, but humans have been doing it since they have the
>> capacity to do so, and still didn't reach any conclusion.
>
> Hopefully we'll take less than 20000 years. :) Can you imagine a
> universe with no conscious beings? If you believe in the Big Bang
> Theory, then such a time must have existed.

In the hypothesis objective reality wouldn’t exist without Subject
(idealism) the Big Bang Theory would be a conception of the Subject, it
would still be, but would just be dependent of it.

Yet you can’t prove what you see is real, because to prove anything you
need material, and you can’t have material if you assume it is not
real. Thus the fact objective reality exist can’t be a proven truth but
only a postulate, an useful (even better: essential) assumption.

>> And no, if I'm producing a guide on choosing a free software license,
>> I don't want to hear about what proprietary software vendors have to
>> say about it.
>
> Understandable. And, if you're right, really, you shouldn't have to.
> However, note that this is a moral issue, and all morality, to some
> degree, involves an arbitrary choice of what to value.

No it’s not up to moral but to ethic. Moral —coming from latin /mores/:
habits— is the value of “Good” relative to a specific culture. While
ethic —coming from greek “ethike”: a science of what is good— is the
value of “Good” in absolute, not relative to any culture but objectively
developed after the study of human.

> Hedonistic utilitarians value happiness, communists value equality,
> libertarians value individual freedom and Orthodox Jews value
> following Mosaic Law.

Isn’t all that linked to freedom at the end? Anarchism taking freedom as
its finality arrive to communist (the philosophy, not the soviet
state-capitalism system nor the authoritarian conception of revolution)
conclusions with utilitarian rationality and a “libertarian” value (well
actually it’s libertarians who illegitimately reclaimed anarchists
rhetoric and values turning completely upside down its thoughts, like
saying capitalism is opposed to hierarchy/authority and makes people
free).

Freedom being essentially defined after will, it matches
happiness. Equality (to distinguish from “similar” or “identical”) being
defined as being not superior nor inferior negates hierarchy, thus
authority thus matches Freedom. Every value of Good, at the end, matches
Freedom.

So at the end everyone thinking rationally is going in its own interest
and will, so trying to reach more freedom… then where people begin to
disagree is “*What* is freedom? *How* to be more free? *Why* aren’t
we?”. That’s what mostly separate anarchists, authoritarian communists,
libertarians, religious reactionary, etc. Yet at the end they all seems
to be in favor of free software (yet we find more GNU hippies than
neonazis or neoliberals :p).

>> BTW, I don't think "man *did* come from a monkey" nor that evolution is
>> gradual.  I think that human is the most complex animal humans know,
>> that it came about by a wide range of gradual and sudden mutations, and
>> is mostly an aggregate of bacteria and unicellular organisms that
>> entered a fruitful symbiosis, leading to more complex symbiosis,
>> mutations, and integration of the "human" organism.
>
> Do you have any evidence to back this up? We can progressively trace
> back the evolution of the entire Homo genus - see here for a good
> explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo .

He didn’t say evolution was wrong actually, just that “did come from a
monkey” wasn’t an scientifically exact way of saying it, since evolution
is more complex than that.

>> *** I hope my second paragraph above makes for a better explanation that
>> does not require framing copyleft in terms of restriction of someone's
>> actions, but rather of prevention from abuse.
>
> Yes, I agree that copyleft is prevention of abuse. (I also think that it
> is a restriction, for the reasons described above, but I agree that it
> is not a good idea to frame it as such, at least not initially.)

It’s a restriction to power, thus a right to freedom.

>>> That sounds horrible. Please tell me that no-one is seriously thinking
>>> of bombing cities to help the construction industry.
>> 
>> *** When I look at what happens in Gaza, honestly, I can't.
>
> Gaza is such a horrible situation. I wish that Israel and Palestine
> would just agree to make peace (although, to be fair, they are trying).

…it’s not like if it were a completely asymmetrical conflict :-°
Actually it’d better help people that Israelis and Palestinians agree
rather than Israel and Palestine would… it depend of your ability to
trust an impersonal entity made of hierarchy, papers, power, property
and money (after all, everything of that is the same).

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