Python is better than free (was Re: GNU wars again)

[Alex Martelli]

"Chris Watson" <opsys at voodooland.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.1002078843.29724.python-list at python.org...
> On Tuesday 02 October 2001 09:54 pm, Delaney, Timothy wrote:
> > > From: Chris Watson [mailto:opsys at voodooland.net]
> > However, GPL is *not* extortion. The writer of a piece of code has every
> > right to want to protect, control or charge for it.
>
> That's true. But dont call it Free code if you do. Because it is not free.
> Look up free in the dictionary. That is the ONLY definition that should be
> followed. Not whatever twisted version the FSF and GNU people want to use.
> The gernal gist of any dictionary is its free if its free from control,
> opression, or restrictions.

You seem to be using a very poor dictionary.  "Free", like all important
words in natural language (study Wittgenstein's "Philosophische
Untersuchungen"
for a deeper understanding of why), is fuzzy and heavily overloaded.
Tracing
its historical roots, we come to Sanskrit "priya" -- and the closest English
translation I can give of THAT is "own", as in "mine own", "prized",
"beloved".

Merriam-Webster online, hardly the widest dictionary in common use:-), gives
just fifteen root meanings for today's use of "free" in English.  Just these
should suffice to show that the singular in "the ONLY definition" is utterly
inappropriate.  Are you, as a US citizen, "not free" because you DO suffer
restrictions -- indispensable to ensure all other citizens are just as free
as you are?  "Your freedom to swing your fist ends short of the tip of my
nose", and all that (the argument by symmetry is best developed IMHO in
Kant's
"Kritik der praktischen Vernunft").

Specifically, are you made non-free by the restriction (14th emendment, I
believe?) that you cannot be sold nor sell yourself as a slave -- is your
freedom nullified by being enshrined as permanent and unalienable?  Most
US citizens would not support such a contention today, I believe.

Fight your political battles for or against any kind of software licence
however you wish -- many of us don't care that much either way -- but
don't think you'll ever get away with claiming "the dictionary" (as if
there was only one!) somehow supports your favoured "ONLY definition"
(as if there was only one!).  Not as long as some of us deeply and
passionately care about *words* -- their history, their usage, their
inter-relationship, the splendid web we can weave with them.  Care to
the point of spending time on Usenet which we DEFINITELY should be
employing more productively, sigh:-).


Alex