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Why do we protect only code freedom? When I read on GNU site, I noticed an interesting article about copyleft motivations. In this paper they focus about restriction applied by GPL license on distributing modified versions of Free Software as Free Software in its turn (WhyFree). This effective limitation to freedom of distribution is justified as preventing that someone who uses your code in a non-free program denies freedom to other users. Why do we not add a clause to forbid users to limit real freedoms (which, IMHO, are more important than freedom of code) of other pepole ? Even RMS (Richard Stallman, GNU and Free Software philosophy founder) says that there are more important battles than this for Free Software and so, what about trying to reach nobler scopes through it ? Unlike a book, progam code can be executed, so giving code, you give people the ability to do something. With this vision we can't state that software is only knowledge, which in turn must be universal.

fero on pdp.linux.it

06/09/10

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