I agree that you can not always compare a DDOS to people blocking a street. I think there's 2 reasons for this.
1) If you are busy protesting by blocking a street this causes you inconvenience as you can only physically be in one place at once. Whereas leaving your computer on to DOS while you go out to a bar isn't exactly a hardship.
2) Many of the DDOSers would not even be remotely aware of what they are doing , see the JS worm that they used recently.
This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?
You've just opened up a huge topic there, has been discussed on HN lots of times and while I have seen good arguments for copyright-less software in many areas (OS kernels , web frameworks etc) there are others where I don't think anyone has thought of another viable business model (at least not one that isn't even more freedom restricting in some way).
Some would argue that these areas should just disappear or be done only by hobbyists but I think I would miss professionally produced video games for example, indie or AAA.
To clarify though, I doubt that Stallman would support Anonymous or people who want to pirate software.
To him any software that is not libre is irrelevant and should be rejected regardless of monetary cost or who distributes it.
> 1) If you are busy protesting by blocking a street this causes you inconvenience
You only have a finite amount of bandwidth, and you have to decide how much to use for DDOS and how much for your own use, so, in a way, the analogy of street blocking still holds there.
That's true but with a physical protest you don't have that choice, you pretty much have to be all in (not to mention putting yourself at risk of physical harm by counter protesters or police etc).
Also I don't think where we're at the stage yet where losing your whole internet connection temporarily (or just having it slow down) are that much of an inconvenience to life.
If you have a 10Mb pipe and you could use 90% of it for DOS for an entire day without noticing much inconvenience (unless you want to use torrent or stream HD video).
In according to his view on this we shouldn't pay for groceries because you don't know how they were grown.
Everyone should get a farm and get his own vegetables, mine his own minerals etc.
Saying that all software should be free is absurd.
I suspect his argument would be more along the lines of when you buy say some potatoes, you can do what you will with them.
For example you could plant them in the ground and use them to grow more potatoes or you could chop and fry them into chips, bake and serve them with with chilli etc.
His issue is not really with the cost of software (that is more a side effect of the GPL). He takes issue with the fact that with software you often have artificial restrictions in use and that the manufacturer may include features that are not to your benefit (e.g DRM , spyware , adware) and you can not remove these without breaking the license agreement.
He would liken this more to buying some potatoes that can only be legally used for one purpose and if you wish to use (physically identical) potatoes for another purpose then you must pay a higher fee.
The commercial issue with the GPL is that if you give people the rights to distribute as they see fit there is guarantee that they will give anything back to the original author.
Personally I would love to get applications with source code available that I can modify as I wish (or just fix bugs) but would require that the original author was paid a fee upon re-distribution (of original or modified version) to someone who did not already hold a license. I see this as a very good compromise in many cases.
The problem with this of course is that if I did wish to distribute the software to an unlicensed person then I could easily remove any copy protection methods prior to doing so.
In such a case ironically the best solution might be stronger copyright legislation to protect the rights of open source but non gratis software developers.
"“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies."[1]
So yes, you can farm your own vegetables. But you shouldn't accept that you buy a potato without being able to plant it to make more potatoes. (Ironically, you should check back on that with Monsanto, though[2]).
1) If you are busy protesting by blocking a street this causes you inconvenience as you can only physically be in one place at once. Whereas leaving your computer on to DOS while you go out to a bar isn't exactly a hardship.
2) Many of the DDOSers would not even be remotely aware of what they are doing , see the JS worm that they used recently.
This is ridiculous. I understand that the current IP legislation is a load of crap but trying to get ALL software to be free is absurd. How are developers going to live? How about groceries? Can I pay for that? Or that should be free as well?
You've just opened up a huge topic there, has been discussed on HN lots of times and while I have seen good arguments for copyright-less software in many areas (OS kernels , web frameworks etc) there are others where I don't think anyone has thought of another viable business model (at least not one that isn't even more freedom restricting in some way).
Some would argue that these areas should just disappear or be done only by hobbyists but I think I would miss professionally produced video games for example, indie or AAA.
To clarify though, I doubt that Stallman would support Anonymous or people who want to pirate software. To him any software that is not libre is irrelevant and should be rejected regardless of monetary cost or who distributes it.