Is freedom useless to "the majority of users".

[Alexandre Dulaunoy]

On 5 Jul 2002, Simo Sorce wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-07-04 at 04:12, Rainer Trusch wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Tue, 2 Jul 2002, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jul 02, 2002 at 10:29:18PM +0200, Rainer Trusch wrote:
> > >> answer two small questions:
> > >>
> > >> What is freedom?
> > >
> > > To be free from the control of anyone to do as it pleases without
> > > restricting the freedom of any fellow human being.
> >
> > I give you another version:
> >
> > To be free from the control of anyone to do as it pleases
>
> Well anyone's freedom stops where another's one start.
> There cannot be _total_ freedom in every field, it's just a balance
> beetween your freedom and another one's.

	Yes and no. Freedom is more than that. For example, I'm a proud
advocate of the Freedom of the Nature. So you can ask : what is the link
with Free Software ?

	 It's quite easy, the human laws shouldn't restrict that the
nature bring impossible to forbid. For example, the immaterial's freedom
is a fact of the nature. You can share immaterial data without having
exclusion principle which you got with material data. (you can't have the
same physical object two times in different place). (Off-topic subject is
Quantum Computing, thanks)

	The freedom of immaterial data is quite obvious for distributed
information (yes, distributed information, privacy is another point like
stated in the GNU General Public License with other words). So the four
freedoms of Free Software can be easily explain with the nature's
freedom. (Freedom #2 and Freedom #3)



> > >> What is freedom for?
> Freedom is really a basic concept per se, instead today application of
> freedom may be tricky and not trivial as it should be, because of many
> interests of those people that want more control than freedom.
>


	Freedom is an ethical issue, this is higher than any laws or
restrictive concept. To protect Freedom we have to focus on the long-term
vision of Freedom not specific case. For example, when we (ael) talk to
politician regarding a specific issue, we talk about the long-term vision
and after, only, we talk the incompabilities of the law with this
""""vision"""".

	Ok, it's a difficult matter...

	adulau

> Simo.
>
>