[kennywinker]

Except it’s not. That poster is just doing an IP law version of the “paradox of tolerance”. Their argument is just: you say you want information to be free yet you believe in licenses that keep information from being made un-free.

[NeutralCrane]

Has absolutely nothing to do with the paradox of intolerance. If you have a more substantive criticism, feel free to elaborate.

[kennywinker]

That was what’s called an analogy. What you said and the PoT are similar because they both rely on eliminating nuance using language.

Paradox of tolerance: to maintain a tolerant society one must be intolerant of intolerance.

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

Your proposal: to make information free one must restrict how information can be used.

The biggest hole in your argument is just the MIT and BSD licenses. Sure what you say might apply to the GPL and other copyleft licenses - but MIT/BSD are as close to no-strings attached as can be achieved in our current legal framework.

So, clearly plenty of people are happy to freely give up ownership of their works. But others value keeping the code out in the open - not zero restrictions.

This is analogous to the paradox of tolerance, because they both rely on eliminating the variability in what people want when it comes to free knowledge or a tolerant society, and they both rely on using words to create a false dichotomy: tolerant vs intolerant, free vs restrictive. A tolerant society is still tolerant event if it is “intolerant” of murder - just because i used an antonym doesn’t mean those are the same exact concepts being negated.