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by anamax
6289 days ago
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> He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens. That's not true. He merely believes that they have a different set of responsibilities than you'd like. > As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name. CPSR have a politics-laden definition of "Social Responsibility" which he doesn't agree with. Is their meaning sacred or is one allowed to criticize and even ridicule? |
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http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html
It may not be the last word ESR has to say on rights and responsibilities, but I think I accurately conveyed his views. I'm not even arguing that they are wrong, although I think they are. My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. He sees that as a road to tyranny or stagnation, consistent with Ayn Rand and her intellectual descendants.
The GPL is about building a web of such responsibilities, explicitly to force closed-source firms to abandon their tactics and become part of a community. I get the sense that ESR finds such tactics distasteful because of his political beliefs. Which is fine! He's not alone in that.
The problem is that he's still claiming the GPL has held us all back by alluding to economic studies, which I'm not sure even exist. The GPL seems to have done really well by every empirical measure I know of, and it shows no signs of strangling capitalism or anything.