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FSFE Becomes WIPO Observer

Posted by timothy on from the which-is-not-a-newspaper dept.

wikinerd writes "FSFE, the European branch of Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation announced that it was granted observer status in WIPO, the international organisation which influences nationwide copyright laws."

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  1. Concerns by petrus4 · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    I will admit to always having been worried about the size of the IP stockpile that RMS is essentially sitting on due to the GPL. Although I realise that having that degree of power no doubt suits *him* just fine, I find it considerably more disquieting.

    This is another of the objections I've tended to have to the GPL as opposed to some other licenses...Namely that from what I've read about Stallman I tend to find it very difficult not to see him as a megalomaniac. The problem with benevolent dictatorship is that regardless of how *benevolent* it might be, it's still a *dictatorship.* The way I look at it is that if we want to remain beholden to unwittingly help fulfill some American charismatic narcissist's "vision," we might as well keep using Windows. Gates might be more morally degenerate in some people's minds, but in my view he's actually considerably less boorish than Stallman. Given a choice though, I go for the third option...Not putting Stallman, Gates, or Linus on a pedestal, but putting *myself* up there. ;-) (What I mean by that is that I tend to think that if people put as much energy into their own self-image as they instead put into other people's, they might be a lot better off)

    There is also an irony in that I remember with the concessions he made with the LGPL, it could be argued that he basically did exactly the same thing he earlier accused the XFree86 group of doing. ("I wanted to make a restrictive license, but it's not as popular as I'd hoped, so I'd better release another one which is a bit less restrictive in the hopes that it will also be more popular.")

    Remove Stallman's personality from the equation, and in reasonably broad terms I'll agree with anyone who says that the FSF have done some good things. But I think it's worth also having our eyes open about the FSF's fearless leader as well, because I have for a while tended to suspect that he is not quite as great a man as he would have everyone believe.