Stallman On the UK Digital Economy Bill

superapecommando submitted a blog entry written by Stallman about the UK's bandwidth initiatives. RMS says "When I read about Gordon Brown's plan to give the UK more broadband, I couldn't restrain my laughter. Isn't this the same clown now busy circumventing democracy to take away broadband from Britons who already have it? And what good would broadband do them if they're punished for using it (or even being suspected of using it)? Laying cables would be a waste of resources if people are not allowed to use them. Brown did suggest another possible use for broadband. He said that it would enable MPs to better communicate with their constituents and keep track of what they want."

Comments

Let RMS dogfood his economic model

[wombatmobile]

Instead of a weekly paycheck, RMS should work for free and accept donations. There should be a button on every article he writes to donate a dollar to the author. In a couple of years, if RMS is convinced of the viability of his model, and his children have grown up healthy and strong, I'll give it a try too. Until then, I'm not convinced that RMS's world is anything more than an untested speculative fantasy.

Re:Don't compare

[AbbeyRoad]

no, I'm not being sarcastic

      "This isn't about laziness, it's about convenience and efficiency"

Yeah right! If it is so convenient, then why does only the most minute
fraction of the population (all with the exact same set of personality
characteristics) use it?

Bottom line is - there is a more-or-less one-to-one correlation between
the sets of people who:

    1. outright violate copyright on a grand scale.

    2. are poor earners, social misfits, highly-vocal-complainers-about-
          the-woe-of-the-planets-intellectual-property-legislation, and complain
          endlessly about the-rights-of-poor-me-being-afringed-by-the-evil-gods-
          of-BigCorp, and ALSO feel real pain whenever they pay for a DVD.

Now why on earth would someone feel pain paying for a DVD?

And why on earth would this someone also want to use the jurisprudance
arguments of "rights" and "freedom" to enable him to not have to pay.

Gee I wonder.

-paul

Re:Right things, not always right reasons.

[Reservoir Penguin]

I live in Russia now and I lived in the USSR for long enough of my childhood to remember how things were. I hope this satisfies your curiosity. I know that the idea of building anything resembling Marx's communism died with Lenin and Trotsky but that was not the point of my post. I was commenting on the silliness of the 'good' sharing and 'bad, commercial' sharing. You know from my experience workers in the USSR free from commercial exploitation did not go on to create a variety of amazing things, most just took the situation as a chance to seat around idly most of the work day. Anything consumer, more complicated than a loaf of bread was sold broken right at the store, was not uncommon at all to come to the store and find every TV set in stock to be non-functional, then buy it anyways and then spend weeks or months procuring electronic components to fix it yourself. Sound a lot like Free Software, doesn't it? IMHO Free Software has run out of steam, beyond several high profile projects (that land actual paying jobs or fame) Free Software just does not provide enough motivation for people both to do interesting tasks (If I am good at something that is interesting to me, I'd rather do it at a place that pays me money for it) and for mundane tasks (who wants to do testing and good support with actual ETAs for free?).