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[Really OT]: Why we believe

David Mertz, Ph.D. mertz at gnosis.cx
Wed Oct 9 15:28:28 EDT 2002 
Some Aussie doctor wrote:
> The GPL exerts Copyleft by modifying rights granted to authors
> by legislated Copyright. As pointed out by someone else,
> Copyright extends only to implementations, not to algorithms.
> Thus, merely studying GPLed code does not 'taint' your mind with
> the GPL, no more so than reading Marx makes you a communist.

"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote previously:
|Indeed, having read some of Marx's work, I am surprised that such
|turgid prose could have apparently set parts of the world on fire the
|way it did.

Funny thing, this is my area.  Slavoj Zizek makes an observation about
this.  Actually it starts with Pascal's Wager[*].  Zizek points out that
one does not become a Xtian because the Wager in convincing; instead,
the Wager makes sense BECAUSE one is an Xtian.

It works the same way with the Old Man. You don't become a Marixst
because you've read Marx; you read Marx because you are a Marxist!

Circling back to the slightest element of relevance, I think the same
thing works with the GPL.  You don't release Free Software because you
are bound by the terms of the GPL; rather you bind yourself to the terms
of the GPL because you want to release Free Software.

Actually, you can plug in almost anything here :-).

Yours, The Filose Philosopher...

[*] The idea here is that Pascal asks to consider belief in the Xtian
    schtick as if one were a gambler.  If you decide to believe, and
    you're right, you get eternal salvation and all that.  I you decide
    not to believe, and your wrong, it's hellfire and eternity (bummer).
    So *IF* the God stuff is right, the choice matters a lot.  Now on
    the other hand, maybe the world is really mechanistic and we're just
    a bundle of cells.  In this case, if you decide to believe, maybe
    you look a little foolish for 70 years, then its over.  If you
    decide not to believe in Xtianity, you are a bit more correct for 70
    years, then nothing.  So the odds chart looks like:

         Reality -> Xtian  Atheist
        ----------+-------+-------+
          Belief  | +inf  |  -X   |
        ----------+-------+-------+
        Disbelief | -inf  |  +Y   |
        ----------+-------+-------+


--
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of
the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the
underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons.  Intellectual
property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
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