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Story: Stallman warns of Mono 'risk'

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Its a Choice not a Chicken.

I guess the point is that every programmer that works on Mono or any Open Source project is doing it by choice. Heck even the programmers working for Microsoft have made a choice.

The issue I see is that Stallman sees evil in everything done by every company that sells software, especially Microsoft. (This is at least what it seems whenever he pops up on the scene. I tend to be somewhat more optimistic. I view MS as not necessarily the Evil Empire, but certainly the Callous, Greedy and Uncaring Empire, maybe 2 giant steps below Evil.

Personally I believe that software is a service just like being a translator, a writer or an editor. Writing software is telling the machine what you want it to do, precisely. I could see having a copyright that would cover whatever creative content was in the comment notes or documentation. I don't see that a patent should be allowed.

If I write music, its copyrighted, not patented. If I write comment notes in the software, then that could be copyrighted not the instructions themselves. There might be a number of ways to do the same function, a patent covers a function and in most cases in general language so that it can cover more territory. The problem is that to do any number of functions in any programming language, everybody ends up using the most efficient way, if they are good programmer's! That almost guarantees that everybody will write the code in the same fashion, sequence or using similar constructs.

A patent on software is like having the rights to tell people that they can't use English any more without paying Her Majesty's Government a royalty check every time they do. (And you thought the Boston Tea Party and Bunker Hill was rowdy!)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that paranoia is an idiotic means to un-involve or motivate people, especially programmers. I admire his zeal but worrying about something that MIGHT happen is a "Chicken Little" waiting to hatch.

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