[SLUG] Last evening's meeting

[Martin Webb]

I was unsuccessful in posting this message, this a.m.  I sent it 
privately to John, but, having now sorted myself out, I'll follow John's 
suggestion and "bring it back to the list".


Particularly to John:

It's quite difficult to put anything in writing without sounding like 
the vote of thanks for the after-dinner speaker, but -
Thanks, John, for a v interesting seminar on Richard Stallman, into 
which you put a lot of work.

This a.m., Diane, my wife, asked me what we had talked about, and I was 
able to tell her in some detail, and, to some degree, to her interest, 
too.  That's some tribute to the clarity of what we heard.

I also found that, over-night, as is psychologically supposed to happen, 
my brain had continued to work on the subject.  Particularly in this 
area: Stallman is, self-admittedly, at least on the edge of the autistic 
spectrum, and, in his own word, stubborn (obsessive?).  One of the ideas 
in the Free Software matrix, about which he was quite uncompromising, 
that came up three or four times (again in his own words, it appeared), 
included the word 'ethics', concerning the openness of the product.  An 
ethic of you're developing through my work and its accessability, and I 
through yours.  Now you might think that I'd be interested in this 
because of my profession, but that would be a misreading.  What I'm 
really interested in is the socio-politico-economic implications of a 
Free Software mind-set.  In English, that comes out as: rather than the 
West sucking in wealth for the past couple of hundred years, at the 
expense of the Third World (the wealth of one, as one might say, 
depending on the poverty of the other), could the West, in becoming 
wealthy, have attended to the parallel and equal development of the 
Third World - the West developing because the Third World was 
developing, too?

Do you think any of Stallman's attitude (despite his protests that his 
work does not transfer to other areas of human activity) bears such 
interpretation?

Much of my own work is based on ideas of social enterprise, and 
commonwealth, which is why my mind will continue the exploration of last 
night's meet.

Thanks again,
Martin