> This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea, labeling it heresy.

I find this use of "theological" insulting and not fitting to the situation. "Ideological" or "partisan" would be better IMO.

Whilst I completely understand why you would find it inappropriate, I'm struggling to see why you would find it insulting.

Can you elaborate?

Insulting is not the right word. I'm not sitting here mad or anything.

But I often see people labelling disagreements over things like licenses or editors or programming language as "religious" disagreements, with the implication that this means "driven purely by thoughtless adherence to a group and/or authority".

Clearly, religion sometimes works like this. But consider people like mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal, or literature professor and theologian C.S. Lewis, or any number of ordinary Christians I know who do think critically, including about their theology. Being religious does not necessarily mean holding a position uncritically, being hostile to those with whom you disagree, or being able to acknowledge partial agreement and gray areas.

On the other hand, non-religion can also display the "religious" tendencies people are trying to deride by using this term. Some people are so fervently allied to the Republican party, or Marxism, or environmental causes, or conspiracy theories, or atheism, or white supremacy, or feminism, or any number of other things, that they're unable to consider opposing arguments.

Unthinking herd mentality is neither inherent nor specific to religion.

Do you consider "religious" appropriate? I see the point that theology originally means something like the study of God.

Au contraire, I find religion to be extremely fitting to the free software - open source debate. Richard Stallman himself is very sympathetic to theological analogies for technology debates, calling himself Saint IGNUcius.

https://stallman.org/saint.html

From that page:

Warning: taking the Church of Emacs (or any church) too seriously may be hazardous to your health.

So at least that page is absolutely not evidence that Stallman is sympathetic to theological analogies (the fact that he is joking by making a theological analogy indicates the opposite).

Invoking an atheist like RMS doesn't help matters, even if he may have a lot of wisdom and experience in the licensing wars. Conflating an argument over a particular licensing debate in 2018 with deeply-held religious beliefs that may have existed for thousands of years and even inspired actual religious wars (where thousands of people, or even millions -- might as well loop Godwin's law into this debate -- actually died in horrific ways) would certainly appear to be insulting to those who are religious (and many who are not) and might take your irreverence more seriously than it was intended.

I think you're overblowing the potential for offense and committing the sin of assuming it's other people and not you that will get offended. If some religious person is offended by the characterization, I welcome them to articulate why. I'm highly spiritual myself and have interacted with many very religious people, and I can say that most of them relish the opportunity to think about worldly things using religious framing.

> I'm highly spiritual myself and have interacted with many very religious people, and I can say that most of them relish the opportunity to think about worldly things using religious framing.

Would they “relish” your using the term “theological” in the way you did in your original comment? Be honest.

Well, they certainly wouldn't take offense to it like a atheist / materialist would at the idea that a debate they care a lot about might be framed that way.

"We've killed lots of people for much less, so mind your manners!"

Wow I'm glad we don't live like that anymore. If using a word in a way that totally suits its literal meaning and most of its connotations is "insulting" enough to help forestall a return to that, bring on the insults! Here's one: RMS believes in free software more deeply and authentically than anyone in this thread believes in God.

Lighten up.

http://wiki.c2.com/?HolyWar

Thank you for this!

> To join the Church of Emacs, you need only pronounce the Confession of the Faith: There is no system but GNU, and Linux is one of its kernels.

I don't agree that it's an ideological argument at all, I see it as a pragmatic perspective on what will 'actually happen' given the arguably 'ideological' stance of this new kind of license.

The license are short and powerful ant try to 'make a statement' themselves ... in reality, the resulting behaviour of the community is another thing altogether.

The pragmatic perspective is the one given by the supporters of the Commons Clause. The ideological one is the one given by the Free Software advocates who have longer memories and thus know where this leads.

I personally support the ideological position, I just don't think this is the right way to make that argument.

There is nothing pragmatic about the CC because it will wield all sorts of problems, most of them unanticipated and unexpected, and may very well 'do the opposite' of intended. That's not 'pragmatic'.

'Pragmatic' is recognizing that maybe what we have today is kind of crap and not perfect, but it's much better than some new pipe-dream of a clause.

> Not every business can be Red Hat.

No, but they can try, https://tidelift.com is a good starting point.

Of course you can fight ideas. Happens all the time. Convincing the dogmatic is difficult or impossible, but not every idea is dogma to many or any people.

> This argument is theological in that it's arguing against an idea

With an actual license text publicly available, this is way beyond just an idea, wouldn't you agree?

> His ideal 'solution' is to just fold it all up and try to forget it ever happened

This was not proposed as a solution to the problem(s) that Commons Clause wants to solve, problem(s) BTW that I can't see clearly articulated anywhere.

I don’t usually post here (more interested in the articles than the discourse over them), but this is something that really resonated with me. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of engineering. We don’t know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our disciplines. The history of the study of engineering shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often insufficient for the changing future, and that fundamental insights into new possibilities can arise from the most unexpected sources.

All of us are entitled to our opinions on the healthiness of the Commons Clause, but if history has taught us anything, censoring the mere _idea_ of it for being in conflict with one’s personal ideology is the greater injustice, and will accomplish nothing in the long run. Might its adoption hurt some people? Maybe. Might it help some people? Also maybe. But shooting it down before it has the chance to do either feels wrong.

> censoring the mere _idea_

Nobody is censoring anything, in either a precise or a fuzzy sense[1]. Conflating criticism and censorship is (a) a category error, (b) a really pernicious notion, and (c) confuses people and derails discourse.

A core principle of free speech is that the answer to bad speech is more speech. Mislabeling criticism censorship attempts to delegitimize that answer, and thus paradoxically attacking the very notion purportedly being defended.

Please don't do that.

[1] Insert private-citizens-cannot-censor distinction here beside an acknowledgment that the word is used informally with wider applicability.

Normally I’d agree, but in fact this post is not just criticism, it’s a demand for self-censorship. That is, stop talking about this, and don’t ever talk about it again.

>The only solution is to bury the Common Clause project. Kill the website and GitHub repository, and we can try to forget this ever happened.

Having made a similar comment myself, I feel pretty confident in saying that that is mostly just intentional hyperbole, used to emphasize the seriousness of the issue. Although the OP of the bit you quoted there may choose to disagree.

Personally I'm not advocating any kind of "censorship", self or otherwise, in any literal sense. But I do want everyone to understand the extent to which I think this "clause" is an abomination and a threat to the entire Open Source movement.

I don't think it's about censorship so much as it's thinking ahead and realizing how huge of a threat this clause could be towards free software. The author is (IMO, rightly) concerned about this and wants to limit how much damage is caused by it.

That's pretty much the driving force behind all censorship - thinking ahead and realizing how huge of a threat the information in question is.

That still isn't censorship, or even anything approaching censorship, because the author has no power to actually do those things. It's still just a suggestion, albeit a pretty strongly worded one

That's why I said "self-censorship". Basically, not just criticizing (that's more speech), but to tell the person who disagrees that they need to stop talking.

> [1] Insert private-citizens-cannot-censor distinction here beside an acknowledgment that the word is used informally with wider applicability.

That's not "usage" that's wider applicability, it's accuracy.

You are no less censored if your boss threatens your livelihood than if your government threatens your freedom or Twitter bans your account. Tyranny is tyranny, and censorship is censorship. No matter the cause for a voice to be excluded from public discourse, it's exclusion is censorship. The only distinction is that government censorship is explicitly illegal under the United States Constitution.

Nevertheless, the First Amendment is not a comprehensive definition of censorship nor is the Bill of Rights a complete expression of all human rights. If you want something that's closer to one of those, please refer to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights[1]. The concept of censorship as well as the ideals free expression, freedom and liberty extend well beyond the scope of a mere government law or institution.

No, not all censorship is illegal. The state can't make all censorship illegal because that power is too easily abused -- you yourself are discussing the difference between criticism and censorship right here. However, we should not mistake the wisdom of proscribing our government from acting as judge over free expression as a unique or defining characteristic of what it means to censor or silence another's right to free expression.

[1]: http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

> You are no less censored if your boss threatens your livelihood than if your government threatens your freedom or Twitter bans your account.

Of course I'm less censored by my boss than by my government. My boss doesn't have a monopoly on my potential sources of income, but my government does have a monopoly on my citizenship; I simply can't move to another country without the permission of both governments. My boss can't persuade me with anything but a temporary lack of income; my government can (legally!) persuade me with a long list of effective arguments, ultimately ending in a gun barrel.

If you're vaporized in an nuclear explosion, are you more or less dead than if you suffer an aortic dissection? No. You're still dead.

If the government threatens you with political imprisonment, are you more or less silent than if your boss threatens you with termination and legal proceedings? No. You're still unable to voice your opinion.

Don't mistake the amount of power brought to bear to coerce with the outcome of acquiescence. Dead is dead. Silent is silent.

The ideal of free speech says that restricting the flow of ideas is harmful and immoral in and of itself. Yes, we need additional protection against government tyranny. That's why it is illegal. But "it's not against the Constitution" doesn't make an action right or just. "It's not illegal according to the Constitution" is perhaps the weakest defense I can possibly think of. If that's the best thing you can say about your actions, you're not really endorsing yourself. Congratulations. You haven't done something so stupendously wrong that we wrote it down a couple hundred years ago and made everybody working in one country's government promise not to do it anymore. If we're to judge you by the strictest letter of a document explicitly intended to proscribe one government's power, you're doing great. And we just nevermind that if you were acting on behalf of the government, it would be illegal? We just ignore the ideal of free speech in lieu of a single embodiment of it?

It's like a CS student saying, "It doesn't segfault on compile. I deserve an A." Well, not segfaulting during compile is the bare minimum. Well done. You wrote a program that's syntactically valid and results in a binary output file. It might be incorrect, it might be insecure, it might be buggy, it might be incomplete, it might be less efficient than bogosort, it might perform trivial work, it might even be completely useless, but at least it does so within the basic rules of the OS!

You managed not to do something illegal. That doesn't mean you're doing something right.

False equivalence. Let me paraphrase your argument a little bit:

"If you suffer a sunburn, are you more or less injured than being run through with a katana? No. [In both cases] you're still injured."

But of course you can be more injured or less injured. The entire point is that injury isn't a binary measure, and neither is freedom/censorship.

---

Let me put it another way... imagine the most oppressive possible regime, and then imagine the most liberal utopia but with one added restriction: you can't say "purple fuzzy dishwasher". That's the only restriction. Absolutely everything else is permitted but that one phrase is illegal, and immediately punishable by a million-dollar fine. Keep in mind that the most-oppressive regime also disallows the phrase "purple fuzzy dishwasher", and in their case it's punishable by torture and then death.

If your definition of censorship doesn't meaningfully differentiate between the two societies, then it's completely useless. You could only use it to conclude that "all people are censored", since there are always possible material repercussions to things we could say.

It's not being "censored". A lot of us are just saying it's a fucking stupid idea, that's all.

Get off your free speech soapbox, nobody is saying that this person has no right to discuss this idea, we are just saying it is a terrible idea. This is a ridiculous non-argument

Personal swipes and name-calling will get you banned here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.