Re: Some ideas with Emacs

[Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>]

On 2019-12-05, at 05:41, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> Turning to the broader ethical issue, I think that _all_ textbooks,
> indeed all educational resources, ought to be free -- because they
> exist to be _used_ for a practical job: f teaching or learning a
> subject.

Having thought about it, I have to say that I am not at all convinced.
Quite the contrary - I would be suspicious about free educational
resources.

Why is that so?  Because if someone provides me with information (be it
of educational nature or otherwise), and I do not pay for it, this means
that it is quite probable that someone else paid for it.  And the goals
of the "someone else" may be very different from my ones.

That might not matter that much in case of a calculus textbook, or Emacs
manual.  But I would *never* give my child a "free history textbook"
(for example) unless I made really sure that the author did not try to
push some nasty agenda with it.  (And I have seen such textbooks myself
- see below.)

Another reason for my suspicions may be the fact that I have lived in
a communist country for some part of my life.  Most people in the US do
not have such experience, and that is probably the reason they allow the
poison of communist ideology to invade their thinking.  (In fact, from
what I read, the US have almost become a communist country nowadays.
I would not want to live there at all!  Free speech in the US is
definitely a thing of past, and I will not be surprised if the US
ditches capitalism and whatever is left of free markets within a decade.
Not that I think free market is a silver bullet, but in many cases it
seems a good economic solution.)

And the idea of free educational resources does smell of communism.
A lot.

Yet another problem with "free educational resources" is: who would pay
for them?  And if nobody, who would create them?  This is of course not
a moral issue, but a pragmatic one - but an issue it is.

Of course, I am perhaps mixing the two meanings of the word "free".  But
this does not matter that much, because if something is "free as in free
beer", that means that someone does not get paid for it, and if
something digital is "free as in freedom" (e.g., free to copy), that
usually means that someone won't get paid for it as much as if it were
"non-free".

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://mbork.pl