IBM Linux Video, going OT...

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

> Christian folks say that everyone is tainted until they die or
> something like that, but I don't think they condone not living because
> of it.

No, the principle, called "absolute depravity," has, as thesis, the
notion that we are deeply tainted by wrong.  We're not all doing what
the Adolph Hitlers of history did, but the fact that such grossly wrong
things keep happening, over and over again, shows that there is some
"seed of great wrong" to which people keep being vulnerable.

> Knowing nothing about karma (or Christian religion, obviously), I
> think that contributing to OSS projects (yes, even by using them) is
> plenty.  Someone mentioned that they don't use postfix because it's
> released freely (as in beer, not as in speech) under an IBM
> license. So what about qmail?  It's not GPL, so does that make it bad? 
> Does the fact that both of these freely (again, only as in beer)
> available software are emphatically superior to other (free, as in
> beer) mail server software make any difference, or should they both be
> shunned because they are not GPL? Does this make the GPL a religion,
> or just something else to be zealotreous over?

"Karma" is a concept of Hinduism, not of Christianity.

The relevant bit of "religious history" is that, historically, many of
the worst and bloodiest conflicts have been between sides that outsiders
would consider had the same theology.  The English "War of the Roses"
was between people that had religious differences that most of us would
likely have a hard time distinguishing.

It is similarly often difficult to distinguish between the proponents of
one "free software" license and another, but they fight nonetheless.

> What if someone writes a piece of software while in University under a
> corporate scholarship while studying to become some kind of software
> guru dude? Should karma also shut down that software and keep it from
> being used freely? Think deep before answering that one, it may have a
> shotgun hidden deep within it somewhere. :)

A great danger, these days, is that Universities are quite likely to
consider software written there to belong to THEM.
--
output = reverse("gro.mca" "@" "enworbbc")
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/x.html
str->str_pok |= SP_FBM;                     /* deep magic */
s = (unsigned char*)(str->str_ptr);         /* deeper magic */
-- Larry Wall in util.c from the perl source code
--
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