Please have a look at Taran's website, KnowProse.com. He has put up some interesting material, whether you're interested in FLOSS or poetry. The most immediate and striking thing to me is Taran's evident desire for community through the Internet. This is expressed in the casual style he writes in, but also by his poetry, through which he becomes vulnerable to anyone who cares to spend some time at his site. At the same time, he seems perfectly willing to allow you to disagree with anything he says, and is not too proud to qualify his site with a quote from Seneca: "Numquam magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit." (There has never been a great spirit without a touch of insanity.) I'm sure you can spend some interesting moments contrasting this attitude with that of the people who currently control your life.

Meandering thoughts (English)

The Cost and Value of Intellectual Freedom

I value my freedoms; I value the coffee I have in the morning, the ability to read what is available to me through the internet and my books and consider what was written while formulating my own views on things. I appreciate the value of my having ripped all my CDs to MP3s so that I can listen to them without having to switch CDs. There is a cost, of course - not so much in dollars as it is in vigilance. Sure, I pay for the internet connection - I've paid for my books and the original CDs of music, but the freedom to use these is something I've already paid for. What if someone asked me to pay for them again?

What if you had a perfectly good CD today, and someone tried to tell you that you would be required to purchase the SAME CD every year for the rest of your life? Or software?

Windows Rights Management Client 1.0 is available now - for free, I might add - for those who have no concept of the Value of Intellectual Freedom. Or no concept of Intellectual Freedom.

At least they named it right. Windows Rights Management. It's certainly not User's Rights Management.

But that's OK. If people don't perceive the value of their rights, why not throw them away? They don't see the problems, though Richard Stallman (RMS) has been talking about this for quite some time - as have others. His essay, The Right To Read, has been around for over 5 years and is still quite applicable.

But I bet many of you haven't read it. You may even believe that such things are interesting things to discuss over coffee, but hold little value in the real world. After all, it is the lumberjack who is said to be industrious - while the Forest Rangers apparently do nothing at all:

"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he
is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole
day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald
before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising
citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them
down!"

-- Henry David Thoreau, 'Life Without Principle' available through Project Gutenberg

So here, Microsoft will be credited for industriously chopping down the trees - damaging the forest of Intellectual Freedom. Quaint.

So - are you a lumberjack or a forest ranger?

Taran Rampersad, in Trinidad.