rms@AI.MIT.EDU (10/16/89)
It is quite right that I am not opposed to proprietary mailing lists. It may come as a surprise to some people, but there are many kinds of property that I think are legitimate in certain circumstances. I am not simply "opposed to property"; I never was. As a social reformer, I am often criticised simultaneously, by the same people, for being too extreme and for being not extreme enough. People construct an oversimplified version of my views, taking them to the extreme. Then they pretend that this exaggeration is what I think, and call me "extreme". Sooner or later something reveals my real views are not the same as the exaggeration; then they call me "inconsistent". Thus we get the amusing phenomenon of a person who believes in proprietary mailing lists (I suppose he does, since most people do), ridiculing me for agreeing with him. In fact, every organization I know of has a proprietary mailing list, and most of them make a point of not letting any outsiders send to them. In fact, there have been waves of public indignation when organizations HAVE let outsiders send to their mailing lists. For example, the ACLU will fight for your right to say just about anything at all, even to speak against their cause. No one is more in favor of free speech than they. But they won't grant you any right to send your own material to their mailing list, or even to leave literature in their lobby for people passing by to pick up. They might let you send something, if they think it would help their cause, but they would insist on reading it before deciding. Now, perhaps you disapprove of them, and most other organizations, for this policy. But if you don't, then it is a double standard to criticize the FSF for doing the same thing. (Some day, in a hypertext world, it might be useful to eliminate proprietary mailing lists. Suppose that anyone could attach a footnote to any publication, pointing to an article expressing disagreement, and any reader would see this footnote--that might be a good idea. However, it's not fair to impose this on the FSF alone. Apple should at the same time have to let us attach footnotes to their sales literature.) A discussion group is another matter. If there is to be a useful political discussion, no relevant point of view should be excluded. However, info-gnu-emacs (and its repeater, gnu.emacs) was not supposed to be a discussion group. It may have seemed to be one, because (not liking security) we left it up to the readers to decide what was a useful announcement. Some of them started using it as a discussion group, which showed that there was a demand for one; but info-gnu-emacs is not it. We created gnu.misc.discuss to serve for political discussions. The FSF had no obligation to set up such a discussion group. Most activist organizations don't make a forum for their opponents. We did it because we also care about the freedom of speech to the point of making a place for our critics. But that doesn't mean we will let them tell us how to run our show.