Kevin Lynch's less interesting mutterings

It's an exciting time - If NI beat Latvia on Wednesday in Belfast and that would be seven points from four games and the chance of qualification would seem to be very high.

Tivo and GPL: Beauty and the Beast? by ZDNet's Ed Burnette -- In the ongoing battle between Linux kernel developers and the Free Software Foundation over the future of the GNU Public License, somehow DVR-maker Tivo has become either the whipping boy, or the poster child, depending on whose side you are on. FSF founder Richard Stallman even coined a term for what he sees as misuse [...]

There is an important point here. When a right is for everyone, everyone can use it. I have never gone on a protest march to Trafalgar square, it's doubtful if I ever will but if someone tried to take away that right I'd be hopping mad.

So too Ed's Aunt, she may not ever use the right to modify any device she owns but she benefits from other peoples use of that right.

One of the defining things about humanity has been our ability to fashion tools out of what lies around. Anything that impedes our collective ability to make tools should be deprecated - especially when those tools owe their existence to humans no longer around. Stallman is right to insist on the right to modify and tinker.

Ed, of course, makes reasonable points in his article it's just that his arguments do not begin to persuade me.