I say hooey!

To Richard Stallman, that is. I was reading what occasionally passes for news while eating chicken curry for lunch when I ran across a column Stallman wrote for CNET news.com. In it Stallman wrote:

"When someone uses the term 'intellectual property,' typically he's either confused himself, or trying to confuse you. The term is used to lump together copyright law, patent law and various other laws, whose requirements and effects are entirely different. Why is Mr. Gates lumping these issues together? Let's study the differences he has chosen to obscure."

Now, the statement "When someone uses the term 'intellectual property,'typically he's either confused himself, or trying to confuse you" is easily over the top enough to roll my eyes back into my head. But it starts out worse; Stallman opens the article with this:

"When CNET News.com asked Bill Gates about software patents, he shifted the subject to 'intellectual property,' blurring the issue with various other laws."

Yet when I read that same interview to which Stallman refers to in his article I found that Gates didn't introduce this term--it was introduced by the interviewer asking about "intellectual-property rights." In fact, here's the question:

"In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?"

No need to shift the subject to "intellectual property," is there? It already is the subject of the question. This disconnect between Stallman's analysis and the text of the Gates interview, of course, sets up a major cognitive dissonance, causing questions to careen madly through my mind:

• Did Stallman link to the wrong interview? Surely not, the text of the interview does refer to communists in the context of intellectual property rights..
• Is Stallman himself shifting the subject and obscuring the issue?
• Does Stallman get paid for writing columns like this?
• Can I get paid to poop out columns like that? Do I need anything more than to be opinionated and outspoken?
• Can I ever possible recover the time I spent reading Stallman's column?

Of course I jest. But not entirely.

If someone is working hard and put money into his own work and create something useful he should have some rights. You can call it 'intelectuall right'.
If someone do the same thing and give his product for free under GPL it's a great thing.
So, basically, we have two kind of persons: 1. person who write software for money. 2. person who write software for free
Stallman is claiming that person #1 is a bad guy because he wants confuse you. Person #2 is a good guy.  Why? Am I bad guy if I do not give my software for free? I don't think so.
If someone wants give his software for free, ok, no problem, I even think it's great! But if someone mark people who do not give software for free as bad guy he is probably some sort of communist. Maybe if he had lived in Czechoslovakia from 1948 to 1989 he would have different opinion. Communism took property  from people and people had to work for state and the couldn't be in business. That's not freedom.
Freedom is that if you want give your software for free, you can. But if you want give your software for money, you also can.

Sorry about my english.