Professor Johnson picked up a welcome sheet at the university which explained the open house currently happening in the university. The open house was for professors and teachers to attend to, in order to learn more about the university.

During the open house tour of the open source university, professor Johnson learned that people could not directly charge money for the course material or course lectures they taught. The professor learned that the courses must be open and free. All courses could be easily digitally replicated by recording them with a digital camera and uploading them to web server mirrors, similar to MIT's open courseware. He learned that students should not be restricted. Students should receive the course and knowledge without heavy restrictions in place. Anyone could view a digitally replicated video and audio of a course for free online.

Professor Johnson then considered one factor: how was he going to make a living, if it was against their terms to charge for course material? After all, course material must be open and non-restricted in order to comply to the university philosophy. He asked one of the tour leaders about this issue. The tour leaders responded that it was okay for professors to charge for transportation to the university, parking spots, desktop rental space in the classroom, seating and chair rental.

Professor Johnson then wondered and asked why the parking spots, desk rental, and seating had to be closed and restricted from students. Wasn't this just moving the goal posts like Richard Stallman does? The tour leaders responded "Courses and knowledge are different than desks, classrooms, and seating. Software is different than desks, classrooms, and seating. Read the GNU philosophy, and you will understand, Mr. Johnson.".

The professor was very familiar with the GNU philosophy already, so that was not the issue. He quite well understood, that this university was flawed in its thinking. And he quite well understood that all GNU, OSI, and Mozilla software was also flawed for the same reason.

For every open source or free piece of software, there is another restrictive counter balance that goes along with that software. Unless of course, people change. Until the seating, parking spots, chairs, and desks are open and free from restriction, free and open software will remain a magical fallacy.

Not that open source and free software isn't nice. Just that the philosophies behind open and free software must be extended beyond software if they are truly interested in satisfying deep thinkers. Shallow thinkers will continue to believe software is magically different than other objects in life. "Free software" is not free software, it's subsidized software. Take a guess at the server bandwidth bill the OpenBSD project pays each month. $4000 a month? $20,000? Take a guess. You've been sold a lie by the freetards who say software is "different" because it's easily copy-able with virtually no costs. No lawyer costs either, folks. Uhm, yes there is.

Note: The author of this article uses and participates in open and free software. This is not an attack against open source software but rather a criticism of hypocrisy. This article was meant to bring out honesty and intelligence by playing devil's advocate for a moment. Why is software the only freedom people like Richard Stallman care about? Yeah, your education courses COULD be free too. In speech and in cost, since speech is very related to the high or low cost of it. The question is, if university is free and professors don't get paid, and nuclear energy is free, and wind power is free, and such and such is free, how many goal posts are you going to continue to move so that you can charge for something, or maybe charge for charging? GNGNGNGNGNG

See also:

Closed-Source-Consulting

Insight-Activism

Closed-Source-Knowledge

Problems-With-Society