Re: Org schemas we talked to be non-free, was: [ELPA] New package: repology.el

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Forgive me for a possibly naïve question, but why on earth would you
  > want to modify a schema?  It's the same as modifying a physical law.

  > Would you say that E = mc² is "non-free" because it cannot be
  > meaningfully modified at will?

We can't modify physics, but a physicist might very well want to modify
the equation E = mc².  For instance, perse might want to use natural units,
in which c = 1, which would give E = m.

Then perse might want to generalize to handle an object not at rest, by
including its momentum.  That gives E² - p² = m².

Or perse might want to express that in 4-dimensional covariant form as

    μ    2                                    2    2
p  p  = m   = p  p  - p  p - p  p - p  p   = E  - p
 μ             0  0    1  1   2  2   3  3

And that's considering only _valid_ equations for relating mass and
energy.  I might want to modify the equation to make it be valid for
some other purpose, or to present an instance of an equation which is
not valid.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)