Re: [Sheflug] NVidia on SuSE and the SuSE/Novell/M$ thing

[Alex Hudson <home@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 13:38 +0100, david wrote:
> Could you elucidate??? What exactly is unethical about proprietary
> software? The freedoms listed above seem to me a good thing that lead to
> dynamism in software and is empowering for everyone involved, but just
> because the alternative seems to be daft and inefficient doesn't mean
> they're unethical. There must be plenty of daft, inefficient practices
> that aren't also unethical. Have I missed one of the points of open
> source?

Well, you've missed one of the differences between open source and free
software :) 

I should say first, I think you can be supportive of free software
without recognising proprietary software as being actually unethical:
it's possible to be better relatively, in moral terms.

The ethics of the situation comes mainly down to the fact that software
can be reproduced without cost. That's very different to other resources
on this planet; the limits on software as a resource are effectively
(usually) infinite, and on that basis it's difficult to justify
"hoarding" software, and not sharing it.

It's a little bit like Star Trek food replicators. In the Star Trek
universe, they can turn energy/matter/whatever into any kind of food, in
food replicators - it's much like copying software. In that utopian
society, they solve world hunger - no-one needs to go without food.

The proprietary software equivalent in that analogy is that even with
food replicators, they should charge for each meal served. Rather than
solve world hunger, they prevent people from "copying" free meals for
each other since they do not want cooks and chefs from going out of
business. Because the situation is hypothetical, perhaps our viewpoint
is clearer (or perhaps it's more utopian and less realistic ;), but it
seems obviously correct to me that on balance, you want to solve world
hunger.

Of course, the issue is one of knowledge and learning, and not of
survival, so while the principle is similar, the effects of making a
different decision are different. But, it does seem to many people that
hoarding knowledge and information (and software) for essentially
protectionist reasons is basically wrong.

Cheers,

Alex.


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