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

[david <david.willington@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2007-03-28 at 14:10 +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
> 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.
I agree with most of that (except possibly that bit about not    
  understanding the difference between open source and free - I thought
 I'd got that sorted out). I think the argument's probably got    
 semantic. A lot of the proprietary practices are unethical I agree,  
 but I can't see a problem with writing some code and then not giving  
 it away. Getting people hooked in and then charging an arbitrary
  license fee for  instance is unethical. The only effective protection
 against unethical practices  is open sourcing as far as I can tell.
 I've been playing devil's advocate - I'm in the process of moving my
 wife onto Ubuntu from windows. If that isn't the ultimate statement of faith, I
 don't know what is!

All the best

David
> Cheers,
> 
> Alex.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
>         Sheffield Linux User's Group
>   http://www.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html
>  GNU - The choice of a complete generation


_______________________________________________
        Sheffield Linux User's Group
  http://www.sheflug.org.uk/mailfaq.html
 GNU - The choice of a complete generation