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franz schaefer wrote:
I like to reason around 'ethics' and have suggested the following: A company that daily accepts its social responsibility towards reaching freedom in the digital age, respecting the ideals contained in the GNU Manifesto.
since you explicitly mention "social responsibilty" here. i think the whole debate has a lot in common with the CSR discurse. CSR - corporate social responsibilty. it is the new hype word that everyone uses. the ideas behind it is that corporations do not want to go through the tedious process of convincing/bribing government to make laws in their interest but to make them themself.
CSR is a promising avenue. It appears to affect very large companies more than Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Leveraging CSR would allow the GBN to be marketed as a positive solution for companies wishing to gain social legitimacy. However, CSR depends on a company making enough money to have time to fret about its public social image. Most companies are so busy just staying afloat that they can't invest resources into these matters. In other words, CSR is a great selling point to large enterprises but it might make up a much smaller part of the decision-making process in a SME.
It would be interesting to read through CSR literature and to examine how GBN marketing could utilize terms and concepts that would resonate with the CSR approach. It might create greater 'buy-in' from firms that are currently non-free.
2 have labels: one positiv and one negative. "GNU friendly bussiness" and "hostile to free software" (e.g. because they do not give out hardware specs for drivers). so if one corporation wants to polish up their public image with a CSR report they could go for the first one but they will not want that someone who googles the company name finds them listet on the list of bad corporations....
I believe this idea may have merit. A list of companies that do *not* support Free Software may be useful for people making partnership and purchasing decisions. However, at the same time this would potentially introduce an air of negativity to the GBN. There is a danger with introducing a concept like this that freedom friendly companies may be alienated. A degree of direct negativity towards xyz company might unnerve perfectly innocent parties. It may also open the GBN to criticism as an 'extremist' network with a hidden agenda. In other words, such a list could be used by critical parties to formulate charges against the GBN.
Shane
- -- Shane Martin Coughlan e: shane@opendawn.com m: +447773180107 (UK) +353862262570 (Ire) w: www.opendawn.com - --- OpenPGP: http://www.opendawn.com/shane/publickey.asc