[Fsfe-ie] Re: ethical interpretations of FS

Aidan Delaney adelaney at cs.may.ie
Tue Feb 3 14:52:56 CET 2004


> Good: companies can take a bigger reward for their work, thus
> encouraging
> more work to be done.
> 
> Bad: if Word was free then the number of people who could save 300
> quid is
> effectively unlimited, also people could customise the software to
> meet
> their needs and never worry about being held to ransom by a monopoly
> 
> The FSF would argue that the bad actually outweighs the good in the
> second
> case. It might be true but it's not good news for the dot commers,
>
I don't believe this to be the arguement of the FSF.  I don't really  
care much for Word and I don't think R.M.S. cares because you spend  
€300 on it, but because it is non-Free Software.  I don't much care for  
OpenOffice either, but because it is released under a Free Software  
licence the Free Software philosophy would allow OpenOffice to charge  
€300 for it.

On another note.  Ian's egold password is personal information  
(hopefully protected by legislation) and is not source code.  Source  
code could be argued to belong to the commons.

--
Thank you,
Aidan Delaney.

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html 
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