[Fsfe-ie] Re: ethical interpretations of FS

Fergal Daly fergal at esatclear.ie
Tue Feb 3 16:37:29 CET 2004


On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 01:52:56PM +0000, Aidan Delaney wrote:
> >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.

RMS should (and I'd imagine does but we should really ask him) care about
that 300e because it's money that could have been spent on creating or
improving a free version or at the very least it would not going into the
lobbying/exploiting/developing fund of the worlds largest non-free software
advocate.

There are other reasons for him to care but as I explained in my reply to
Ian, this was simply a counterexample to Ian's "no personal secrets" is
isomorphic to "all users should get the source" statement. So conclusions
about the goodness or badness of one do not automtically transfer to the
other. It was not supposed to give an exhaustive analysis of why the FSF
believes that they do,

F


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