Re: is free, open source software ethical?

On Mar 4, 10:34=A0am, Mark Tarver <dr.mtar...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> A long time ago, sometime in the 70s I believe, a friend of mine used
> to work for RCA. =A0Right at that time Japan was expanding its
> electronics market in the Pacific and the Japanese were capturing the
> market from RCA by selling below cost. =A0My friend bitterly condemned
> these practices as unethical.
>
> This practice, called 'dumping', is generally condemned, and can often
> be prosecuted under law. =A0It has been used and criticised as such on
> several occasions e.g. w.r.t. the dumping of subsidised EC surplus
> produce on poor African nations, on Rockeller's ruthless expansion of
> Standard Oil by undercutting.
>
> In the defence of open source software, Richard Stallman was willing
> to condemn closed source software as unethical. =A0Now here is a
> thought. =A0Is it rather *free software which is unethical* because the
> supplier is dumping a free product from the position of having a
> subsidy?
>
> To put some flesh on the bare bones of this proposition. =A0Imagine if
> someone were to use their comfortably paid university position to
> produce, (e.g), a free GPL algebra tutor, thus putting out of business
> a struggling company trying to sell their own version. =A0Would this be
> ethical? =A0Is it not the ethical equivalent of dumping?
>
> This is posed as an open question, and a fairly important one (hence
> the cross post). =A0You should not assume that I'm against free/open
> source from my posing this question, although I'm willing to 'play
> black' (attack OS/free) in this thread if the responses are too one
> sided.
>
> Mark Tarverwww.lambdassociates.org

Can I make a guitar and then give it away?

How about ten guitars? 100, 1000?

As I see it, if I want to spend my own money and resources making
guitars and giving them away, it is my own business and there is
nothing wrong with it, even though some guitar companies might not
like it.

On the other hand, I do see one small exploitation.  Sometimes, a mess
of college kids throw themselves into creating these free tools,
because 'Hey -- stick it to the man!'.  And then someone else bundles
them up and puts them on a CD (Let's call it "GreenHat") and sells it
for $170 {the kids get nothing, and they did a large fraction of the
work}.  Oh, wait, they don't sell the CD -- that's a violation of GPL
-- they sell a service contract.  Anyway, the odd man out I see in
this picture is those kids who were more or less tricked into working
for nothing.  Now, lots of them do go into it with both eyes open but
some of them are fooled also.

At any rate, I see open source software as generally a good thing, but
I also think it should be a choice.  I do think that algorithms are a
form of mathematics and should be public domain like mathematics
itself (which cannot be patented) but that is neither here nor there.
Of course, I would obey even those laws that I disagree with, because
society has chosen them.

So here is the ideal situation that I would like to see:

1.  Lots of software licenses from commercial, totally closed to
public domain and everything in between.
2.  Lots of innovation shared by projects like those hosted at
sourceforge.
3.  Lots of excellent research like that which is hosted at
universities around the world and then made available on Citeseer (I
*Hate* those 'pay $25 for this article' places -- but I also recognize
their right to do that)
4.  Oh, and no software patents.

I have been involved in just about every sort of open source and
closed source project that there is.  I have done GPL, LGPL, BSD,
Public Domain, etc. as well as commercial software.  I have no
problems with any of it.