Re: is free, open source software ethical?

Thant Tessman wrote:
> The point is that people act not because they expect the action to
> benefit themselves specifically. People act because they expect the
> action to bring about a result that they value. There is no reason that
> this can't be "a better world" in a genuinely altruistic sense.
> 
> In other words, of course there are people who "free" their code because
> they value in a genuinely altruistic sense the result of doing so.
> (How's that for bringing it back on topic?)

Perfect. Mark's claim (whether he really believes it or not) is that these
people act in error, either because the result of their doing is not what
they think it is, or else because the result is not as valuable as they
think it is.

For the sake of discussion let us assume that the 'damage' really has
happened, i.e. that small or medium sized (i.e. non-monopoly) companies
have been forced out of business because of some FOSS competitor. Now, I
think that there is no question that this is bad, at least for the people
owning these companies, maybe for the employees, too. However, this
badness
must be weighed against the equally unquestionabe beneficial effects. For
instance, many users have gotten a piece of software for free instead of
having to pay for it. /Maybe/ what they got is of lower quality, compared
to what the companies offered, but even if that were the case, obviously
the higher quality wasn't enough to outweigh the price difference. This is
the good old principle of capitalism. Most economists happily embrace
the 'creative destruction' that happens every day when companies die
because some competitor takes over their market share. If you think
differently, blame or criticise capitalism, but not free software.

So much for the 'they mean well but cause evil' case.

No, let us further assume that development of this piece of free software
has been sponsored by Big Money, either government or privately owned;
maybe even with declared (or secret) intent to annihilate commercial
competitors. I still claim that the situation is not comparable (in
evilness) to classical dumping. Why? Because with /free/ software it is
almost impossible to eventually profit from the resulting monopoly, i.e.
raise prices as soon as the competition has been stamped out. Just imagine
Sun or IBM in a few years trying to demand money for OpenOffice or Linux,
or whatever. It just doesn't work, people would simply copy the stuff,
fork
the projects, whatever, and no law could forbid this. The big player
cannot
unilaterally change the license, at least not if they received and
accepted
contributions from outside the sponsored (and, presumably, tightly
controlled and contract-bound) core developer team. Even if some large
company works a legal miracle (maybe with help from corrupt politicians
and/or judges) and succeeds at this, it would make the whole FOSS
community
extremely suspicious, so that it will hardly happen a second time.

I am sure that e.g. Sun has ulterior motives in sponsoring a free
competition for M$ office. It weakens M$'s grip on the market and that
alone might be worth the money. I am equally sure that they are not stupid
enough to believe they can create a monopoly with it, eventually reaping a
huge profit.

Cheers
Ben