Re: is free, open source software ethical?

Ben Franksen wrote:

[...lots o' stuff...]

I'm not exactly sure of the point you're trying to make, but there are 
some other points that need to be made.

First, there is no such thing as dumping. It simply doesn't happen in 
the real world. It's a myth invented by people to try to explain away as 
'cheating' why someone else is able to produce something more 
efficiently than they are. Any company that has the resources to 
underprice a product for an extended period of time in order to put 
competition out of business also has the resources to simply *buy* the 
competition. This is what happens in the real world.[1]

Second, it's pure nonsense to argue that the market is somehow worse off 
because someone wasn't able to make a profit on something that someone 
else decided to give away. It's like saying we're all worse off because 
there isn't someone there to charge us for air. Yeah, someone who would 
otherwise be in a position to charge us for air might make such an 
absurd argument, but certainly his position is a bit biased.

None of this is to defend 'free' software as somehow morally superior to 
commercial software. What matters is that people get to decide for 
themselves how to dispose of the product of their labor. A programmer 
has every right to sell his labor to a corporation for monetary 
compensation, and alternatively every right to 'free' it in the GPL 
sense. They are both perfectly reasonable and honorable forms of 
compensation. A corporation even has the right to pay programmers to 
write GPL'd code. A programmer also has ever right to simply give away 
the products of his labor for social status, or psychic satisfaction, or 
purely altruistic intentions. As long as such contracts are voluntarily 
entered and not fraudulent, who has any right to complain?

-thant


[1] Dumping *does* happen, but only under conditions that cannot be 
described as free market. For example, central banks will dump gold or 
financial institutions will dump oil futures to manipulate the price for 
political ends.