I suggested: > > Ethics is a rather personal thing. You'll want to define membership > >criteria for a SIG, and totally avoid the phrase 'ethics'.
On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Mark Lane wrote: > Why would we want this? All professional organizations from Medical Board > to Engineering Associations have ethical standards by which their members > are required to adhere. The Linux / Open Source / Free Software community is considerably more diverse than these groups, IMNSHO. There would be much more agreement on what is 'ethical' and what is not, and thus not a huge amount of time spent debating this. Example: Is it "ethical" to take software that is Free Software, and make a proprietary derivative of it? A GPL-type person would say it is not ethical, and points at the GPL anti-theft provisions (Theft being "making free software proprietary"). A BSD-type person would say it is not only totally ethical, it is encouraged by the BSD license and is considered pragmatic. They consider the GNU-type persons restriction of GPL'd software from usage by Software Manufacturing to be unethical. These two groups each have their supporters and those who strongly disagree. This is even a strong disagreement within two groups of *FREE SOFTWARE* developers, and it gets much more complex when you add in the non-Free Software Open Source, or the non-Open Source Linux stuff. You could spend years just debating whether Apple is an ethical company, given their promotion (or is it unethical exploitation of? That's the debate) Open Source with Darwin. http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ I don't think you would find the same type of debate of the fundamentals in other professional fields. CLUE has quite a bit of work ahead of it to avoid these discussions happening over-and-over again within its forums, and with membership/SIG requirements/guidelines. --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> See http://weblog.flora.ca/ for announcements, activities, and opinions Getting Open Source and Linux INto GovernmentS | No2Violence in Politics http://www.flora.org/dmca/forum/942 | http://www.no-dot.ca/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
