On 05/12/06, Luke Dicken <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I love the soap boxes people find to lecture the world from. Drop me a line when capitalist society starts living up to these idealistic standards.
I'm surprised you think that Free Software is not part of capitalist society. Free Software is more pro-business than proprietary software is. If you buy a car, you don't expect that the bonnet is padlocked shut, so you can't do basic small things yourself like changing the oil, and that you can't take it to any independent mechanic. Instead, you have freedom to fix what you can yourself, and to help a thousand more mechanics make a million more pounds. All proprietary software developers are monopolists, because only they can pop the bonnet or your car, as it were. Yes, a free market prevents monopolists making _as much_ money as one where they have the market. But without monopolists - proprietary software developers - everyone else makes more money, overall.
Until then, I'm going to play by the same rules as other people do - holding yourself to a higher standard just to take the moral high ground is the very reason the phrase "cutting your nose off to spite your face" was coined.
Were people cutting off their noses to spite their faces in their struggle for freedom in the suffragette movement? Were people cutting off their noses to spite their faces in their struggle for freedom in the anti-apartheid movement? Consider "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?" - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder In that spirit, the Free Software movement is "willing to undergo the tremendous inconvenience to create a free program that's a replacement for a proprietary program. That's why we have the GNU/Linux system, because a lot of people were prepared to make practical sacrifices so we can have that freedom." - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/15/lessig_stallman_drm/ :-) -- Regards, Dave - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
