> On Tue, 2007-11-06 at 14:00 +0100, Torsten Werner wrote: >> Hi Sam, >> > Freedom always comes down to politics. >> >> very true. In such situations the argument about saving money / >> minimizing costs can become the most important one in getting things >> changed. But such arguments should not be used because that violates >> our ideology as we could read in the blog of Marcus Rejas.
I disagree very strongly with the argument put forward on that blog. While some people might have plenty of money to spend on software, there are many (a majority in the world) who do not. As it happens, in a country like Spain which supposedly has quite high levels of wealth, a majority of people are using proprietary software without a licence. This is true both of individual users, and even SMEs. What this means, in practice, is that many people make the choice that breaking the law is a better option that paying for software. I think it is very clear that proprietary software pricing is abusive. The level of surplus value extracted from a zero-marginal-cost good, which in a free market would have near zero cost, is obscene. The fact that Free Software is rationalizing the pricing model of software, tending towards a zero cost per copy and a non-zero cost for services which actually require labour inputs, is in my view yet another important thing in its favour. I admit that the freeness and costlessness conflation is problematic, and that for psychological reasons people often equate zero cost with zero worth, but that's not sufficient to make the no-cost argument out of bounds. Freedoms 0 and 2 also tend towards creating a zero cost per copy, even if commercial distributors ask for a price, and that is a systemic part of the Free Software story. A great thing about Free Software is the possibilities for democratizing access to information technology and goods. When even in the European context people often break the law (having then the sword of Damokles over their heads) or choose to go without, Free Software gives an opportunity to make the best and widest use of computers. In the developing world, this needs not be said, I think, but it also holds for Europe to some extent. --David. ---AV & Spam Filtering by M+Guardian - Risk Free Email (TM)--- _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list [email protected] https://mail.fsfeurope.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
