On 2/5/07, Dave Crossland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Please explain how a lack of sourcecode is immoral.
I do think there are ethical issues with closed source and restrictive information models. It is more about what the overall goal for technology (and information) is for a society and whether restrictive models enable those things to be. I think that in a global sense we are a global community making decisions about business, economics, health, environment, diplomacy based on information systems, technologies and law which are controlled by individuals and which can not be mapped and understood as a system of knowledge. Sometimes it is the context that makes it most obvious. Here are some software examples: Voting machines need to be seen to be transparently accurate unbiased and effective. Public information systems and systems where the technologies are modelling in order for decisions to be made based on the outcomes of those models should be open source for the same reason. We need to be able to see the path the data takes in order to understand whether the decision or recommendation matches with our own ideas about what the contributing factors and processes should be. And in the information space: One of the petition's signatories, Richard J Roberts, Nobel Prize winner for Physiology or Medicine in 1993, said: "Open access to the published scientific literature is one of the most desirable goals of our current scientific enterprise. Since most science is supported by taxpayers it is unreasonable that they should not have immediate and free access to the results of that research. Furthermore, for the research community the literature is our lifeblood. By impeding access through subscriptions and then fragmenting the literature among many different publishers, with no central source, we have allowed the commercial sector to impede progress. It is high time that we rethought the model and made sure that everyone had equal and unimpeded access to the whole literature. How can we do cutting edge research if we don't know where the cutting edge is?" The petition is available at: http://www.ec-petition.eu/
From the Yale symposium:
"The panel discussions focused attention on the need to acknowledge the policital, legal and economic as well as technical relevance of software code and of software standards processes; that software standards are policies in disguise, that code is law, and that our institutions exist today in the wrong shape to cope with creating and managing technology that serves both public and private interests." http://fussnotes.typepad.com/plexnex/2007/02/yaly_osi_sympos.html We have laws developed for and in partnership with specific interest groups, owners of components of our information and technology interests. We do not have a responding strong guiding hand representing overall systemic role of information and technology in society. We need to develop ways of making business and culture which are not dependent on restrictive practice because restrictive practice has high costs for the social roles of both information and technology as a global community. In many spheres the individual control of information by specific interest groups is achieving business outcomes for individual entities at great social and environmental costs. Patents on AIDs vaccines, debates about who is *allowed* to develop vaccines for bird flu, how technology and information can be effective tools we can participate and interact with rather than products we can consume uncritically. Access 2 Knowledge movement is the response to this situation. We are lucky that open source software is probably one of the areas where people are finding hands on practical ways to have business, technology and culture without restrictive licenses, other areas perhaps have some of that work still to do. Janet _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
