"Dave Crossland" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I am proposing that this is a practical problem, not an ethical one. > Please explain the ethical dimension of this.
If the user accepts a binary without source code, they have given up their individual freedom to help themself, and they have broken the solidarity for the whole user community to help each other. A binary is a temptation to give up that freedom and break that solidarity. So the user loses the ability to protect their other rights such as their right to privacy, and society loses the ability to control the general direction of software progress and to decide how software should treat society. Saying that software is purely practical is like saying that the news in our newspapers is purely practical (it's just information, right?), but everyone can see the ethical aspects of freedom of the press. -- Ciarán O'Riordan __________________ \ http://fsfeurope.org/projects/gplv3 http://ciaran.compsoc.com/ _________ \ GPLv3 and other work supported by http://fsfe.org/fellows/ciaran/weblog \ Fellowship: http://www.fsfe.org _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
