----- Forwarded message from Aaron Swartz <m...@aaronsw.com> ----- Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:43:32 -0400 From: Aaron Swartz <m...@aaronsw.com> To: Kragen Javier Sitaker <kra...@canonical.org> Subject: Re: Saying “Do no evil” excludes you from any serious conversation about Google
> May I forward this and my reply to kragen-discuss? Of course. > That sounds plausible. So how do you interpret "make money without doing > evil"? It seems to me that anyone taking actions in the world is going to do > a > little evil, so you can't really make money while doing *no* evil. I think the solution lies in a proper understanding of the word evil. In no way is "eating a small chunk of leftover meat" evil, as you suggest. Evil doesn't mean wrong -- it's a much higher bar than that. I agree it's hard to live in the world, let alone make money, without doing anything harmful to anyone, but I do think it's possible without doing anything that's fundamentally evil, which they seem to define as systematically hurting their users in order to increase their profits. There are lots of companies that you could say do evil in this sense: Printer manufacturers who put DRM on their toner cartridges, for example. Apple's requirement that companies not sell ebooks through their iOS app. Web publishers who break articles up into 20 pages to increase their ad impressions. AFAIK, Google has never done anything like that, which is pretty remarkable if true. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- To unsubscribe: http://lists.canonical.org/mailman/listinfo/kragen-discuss
