Good for google! They hire themselves into fame and therefore look "good" in the process. If the individual thinks that the money is worth it for him/her we have a transaction. Nowhere do I see any ethical questions. Google is in it for the money and someone needs to pay a mortgage. End of transaction. Both parties benefit.
I am going to say something that most people will frown upon but here goes. Writing open/free source code is mostly a selfish activity. That's right I said it. I'd bet money that most people that write code and give it away do it because they can and make themselves feel better in the process (resume padding, fame, power in the community, $my_reason_for_writing_free_code etc). They don't do it for altruistic reasons like "ZOMG I am stopping world hunger with OMGOS". I am of the opinion that all these so called ethical questions are trivial and uninteresting. A company selling software is in no way shape or form unethical provided they abide by the law. You might disagree with their way of doing business but that really doesn't make it "unethical"; maybe questionable behavior or unwanted behavior but really ethics are really only applied to much more interesting life events. Ask yourself this question. Do you really believe that someone who sells a product which was developed within the lawful frame work is unethical? Also ask yourself the question if you like computers and the internets and if it would exist if it wasn't for some people making money of it. Do you work in the field of IT? Are you therefore unethical? On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 09:44:00AM -0700, Jack J. Woehr wrote: > A professional peer of mine wrote the following article: > > http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23417 > > which contains the following paragraph: > > Google's hired great open source developers from projects like > Linux, Firefox, Samba and Apache. > They all still have ties back into those projects. Now these key > hires can help influence open source > development projects that happen to indirectly benefit Google. Plus, > open source developers would > love to help improve their projects and displace Microsoft. A win-win. > > I'd like to ask the community what they think: Is the hiring of open source > star coders in expectation of > ancillary benefit from their influence in Open Source projects a win-win > form of "voting with your > feet" or is it an ethical conflict? I'm curious how we all see this. > > -- > Jack J. Woehr > Director of Development > Absolute Performance, Inc. > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > 303-443-7000 ext. 527
