I would just like to add some thoughts about Richard Stallman and said
interview in Linux Action Show.
First of all, I believe that Richard and the FSF are fighting for a
moral and ethical dillema, something that belongs to the field of
Philosophy, not Economics, Computer Science and the likes.
If you read carefully all that the GNU Project and the FSF Foundation
has to say, with an open heart, you will understand what it is all
about. Just try to understand what Richard has to say when he speaks
about MIT lab and what happened there in the 70s. He wants software code
to be open to everyone, and to be protected against proprietaryship. He
states that software that people learn to use and depend on, has power
over them, so that is why it should be available for everyone to see,
and a policy to keep it that way (the GPL and similar licenses). He
wants the user to have power over the computer, and not the opposite.
He is not a messiah, he does not have all the answers, nor is trying to
have all the answers. He is just acting as a philosopher, he has found a
problem and he is showing you the solution for this problem. Other
problems require other solutions.
If you started working for the companies that do proprietary code,
before you learned about the evil behind it, and having sympathy for the
libre movement, understanding why it is unethical to do it, there is no
way that you can use the "feed the children" argument to make you become
ethical. Why people can't admit they are being unethical? It is very
hard to accept criticism or to understand that we are not 100% ethical
beings, we do things because sometimes we are too weak to try another
path, and usually having people that depend on us make us much more
prone to avoid risk.
What is unacceptable, in my opinion, is people claiming that they
support the Free Software movement, but believing that it is ethical to
work against it because they have children to feed. Really, Stallman
never said that he prefer children dieing, he said that there are other
ways to feed your children other than working with software at all, so
he can't agree with any ethics behind doing it. But if there really was
no other way, of course, as a good person, he would say that our lack of
ethics means nothing compared to the hunger, and that human beings might
do anything to survive. There is absolutely no reason that would turn
something unethical into something ethical, it is just morally accepted
because we can understand the state of despair that would make someone
break ethics, like stealing food to eat.
What Stallman wants to accomplish, is not making everyone turn sides and
become true supported of the Free Software movement. He wants people to
understand why it is unethical not to free the software, and to
influence people and companies to support this change. He wants the new
kids to grow up in a world that will support that freedom, so they can
have a choice and find jobs that will not work against it, before having
children and using them as leverage to unclaim their lack of ethics in
the software world.
I believe all this people that get so offended by Richard Stallman are
mostly people that are making a living from the companies that don't
support free software, and can't take criticism, that is why they get so
flamed and angry, because they can't live with the idea that they are
not being ethical. If they were more prone to humanistic sciences, maybe
they would understand that being ethical or unethical not necessarily
make a person bad, the human being is flawed and we should embrace
change and forgiveness. Nobody is perfect and even Richard is not a
completely ethical human being, I am sure that he did a lot of unethical
stuff, just like everyone else, but his job is to spread the word about
the Free Software movement and teach people about ethics in the software
world, he is not a saint, a guru or a messiah, and he can't let people
argument against what he has to say with fallacies and lack of
comprehension of Philosophy.
Feeding children has nothing to do with being for or against free
software, it is a personal problem that require personal decisions, just
don't try to kill all the movement by saying that kids are more
important than free software, so that is why we should all embrace
proprietary software because that is the best way to feed them. This is
absolutely not true. People that think this way are also being very
hypocritical, because if we really want to talk about children welfare
being above all, let's start discussing the capitalist world and how it
spreaded poverty around the globe, and how you all don't care about all
those starving babies in Africa when you are just caring about your own
children. I wonder if the guys that are angry with Richard would donate
all their excess money and possessions to feed that african children
that they find so important, while accusing Richard of hating them.
