[email protected] wrote:
The whole community is harmed: users of Skype reinforce Microsft's monopoly and impede the rest of the group from switching to free software. And the problem propagates down to the operating system because, as far as I understood, Skype for GNU/Linux is technically much worse than Skype for Windows (ethically, both versions are equally abject).
I was about to bring up this very point, thanks for raising it. Eben Moglen raised a similar point with regard to email in part 3 of his "Snowden and the Future" series of talks regarding email (see http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html for a transcript starting with "Those who wish to earn off you want to define privacy as a thing you transact about with them, just the two of you.").
I concur, and I don't think Skype users are doing this maliciously. I think they're inviting others to be harmed out of the ignorance and naivete that got them into using nonfree software such as Skype -- they're making decisions along the lines they've been taught to favor. They've been taught to value convenience and price, so they do.
Convenience is repeatedly reinforced but freedom talk is pushed aside (perhaps as inconvenient, not 'good for business', circularly dismissed as unimportant due to being unpopular), outright ignored, or called silly.
