I take the point you are making about the potential dangers of spreading
uninformed speculation as fact. However, I think it's worth pointing out that
the OP isn't making erroneous claims of fact based on ignorance. He is posing
open questions, to start a discussion about medium-to-long-term software
freedom strategy. I think this is valuable, and it's sad to see people
shouting him down for his initiative. The clarifications offered by various
people about the relationship between Microsoft and Canonical, between
Windows and Ubuntu, and between Ubuntu and Trisquel, have been much more
helpful.
There are lots of important things each of us don't know very much about
(yet), and bringing them up for discussion in a community of shared values is
one of the better ways of becoming more informed. For example, I would have
made the same assumptions as Onpon4 about vaccinations had I not read the
chapter on them in the anti-vivisection book 'Animal Research Takes Lives –
Humans and Animals Both Suffer' by Bette Overell:
http://web.archive.org/web/20130709043025/http://www.health.org.nz/chapter5.html
As a result of reading this, my daughter was not vaccinated during the first
two years of her life. More recently I decided to look into the issue in more
depth, and map out both sides of the issue here (note this is a work in
progress and help is welcome):
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/drillingfortruth/vaccinations
One of the things I have discovered is there are whole organisations of
medical professionals who do not support vaccination, such as the
International Council on Vaccination:
http://www.vaccinationcouncil.org/about/
When we consider that science is, at its core, the constant modification of
theories in response to new evidence and reconsideration of existing
evidence, the claim that any criticism of vaccination is a sign of ignorance
or mental illness is fundamentally anti-scientific propaganda. The claim that
the scientific evidence on vaccination is as clear-cut as the evidence for
anthropogenic climate change is also propaganda. As an radical
environmentalist since childhood, I acknowledge my bias towards believing in
climate change, so like any honest scientist, I set out to prove the null
hypothesis of the climate "skeptics". When I carefully examined a number of
the "skeptic" arguments and the evidence for them, with an open mind, they
inevitably collapsed when I read just the abstract of the papers cited as
evidence. Vaccination is a different kettle of fish, with both sides
presenting plausible arguments backed by peer-reviewed evidence, suggesting
that some vaccinations may be safe and beneficial, while others may be
harmful or ineffective, and that a healthy scepticism towards vaccinations is
an informed and rational approach.
