On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Adam Monsen wrote: > On Tue, 2008-10-21 at 00:56 -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > >> Aside from the funny stuff, it was interesting to hear him talk about >> free software. He says that proprietary software is unethical. I need >> to hear more from him about ethics. I've read a lot of his stuff but I >> don't understand why proprietary software is immoral, at least I don't >> understand it well enough to convince anyone else. > > I interpret the unethical part to be "proprietary software robs us of > our freedoms". That's unethical, right? Playing devil's advocate: We are free not to buy it, and if we buy it we agree to the terms, so what freedom is taken from us? > If you buy an iPhone, you agree to let Apple lock you into their > software because of the Digital Restrictions Management stuff on the > phone. You cannot do whatever you want with that iPhone. That's > unethical, right? If I buy hardware, I should be able to run whatever I > want on it. More devil's advocate: What is unethical? Is it the purchase or the sale? Or both? The thing is, Apple decides pricing based on expected use of the product. When Apple's software is used on the iPhone, Apple expects to get something in return for that, say, via their online stores. There is also some agreement with AT&T. Obviously Apple has a reason and it has to do with their revenue stream. Because they can make money from users, they can charge them less up front. Is this an unethical system? Isn't it the same kind of thing as agreeing to buy a year of cable service to get a free DVR? >> I know why I don't like it and why I want to avoid it, but that is >> based on years of bad experiences with it (and good experiences with >> free software), not on a philosophical argument. > > Agreed, this is why I use Free² Software, too! I feel like "they already > thought of everything", and the GNU utilities and GNU C library are > quite excellent implementations. Fast, well documented, simple, useful. > They run on any hardware. > > Non-Free² software is often more convenient... I think most people > *don't* care that proprietary software "robs us of our freedoms", and > just want to get done whatever they're doing on a computer as fast as > possible. Non-Free² software is also marketed much more heavily. > > So, how do I convince someone that they must care about their freedoms? Let's take Irfanview for example... http://www.irfanview.com/ It's a nice little image viewer that I use on Windows computers. What is unethical about using Irfanview? It is easy to use and I like it. I know that I don't have source, I can't therefore modify and distribute source, it obviously doesn't have a GPL-compatible license. What is unethical about using it? Am I behaving unethically, or is the developer behaving unethically, or both? If there is something unethical about using Irfanview, I would think that implies that someone is being harmed. Who is harmed by Irfanview or by my use of Irfanview? I don't like to use Windows computers but it is often necessary. Mike