Re: [Fsfe-uk] Mac OS X refund

[Noah Slater]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 02:34:36PM +0100, Andrew Savory wrote:
> No, I'm not. In an ideal world I should be able to release my FooMatic
> software tomorrow under a license that gives you the right to only run it on
> Thursdays and that you have to give me a beer every time you use it. If you
> buy it and accept the license, all is good with the world. You have the
> freedom to accept it, or not. I have not restricted your freedoms other than
> the restrictions you _may_ accept. But by forbidding me from releasing my
> software under that license, you are restricting _my_ freedoms.

Sure, but please see my sig for my comment on that.

> IMHO, FLOSS is centered around the concept of freedoms, not ethics.

There are two things wrong this statement.

Firstly, FLOSS doesn't exist, it's just a nice way to refer to two
completely seperate socio-political movements. The Free Software
movement is about computing ethics and the Open Source movement is
about computing pragmatism.

Which leads me on to the second point, which is that YHO doesn't come
into it, these two movements exist outside of your interpretation of
them and to say that the Free Software movement is not about ethics is
like saying that the RIAA is about freedom.

> That I can decide to pay money to run a closed platform on my laptop
> is a freedom.

Freedom isn't universally a good thing. I don't have the freedom to
take your words and claim them for my own, I don't have the freedom to
slander you in public and I don't have the freedom to bash you about
the head when I meet you in person. All these restrictions are good
things.

To say that the Free Software movement is about freedoms and then
claim that as a free software champion I should support the choice of
non-free software is a strawman argument. The Free Software movement
is about ethics, and sometimes it is ethical to restrict as well as
liberate.

-- 
Noah Slater <http://bytesexual.org/>

"Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as
society is free to use the results." - R. Stallman