Re: [DotGNU]DotGNU Manifesto - first draft

[David Sugar]

There are plenty of other reasons and situations where a society may 
choose to restrict "limitless profit potential" of a few for the overall 
good of the whole.  For example, imagine what the practice of medicine 
could be like without the ethics of things like the hippocratic oath 
getting in the way of making a profit on someone's illness?  Should we 
permit a for profit market in human organs because it might improve the 
economy a little?

If we as a society permit things like exclusionary practices common in 
proprietary software and granting of temporary monopolies on ideas 
because it benefits the profits of existing organizations at the cost of 
everyone's freedom, is this very different from saying let's suspend 
parts of the constitution for awhile because freedom is currently 
interefering with the ability of government to maximize it's policies?

Freedom as an ethic has nothing to say directly about pro or 
anti-business when taken in whole that I can see.  That it can 
potentially prevent the rise of unnatural market monopolies and 
encourage more market diversity by loweing barriers to market entry is 
probably in the long run market neutral.  One might even say in that 
role it can function as the invisible hand of capitalism immortalized by 
Adam Smith.  As such, I cannot think of anything that is more 
pro-capitalist for the software market than Free Software.

No, I see nothing anti-business in the GPL.

Richard Stallman wrote:

>    Some people call the GNU GPL/LGPL 'antibusiness'.  They say 'It's not
>    conducive to profit-making enterprise.'
>
> It is not conducive to the practice of making a profit by trampling
> our freedom and dividing our community.  However, that practice is
> antisocial and ought to be discouraged one way or another.
>
> We encourage people to make a profit, as long as they respect our
> freedom and our community.
>
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