Interpreting Stallman
Posted Dec 4, 2002 23:37 UTC (Wed) by
josh_stern (guest, #4868)
In reply to:
No future in proprietary software (ZDNet) by rknop
Parent article:
No future in proprietary software (ZDNet)
Stallman is smart and reasonably practical. His pronouncements seem
puzzling primarily because his ethical position is unusual and hard to
grasp even after he explains it. Consider an analogy between his view of
proprietary software and the view that many people have of prostitution.
Critics of prostitution argue that it damages society at large and the
individuals that participate in it. These critics would exhort others
to shun prostitution, whether or not it was illegal. Similarly,
Stallman feels that proprietary software is damaging to society at large
and should be shunned. In articles like the given link, he is saying
that the evil of proprietary software could be avoided without seriously
harming the amount of work that gets done by society. So really, there
are two different classes of disagreement with him - Class I: not
agreeing that proprietary software is evil in the way or to the extent
that he claims, and Class II: not agreeing that free software can be
economically substituted in all or most all cases (e.g. because of the
extra overhead involved in other ways of collecting funds to pay
programmers or other ways of protecting trade secrets embedded in the
code).
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