Today's quiz

Today's quiz

Posted Nov 18, 2006 10:47 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Today's quiz by bronson
Parent article: Resisting the binary blob

Not really. It is a bit confusing because there are two sets of principles here. The first one is the set of principles embodied in free software: that software must be free (just as speech, since it is another form of human expression), that proprietary (closed) software is bad, that binary blobs have bad consequences.

I explained that this set of principles applies generally because it derives from another, simpler set of principles: that helping others is good, and not sharing good things is bad. Not all children learn these ideas; remember the greedy kid in the corner who has all the goods but no friends. What is worse: we tend to forget those principles as we grow up.

What our correspondent here (as well as certain kernel developers) don't seem to understand is that both sets of principles are very much the same; or, being more precise, we do not agree to the extent of the equivalence. Both are practical in nature, since they have immediate, real-world consequences (as the Open Source crowd likes to point out). Both can be theoretically justified (as in games theory or elaborate essays). And both have ethical consequences which you have to consider.

Many kernel devs don't think that the Kindergarten principle of helping others necessarily applies to their work, which is fine -- but wrong. Torvalds in particular seems to think that it is only about sharing code between professionals (tit-for-tat, a famous Kindergarten principle + games theoretical concept [as I have just learned]), but that Tivo-like locked down systems (which do not certainly help others) are OK. Again, not enough thought is given to the consequences of one's actions, which is not so surprising since you have to be a bit obsessive to think things through in this manner.

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