What about Nat Friedman? [LWN.net]

What about Nat Friedman?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 21:33 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510)
In reply to: What about Nat Friedman? by khim
Parent article: Jeremy Allison Has Resigned from Novell to Protest MS Patent Deal (Groklaw)

The problem with ethical position is that there are none.

You're saying that ethics is not a valid concept with regard to business. That's not true, a more accurate statement would be that the law sees no ethical position. And that's a bug, not a feature.

There are many laws regarding a business and its obligation to stockholders and others. For the most part the laws penalize particular concrete examples of unethical behavior rather than any unethical behavior. Some laws, like RICO, come closer to addressing ethics than others.

You may not go to jail or be successfully sued for breaking a promise. But, as you point out, your business may suffer consequences that are just as bad. As Jeremy pointed out, Novell have made pariahs of themselves. This may well lead to failure of their Linux business, especially since they are headed for a collision with GPL 3 on Samba, Libc3, etc., and they haven't been very successful in generating Linux business even without being a pariah among many people who might previously have recommended them.

Thanks

Bruce

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What about Nat Friedman?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 22:50 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

The money Microsoft is paying to Novell exceeds their Linux revenues by a
large factor. Whatever ethics its has, a company cannot ignore the
business side of things. So, business won from ethics in this case, but
this is too little to consider Novell is not our enemy. They did and do
many good things for Linux.

What about Nat Friedman?

Posted Dec 21, 2006 22:51 UTC (Thu) by dmantione (guest, #4640) [Link]

Correction: "this is too little to consider Novell is our enemy"

What about Nat Friedman?

Posted Dec 22, 2006 14:36 UTC (Fri) by skvidal (subscriber, #3094) [Link]

Ethics should always come before business decisions. Otherwise we end up with enron and worldcomm/mci and tyco. That's the shame of it all. We've actually been beaten into the idea that it's acceptable to do evil as long as it is in the name of business. So sad.

What about Nat Friedman?

Posted Jan 7, 2007 20:16 UTC (Sun) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

I strongly disagree with your assertion that the fact that the law is not inherently moral is a bug.

My guess is that when you say you want 'ethical laws' you mean laws that correspond with your ethics, but ethics are inherently subjective. Large parts of the earths population considers various actions like the use of prophylaxis, the owning of property, using surgery to correct life threatening medical conditions, working on certain days of the week, eating certain foodstuffs or homosexuality unethical. My aunt, who is hardcore catholic, probably thinks it is unethical _not_ to eat fish on fridays. Luckily she doesn't want to force her views on ethics on the rest of the world. Unfortunatly, the rest of the world doesn't feel that way. Various attempts to encode the ethics of a specific grouping (usually a religion) into common law is a widespread disease, both today and five centuries ago.

I want a world where law is as far removed from morals as possible, and instead focuses on providing a basic framework for different people with different customs and morals to meet and interact with each other as equals. This framework should only consist of fundamental rights like the rights to life liberty and propery. Anything above that should be up to the individual.