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equal treatment, or equally bad treatmentequal treatment, or equally bad treatmentPosted Sep 21, 2007 6:11 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)In reply to: gNewSense by epa Parent article: MadWifi developers move to ath5k The "equal treatment" argument reminds me of the joke about the Russian peasant back in the Soviet days, who contacted his local Party official and complained: "My neighbor has two cows, and I only have one. Kill one of my neighbor's cows!" You are asking for equally bad treatment, subtracting a capability if that capability is only useful to a proprietary software developer. Free firmware would be great, but replaceable firmware beats a device that cannot be fixed at all if it has a flaw.
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equal treatment, or equally bad treatment Posted Sep 21, 2007 13:59 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] You are right that in any individual case it is better to have a device that someone can upgrade rather than enforce equally bad treatment on everyone. However, applying the rule of equal treatment to all cases creates an incentive for device makers to do the right thing, if their choice is between making the firmware updatable by the device's owner or not at all.
This 'all or nothing' rule is characteristic of the GPL (version 1 applied it to copyright, v2 to patent licences, and v3 to allowing updated versions to run). I think it has had some success in getting more free software and is worth continuing.
Bad analogy time: in many countries with forest fires it is illegal to build on land that has been cleared by burning, even if the fire was entirely natural. Clearly in any individual case this benefits nobody - it would be better to use the land rather than waste it. But as a general rule it helps to discourage people from starting fires deliberately.
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