[LAU] Some disturbing news

[Thorsten Wilms]

On 03.06.2018 19:52, Louigi Verona wrote:
> Saying that proprietary software is immoral is baseless.

That you either never read or just failed to understand Stallman's 
arguments doesn't make it baseless. Though even he has no problem with 
proprietary (nonfree) software, as long as the authors keep it to 
themselves.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html

The problem starts once you do anything that encourages another person 
to use non-free software, because in doing so, they will give up the 4 
freedoms. In turn, the entity controlling the non-free software gains 
influence.

Calling that immoral in itself may sound over the top at first, but it 
should be seen in the context of all the dark incentives and actual 
practices connected to it:
- Asking users to pay for licenses at costs way in excess of making a 
living.
- Bothering paying customers with license management.
- Pushing others to buy licenses to the same software for being able to 
work with closed file formats.
- Newer program versions that write files that can't be read by older 
versions (even if no new feature was used), to force all collaborators 
to update.
- Making and keeping things incompatible to potential competition in 
order to attain a larger piece of the cake and to maximise user dependency.
- Keeping deficiencies around that users may hope to be addressed in a 
costly update.
- Injecting spyware or other malware.
- DRM schemes.
- Incentive to create addictive software.


That said, there is no justice in how hard it is to earn a living 
working on Free Software and in how developers are treated by users at 
times, either.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/