21 Feb
2006
21 Feb
'06
11:30 a.m.
Chris Cannam <cannam(a)all-day-breakfast.com> writes:
An irony of both open source and free software is that
they make it
easy to forget that all software is almost always written by decent
humans -- for example, by implying that proprietary software
developers are less moral and so less significant. If my free
software work puts a company or its developers out of work, then
that's a problem for my conscience. It's not a victory for free
software. And it's not "just business", because it's not business.
I will have damaged people's livelihoods, for fun.
That particular argument does not hold water at all, sorry. Following
your kind of logic, people caring for peace on Earth are damaging the
livelihoods of weapon producers, decent people mostly, and that merely
for their selfish desire of a world worth living in.
If their livelihoods get tougher because of a world where work is
shared and exchanged between consenting and cooperating humans, so
much the better. It is a byproduct one can live with.
The mantra of artificial inefficiency by forced reinvention of the
wheel is nothing that aids progress: it merely supports stagnation, at
the same time burning through our natural resources at appalling rates
for the sake of sustaining the illusion of progress.
In the last century or so, the productivity of a worker in
industrialized countries has increased more than a hundredfold, the
average work time has dropped to about half. The missing factor of 50
is mostly smoke and mirrors: people mostly do nonsensical tasks, aim
for nonsensical goals, fight for nonsensical stuff.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum