GNU Business Network Definition comments

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Mon, 26 Jun 2006 11:00:45 +0100
 || Alex Hudson <home at alexhudson.com> wrote: 

 ah> Right. But I guess what I'm asking implicitly is, what is the
 ah> goal of the GBN?

Please see my mails of last week, they should be in the archive.


 ah> Food also gives us other examples: [...]

All comparisons are limited. I find the comparison with food limited
to the extent of being misleading, and not very useful, to be honest.

Software has very strong network effects, that apply force on others,
and take away their freedom of choice in a digital society.

This is not the case for food in general. But if you wanted to compare
software to food, you'd have to think of a world where a food supplier
was threatening to become so dominant that it could force everyone on
the planet to eat meat under threat of starvation.

And I guess you would care about that situation.

Proprietary software always seeks to establish a monopoly, and always
means control over others on a very intimate level. So I don't ever
think that doing business based on proprietary software a good or
acceptable idea.

That said: Different forms of proprietary software have differences in
the strength and range of impact. Also this world is not perfect, and
change takes time.

So we should IMHO always criticise proprietary software, but give
people a chance to change, supporting them for taking steps in the
right direction.

Doing that collectively as a community of developers, businesses and
customers is probably the fundamental idea behind the GBN.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 314 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20060626/1e1fcca5/attachment.sig>