Balance relationships with companies

[Bernhard E. Reiter]

Hi Christian, Carsten, Paul,

thanks for your thoughs on this thread!
My response is coming late because school holidays were in between.


Am Dienstag 02 Juli 2019 15:36:10 schrieb Christian Imhorst:
> Am 28.06.2019 14:55 schrieb Bernhard E. Reiter:
> > (Facebook, just like the companies IBM, Microsoft and Google contribute
> > quite  significant amount code as Free Software and interact with the
> > communities. Applaudable even if they do bad things in other areas.)
>
> nope, they didn't. 
[..]

> It's really important to remind us of the moral dimension of software
> freedom and to link this to human freedom: Free Software is primarily
> for people and not to create freedom for companies. We've got to keep
> the social dimension of Free Software in perspective. Like free speech,
> Free Software should be a fundamental right and we should fight the
> proprietary vendor lock-in of cloud providers.

In my view a society can only prosper and give human freedom if we have 
companies, because currently a "social, ecological market economy"
(as it is called in Germany, see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy) 
is wordwide the socioeconomic model which is perceived as most successful.
(Even needing adjustment and balancing.)

If there are companies, we can see that they'll produce something within the 
laws of a democratic system which people have demand for and they are more or 
less progressive towards Free Software. For larger companies are so big, that 
they are like a hydra (the classic "monster") with many heads and some heads 
can be "good" and others can be "bad". Those companies evolve due to law, 
democratic trends, customer demands. 

If we want Free Software to succeed we must transform companies towards being 
more compliant with the social values of Free Software, like being able to 
help your neighbour. So we want their "better" heads to grow in power. We 
want more customers demanding more products with more freedom for them and we 
want more services offered where this is a key selling point. 

To do this we need to applaude steps that are in the right direction.
It is good that Android and Chromium is Free Software, it raised the chances
over Windows CE and Internet Explorer of people running this on other hardware
and studying and rebuilding it for their needs (LineageOSMicroG, 
Iridiumbrowser).

On a more philosophical note:
Altruism and self-interest can be align.
(Here is a German campaign https://www.unperfekthaus.de/altruismus/
You'll also find this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Grant 's 
Give or Take as "otherish". )

Regards,
Bernhard
 
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