[Fsfe-ie] Re: ethical interpretations of FS

[Aidan Delaney]

I believe I'm starting to believe Ian.
> Because then the user would not be dependent on the author of X for
> all fixes and improvements.
This is where free market comes in.  Users have a coice wheather to use  
services that rely on Free Software or on propritery software.  I and  
the FSF say that all software should be Free, but we cannot _force_  
people to make their software free.

> This reason cannot be applied to passwords.
> 
> The important part is not software being freely available, it's the
> user being free from restrictions once they have the software.
Again this a market choice thing.  Go with MS on your desktop or GNU/ 
Linux.  One can shop for services in the same way.

> The Free in FSF is about far more than freely available. In fact the
> FSF say
> freely available source is no good on it's own. The Freedom they are
> concerned with is the Freedom to modify, use and redistribute  
> modified
> versions without any control from the original author.
Agreed.  We must also have the freedom to choose non-Free software :)   
I personally belive that I should have the freedom to use only Free  
software, I don't think that I have the freedom to curtail someone  
else's use of non-Free software.  Except where they use Free software  
owned by me and make it non-Free.

I don't have time to read the rest of your email.  I'll reply on Monday
--
Aidan Delaney.

If you believe in the health of the software economy, this has been  
based on IP.
  -- Jean Philippe Courtois, head of Microsoft's European operations
The health of the software economy has been based on the open standard  
Internet Protocol.
  -- me
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-ie/attachments/20040205/ef95ce3e/attachment.pgp