Re: gds.el --- Emacs interface to Google Desktop Search

[Tim X]

"Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:

>     I use some
>     commercial software on my GNU/Linux system simply because there is no
>     free version available
> 
> "Commercial" and "free" are not opposites.  To be "commercial" means
> "made as part of a business", and that is not wrong, since business as
> such is not wrong.  Much free software is commercial--this includes,
> for instance, Postfix, Qt, MySQL, OpenOffice, and to some extent
> GNOME.  It's legitimate and useful that businesses develop free
> software.  See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.
> 
> What makes a program unethical is being proprietary (non-free).
> Perhaps you meant to say "proprietary".
> 
> If you are going to use these non-free programs anyway, it is better
> that you run them on GNU/Linux rather than on Windows.  But that does
> not make them ethically legitimate, on whatever platform.
> 
> Are you at least contributing to the development of free replacements
> for those programs?  That would be the only way to redeem your use
> of them.
> 
> 

Yes, I probably did mean proprietary or closed source. However I do
not contribute to the development of a free version, While you may
judge this as unethical, I don't. I do agree with open source and I do
agree with many of your arguments regarding the dangers of
propriettary software etc. However, the software I'm referring to
operates in a specialist domain in which I have no real knowledge and
possibly no real talent for - and certainly no real time to find out.
or learn. I did lobby the company to make the software open source
(along with a few others), but there just wasn't enough demand and
while the company does have a track record for limited open source
licensing of some products, they were not prepared to budge on this one.

However, I have done and continue to contribute to other open source
projects, have successfully convinced past employers to release work
we have developed as open source (sometimes GPL, sometimes BSD/MIT)
and plan to continue to do so. 

My consciounce is clear regarding my ethics and I don't need to be
told by you or anyone else what I need to do to redeem anything. You
live by your ethics and let others live by theirs. Feel free to try
and convert as many as you can to your ethical standpoint, but refraim
from trying to dictate how they should live their lives - convert
rather than conscript. 

regards,

Tim
-- 
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you 
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!