[Linux4christians] The Moral Foundation of Free Software

[Samuel Clough]

Ok, I'm putting on my flame retardant suit :^).

Just to weigh in on this...

I prefer OS.  I promote it actively.  I think it
is a great thing for Christians and churches and
prefer the ability to share the program (free as
in beer) which is, to be honest, more what the
average person cares about than if they can
actually get the source code.

I also understand the closed source model from an
economics point of view.  I personally think
schemes like the MySQL or JBoss business model are
the best.  Sell licenses and support to those who
wish, but make the product available and solict
input from the community.  It also gives your
software rapid adoption if it's good.  However,
there will always be millions who use it free of
charge.

But, I'm not sure there is an argument that it's
inheirently evil to use proprietary software since
I can't help my neighbor.  If you apply this logic
to anything else, it flat does not work.  If a
person sweats and labors and spends hours on
software, I think they have the right to
distrubute it and charge for it.  There is a real
cost to programming and I don't think it's evil to
charge for an end product. Obviously, if you were
charging astronnomical amounts, or something else,
that may be a problem, but the act of charging or
having a proprietary license is not evil per se.

As a comparison, if you built a product, say a
car, for somebody.  You put sweat and equity into
it and charge for it and everybody considers that
fine.  You can't "share" it with your neighbor
because it is a physical product.  Just because
software is easily shared whereas physical
products are not does not mean it is therefore
evil to have a product that cannot be shared.  I
don't see how software can be treated any
differently from any other product.

Sure, we want to share it and we use OS so we can
help our neighbor.  But, I don't think that makes
proprietary necessarily evil.

My .02

"People say I take the gospel too seriously, but
do they really think that on judgement day Jesus
Christ will say, 'Len you took me too seriously'?"
- Leonard Ravenhill

----- Original Message -----
Subject: Re: [Linux4christians] The Moral
Foundation of Free Software
From: evangelinux at matheteuo.org
To: linux4christians at thelinuxlink.net
Date: 01-04-2005 2:51 pm


> On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 09:12 +0000, Ben Thorp
wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Some of my thoughts on this topic:
> > 
> > 1. We seem to have fallen in to the trap of
equating "free" software with
> > "free as in beer" rather than "free as in
freedom". There is nothing in
> > FOSS licensing to say that you cannot charge
money for your program, only
> > that you must distribute the code. You may
think the distinction is
> > unimportant, because people we just use your
source code, and it will then