On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 06:25:18PM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
> Indeed. I am saying that the very same ethical arguments that we use
> for excluding software from main apply to excluding software from our
> FTP site. This is not a novel question. It has been answered already
> ad naseum.
Uh, no they don't. If you can make an argument that "this software is
better than that software", for some particular classes of software, then
that's a reason to *distinguish* the two classes, but it's not a reason to
cease distributing it entirely.
A similar argument that *is* a reason for ceasing to distribute it
entirely is "this software is better than that software *for all use
cases*". That's certainly possible to achieve for individual pieces of
software -- at least if you limit it to "99.99% of use cases" or similar
-- but doesn't come close to applying to proprietary software in general,
nor IMO the semi-free software we distribute in non-free.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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