Anthony DeRobertis wrote:
On Jan 20, 2004, at 04:25, Sergey Spiridonov wrote:but he can say "We refuse to do it, because we are busy with working on free software replacement for what you are asking for and on other free software. Packaging this can lead us and your to non-ethical situations, but we have no free resources anyway."Well, the thing is that we can't force volunteers to do... anything. So, if no one wants to write a free replacement, no one will.
It is their decision how they want to act. I'm sure, Debian developers don't want to produce non-ethical situations.
Even ignoring that, this argument does have a slight problem. For example, the amount of work to replace FOO with a free alternative is substantially more than the amount of work to package FOO. So, in the same amount of time it took us to rewrite FOO, we could of packaged BAZ, TAZ, and FROB, even if they aren't free.
Where is the problem?
That really just leaves the question: Does the ethical action of being able to help some/most people by sharing non-free software outdo the unethical action of being unable to help some people, because the software is non-free? Or is the unethical action so bad that no amount of ethical actions can make up for it?
"Being (un)able" is not an action, it is a state. I have no idea, how by being (un)able to do something you can change something.
-- Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov