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Re: non-free and users?



Raul Miller wrote:

The fact, that someone will suffer because of non-free situations
which can happen after distribution, can be ignored because we do not
care about it.

False.

We do the best we can -- this is the opposite of not caring about it.

Do you mean that by distributing non-free we do the best what we can?
Why? Even if we can work on free instead of non-free?

I think we agreed that rejecting to help 'B', when we are busy with
helping 'A' is O.K. It will be completely ethical to act in this way.
It produces no evil to answer "Sorry, we are busy with helping S.
Spiridonov and other Debian users to fix printing of Russian in Mozilla"
when I. Ivanov will request to package Nvidia driver.

Why working on free is not the best what we can?

The argument for this was: we can produce more good at the same amount
of time. But we increase also amount of unethical situations by this.

We can not count even amount of this situations. That is why we can not
even answer if amount of the evil produced by this situations is less
than amount of good produced by distributing non-free. So, it is
possible, that amount of evil is underestimated. We can not be sure, how
large the amount of good will stay after we subtract evil from it. So we
can not be even completely sure, if we will get positive result at the
end. It can be positive but we do not know for sure. That is why some
people say "it is a matter of belief".

On the other side we know for sure, that working on free produces no evil, or at least amount of evil is less for sure.

That is why, distributing non-free we _hope_ or someone prefer to
_believe_ that it will give positive result at the end. By distributing
free we _know_ about this.
--
Best regards, Sergey Spiridonov




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