On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 02:39:36AM +0100, Sergey V. Spiridonov wrote:
> 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.
There is no corresponding "we're too busy" formulation for the question
"Would you mind distributing this program on your mirrors, and letting me
use your BTS for it? It's very useful for Chinese dissidents, but comes
with a license that says it's not allowed to be used by Iraqi dictators
to organise their mass graves, so unfortunately it's non-free, and the
author has been abducted by separatist guerillas, so can't be contacted
to relicense the software."
Answering "no, we won't help you" in that case seems like it would
"produce evil" by your formulation; and for that reason we should continue
to distribute non-free software.
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 could.
http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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