[CS-FSLUG] The Moral Foundation of Free Software

[Norbert Bollow]

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I feel very strongly that the Body of Christ needs to be awakened
to the fact that business decisions of Christians, as well as
procurement decisions of ministries, sometimes have a spiritual
component which cannot be captured by a mere cost-benefit analysis.

The choice between an IT strategy of using Microsoft software
primarily, or a strategy of using Free Software whenever reasonably
possible, this choice is an example of such a spiritually significant
decision.

Look at what Microsoft has been doing, and is still trying to do.

Apparantly unlimited greed is driving them to try to achieve ever
greater control of what people can do with computers.  A percentage
of every dollar that someone pays to Microsoft goes to paying for
the development and perfection of software systems that can and will
be used to _control_ how the internet and computers in general can
be used.  Anyone who cares about matters of privacy, political
freedom or the _freedom_to_share_the_gospel_ should be able to see
that the direction into which Microsoft is trying to take computer
technology is wicked and dangerous.

The main obstacle to these wicked plans is the availablity and
(hopefully increasignly widespread) use of Free Software.  By
choosing a strategy of using Free Software whenever reasonably
possible, we will not only avoid contributing to financing
Microsoft's wicked empire, but we also make a positive contribution
to making sure that the Free Software alternative remains available.



Aaron Patrick Lehmann <lehmanap at cs.purdue.edu> wrote:

> What do they gain?  If KDE is equivalent to Windows, but is going to
> cost every user 2 man-weeks of time to get used to, this requires
> substantial benifits to justify.

The reported information was that people who make the transition
are "comfortable" after at most two weeks; this implies that the
actual time investment for re-training must be much less than two
weeks, because these people are doing useful work already before
they're comfortable.

I believe that there are significant long-term gains from this
switch, however that is not the point of this thread.  In this
thread we are discussing that there is a _Moral_Foundation_ of
Free Software, which gives a good reason to make the switch even
independently of whether the long-term benefits of switching to
Free Software are greater than the cost of switching.

Until OpenOffice became available, a Free Software IT startegy was
not a viable option for most ministries.  The costs of inconvenience
and retraining were unacceptably high.  Fortunately this situation
has changed.


Aaron's other point was the claim that many people already know how
to admin a MS based PC, while comparable skills for Free Software
operating systems are less widely available.  This is a valid reason
for supporting the Freely project which aims to bridge this gap.  On
the other hand, I don't view this as a valid point in favor of Aaron's
suggested strategy of using old versions of Microsoft software.  Even
if, as Aaron claims, it is possible to connect such systems to the
internet in a secure manner (i.e. without making oneself vulnerable to
well-known exploitable security bugs), the needed knowledge and skills
for doing that are surely very specialized and much harder to find
than what it takes to administrate a Free Software system (which has
been installed from a reasonably user-fiendly distro) in an adequate
manner.

Blessings and greetings,
Norbert.

- -- 
Founder & Steering Committee member of DotGNU, see http://dotgnu.org/
Free Software Business Strategy Guide   --->  http://FreeStrategy.info
Norbert Bollow, Weidlistr.18, CH-8624 Gruet (near Zurich, Switzerland)
Tel +41 1 972 20 59         Fax +41 1 972 20 69       http://bollow.ch
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