[CS-FSLUG] The Moral Foundation of Free Software

[Aaron Patrick Lehmann]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2005 at 01:37:31PM +0100, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> 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.

My practical concerns arose out of a stewardship concern.  The supposed
immorality of using closed-source software has been breifly examined with
regard to Microsoft (although not with regard to other closed-source
solutions), but not in any great detail, or any systematic way.  This is an
interesting question, "Are we responsible for the actions the entities we
purchase from take, using the money we gave them in trade for their product?"
I do not know the answer to it.  However, I think it is important to recognize
that this is larger than Free v. Closed source software.  This is a general
consumer ethics question, and should be looked at as such.

> 
> 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.

I disagree.  I believe you overestimate the difficulty of securing computers
and networks.  So long as the users do not have administrative control, and the
administrator is competent, I don't believe there is a significant inherent
difference in difficulty between closed and open-source products.  

Aaron Lehmann
-- 
Why do the Democrats complain about Nader losing them Presidential elections?
Republicans don't complain about Libertarians.