[CS-FSLUG] Philosophical Debate

[Don Parris]

On 11/8/05, Nathan T. <celerate at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 11/9/05, Ed Hurst <ehurst at asisaid.com> wrote:
> > Don Parris wrote:
> >
> > >>Who's right? I admit I tend to favor the former. All the more so for
> > >>FreeBSD. This is because I view FOSS through the eyes of faith. I
> > >>understand "narrow is the path" following Jesus, and the logic of that
> > >>suits me. To find that in FOSS is comfortable and comforting. MS Windows
> > >>is an example of what accommodation looks like, in my mind. It results
> > >>in a hellish dependency and ignorance, and much waste of resources.
> > >
> > > This is truly scary, Ed.  No, I mean it.  Really.  You're scaring me
> > > here.  I see so many similar parallels between our faith and FOSS it
> > > isn't funny.  But you can laugh if you want to! :-)
> >
> > I'm not laughing. I'm quite serious about it. The call of God on my life
> > includes a calling to FOSS, and logic of that is obvious.
>
>
> You haven't been spending too much time around Richard Stallman lately have
> you? ;-)
>

Well, if you think about it, we do have something in common.  A
printer drove both of us to libre software.  In his case, Xerox
delivered a printer running proprietary code to use in the MIT lab. 
Prior to that, they had been able to fix the old printer themselves by
writing a program to inform them when jams occured.  With the Xerox,
they tried to do that, but couldn't find the source code.  They were
told it was proprietary, but that Xerox would fix the printer.  They
never did.  It's not far off from my own experience.  Proprietary
drivers and OS were to blame.


>
> If you're Christian convictions are telling you not to be enslaved by
> unreasonable binding terms then I could see why you would feel this way, I
> don't think God intended for us to be servants to a EULA either ;-)
>
> _______________________________________________

How many people actually read the EULAs?  Out of them (what, one in a
thousand, maybe?), how many go so far as to consider the impact of the
EULA?  Now, once you've agreed to surrender your freedom, and there's
no apparent harm (no humans were harmed in the use of this software),
you feel much better about surrendering your rights again - and
possibly more rights - with the advent of the next EULA.  It's akin to
the downward spiral of sin.  Witness the article that appeared
recently on LXer about the patented story-line.  We're sinking lower
and lower.

Yeah, I still have to use proprietary software at work.  Still, I am
no longer a slave to the EULAs at home, or in my ministry.  I do
believe in the idea of balance our copyright system is supposed to
provide.  EULAs circumvent that, overriding the balance.

Don
--
DC Parris GNU Evangelist
http://matheteuo.org/
gnumathetes at gmail.com
"Hey man, whatever pickles your list!"