Re: gds.el --- Emacs interface to Google Desktop Search

[Richard M. Stallman]

    I use some
    commercial software on my GNU/Linux system simply because there is no
    free version available

"Commercial" and "free" are not opposites.  To be "commercial" means
"made as part of a business", and that is not wrong, since business as
such is not wrong.  Much free software is commercial--this includes,
for instance, Postfix, Qt, MySQL, OpenOffice, and to some extent
GNOME.  It's legitimate and useful that businesses develop free
software.  See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.

What makes a program unethical is being proprietary (non-free).
Perhaps you meant to say "proprietary".

If you are going to use these non-free programs anyway, it is better
that you run them on GNU/Linux rather than on Windows.  But that does
not make them ethically legitimate, on whatever platform.

Are you at least contributing to the development of free replacements
for those programs?  That would be the only way to redeem your use
of them.