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Re: LGPL vs. GPL


From: Ciaran O'Riordan
Subject: Re: LGPL vs. GPL
Date: Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:08:57 +0100
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.1 (gnu/linux)

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:
> Yes, this is a political question and a moral one.

It is, but people approach the ethical questions of labour and software from
different starting points.

Most people have thought about and discussed the ethical aspects of child
labour, and try to some degree to avoid it.  Probably because paid labour is
over a thousand years old and the free labour movement's ideas about workers
deserving certain rights is already a few hundred years old.  Society has a
philosophy about labour.

On the other hand, most people don't think about the ethical aspects of
software.  Software is new, and the idea that software users deserve certain
rights is barely 25 years old and is still relatively unknown to
society-at-large.

If someone thinks that software developers should have no obligations
(i.e. there are no rights that users of the software deserve), then it's
most likely that they haven't heard the arguments.  When they hear the
arguments, the still might not agree, but I think it's best to present the
arguments rather than replying with what sounds like an accusation of
ignoring ethics.


-- 
CiarĂ¡n O'Riordan, +32 477 36 44 19, http://ciaran.compsoc.com/

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