Possibilities for commercial software?

[Renaissance Man]

On 26 Jan 2007, at 8:34 pm, David Schlesinger wrote:

> I'd say you're instead limiting "free" to mean "free according to  
> the doctrine of the Free Software Foundation". (Should I only be  
> eating in restaurants which will give me copies of their recipes,  
> for the asking, in the name of freedom...? It's gonna limit where I  
> can go...)
>
> Why can't a person have the freedom to run proprietary software on  
> _their_ open phone if they choose to? No one's requiring _you_ to,  
> presumably, if you choose not to. Does the general community need  
> folks like you to protect us from ourselves? (And you never  
> answered my question about the ethics of Photoshop...)

It's not a matter of "should." A person DOES have the freedom to run  
proprietary software on their open phone if they choose, but that  
freedom, if acted on, has consequences (called an externality in  
economics). And that consequence is that the more people who do it  
the more reliant on non-free software free software becomes, and the  
more reliant free software is on un-free software the less free the  
whole system becomes: meaning, when you look at the whole picture,  
users will have less freedom to use software, and the systems run by  
that software, in the way they want.

Renaissance Man