Possibilities for commercial software?

[Gabriel Ambuehl]

On Saturday 27 January 2007 17:23:14 Renaissance Man wrote:

> 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). 

No that's not what is generally called an externality. It would only have 
externalities (which BTW can be be good or bad, which is often overlooked) if 
it had effects on third parties which is probably not the case as weird 
philosophical arguments such as "this is morally bad so it affects me" 
generally aren't allowed.

> 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.

That is not following from people using non free software on a system. If I 
chose to use TomTom on my Neo, nothing gets any less free than it was before.