I decided to write this page after 3 months spent in thinking about Ethic Software. Results derived from my own thoughts and discussions in mailing-lists and with friends.
The obvious question which evryone asks himself before applying a theory to the real world is:
DOES THIS WORTH IT ALL ?
The answer is not as obvious as the question is.
Stating that freedom of expression and its protection have in my opinion a basic role in all mind works, at the beginning I thought that ethic constraints should be applied at any price. In this way anyone could share his ideals with other people, in a strong way, anyone could be able to say "NO".
Moreover I was not wooried about damaging Free Software community: every author already has the possibility to choose license he likes, Ethic Software represents only another scheme..
On the other and, thinking deeply and deeply, I focused the real problem in application of Ethic Software License in all software.
To understand these conclusions, you have to know that almost all the times, good quality of software depends on community that use and works beyond its shoulders.
So, ethic problems raise often in enviroments in which there is great power of economic giants (think about army, pollution,... ). This is obvious, because of absence of reasons in managing a problem in a non-ethic way if there are not power or money involved. (what a nice world!)
If these "giants" need a software with ethic license, they have no problems to pay someone to produce a better solution. If they release that code under GPL i.e., all the community would move from the less functional ethic software (ethic for author vision, maybe not universal) to the new full-of-features product.
At the end the very honorable software would be garbage.
Conclusion: I think that programming ethic software does not worth the time spent if that software is for common uses. On the other hand, if wrong utilization of that program could give many advantages to "non-ethic" entities, I think that the author must publish software with an Ethic License such the HESSLA. in this way he can strongly state "Not in my name".
Thanks to all people who helped me in watching deep in this ideas.
|
