Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Tue 19th Jun 2007 22:05 UTC
Pocket Informant is one of the most successful PDA applications ever. However, it has not been immune to software piracy. The CEO of WebIS posted an open letter explaining how software piracy is hurting the industry, but also the consumer too and especially small software houses like his.
Thread beginning with comment 249576
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2006-09-27
This argument could be used to justify any kind of unethical (but currently lawful) behavior.
Slave oweners could have said something like "who are these yankees to decide we can't own slaves. Slaves are our property, not theirs. If you don't like slavery, DONT BUY SLAVES but leave us alone".
(NO, I DON'T mean copyrights and slavery are comparable. I just want to show that sometimes the ethical thing to do may be to get into other people's business and challenge their "rights" and their "freedoms".)
So, RMS thinks copyright restrictions are evil, and he uses a copyright license to fight against it's worst effects. Is that contradictory? Not really. The GPL is just a TOOL; using it does NOT mean one approves of copyright law. The purpose of this tool is to encourage developers to contribute, by making sure they are working for the community, not for proprietary vendors. If there were no copyrights, there would be no proprietary vendors and no need for the GPL, as the whole world would actually be the kind of community the GPL tries to build.