Short answer. Yes. As long as we remember that the end goal is Freedom, co-operation, sharing and community.
Long answer. Ethics is not black and white. In this case, the most important question is By providing such binaries, are the solution providers encouraging participation in the FOSS ecosystem. OR are they encouraging participation in the propritary ecosystem.
In this case it seems to me that the GNU/Linux solution providers are encouraging adoption of FOSS ecosystem.
"And then you begin to experience what I know people are experiencing here and I certainly see in the States. Which is once you have moved somebody from IE to Firefox for security reasons, and from Word to Open Office for economic reasons. It then turns out that they are living in a free software environment, and you come along one day, and remove the operating system and put a new one underneath and they don't even notice that its happened. So that the gradient of fear of technological change, which was the real guarantor of the monopolies market power is being overcome." http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lecture_at_Multimedia_institute_MAMA/CARNet
http://mod.carnet.hr/hr/carnet/drustvo_znanja/eben_moglen.wmv The video is unfortunately in proprietary format, can somebody change it to open format and publish the same.
Years from now, OpenOffice will be seen as the most important contibution to the FOSS world. Because it encourages participation in the FOSS ecosystem more than any other application (yes including mozilla).
-Krishna
--- cvr3@river-valley.org wrote:
A specific question which many Linux solution providers keep asking me.
The question relates to the client side applications NOT the server.
When Linux business solution providers go to Govt. organisations they are confronted with the bleak scenario of all the systems being under M$. Since their solutions are "standalone" and built with Linux libraries such as GTK, QT etc. they need invariably Linux OS. Since the organisations are reluctant to change their existing M$ platform just to accommodate their solutions (even though they liked it) they are loosing that business. What I am asking is that under these circumstances is it ethically and morally correct for them to create M$ binaries of their solution using windows versions of GTK and QT libraries and install them on the M$ platform, and there by getting the business order.
Already FSF is releasing all their libraries such as gcc, gtk etc for M$ too.
Please think as if you are a business man providing free software solutions to make money to run a free software business.
-- Rajagopal CV
Fsf-friends mailing list Fsf-friends@mm.gnu.org.in http://mm.gnu.org.in/mailman/listinfo/fsf-friends
===================================== Misinterpreting Copyright by Richard Stallman http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html "Die Gedanken Sind Frei": Free Software and the Struggle for Free Thought by Eben Moglen http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/berlin-keynote.html
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