ESR has put up a brilliant (IMHO) blog post about the importance of essentially "picking your battles". He says:
A common failure mode in human reasoning is to become too attached to > theory, to the point where we begin ignoring the reality it was intended to > describe. The way this manifests in ethical and moral reasoning is that we > tend to forget why we make rules – to avoid harmful consequences. Instead, > we tend to become fixated on the rules and the language of the rules, and > end up fulfilling Santayana’s definition of a fanatic: one who redoubles > his efforts after he has forgotten his aim. > I think this is often quite true of open source -- that we really don't * need* open source everything. He defines a vague scale in various dimensions for cataloguing the harms of closed source software, and concludes that while some software types (desktop and smartphone operating systems, communications and productivity tools) really *must* be open source to protect our freedoms as computer users, it isn't quite so necessary for others (microwave firmware, games), and therefore, it is not so hypocritical for a free software supporter to play proprietary games. _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb
