well, i suppose the moral approach is for one to purchase *something* from freeware developers. Oh well, I lack these morals, and as such, i'll keep my mouth shut about such things of controversy. no good can come from feuding.

Thanks for your understanding, Karma.

These boards do have an operating principle that aspires to take the moral high ground regarding technology. Although, we are certainly not perfect and make mistakes, we do *aspire* to a social-moral theme or kindness toward all.

This theme actually resonates with your name - Karma. Karma is the Pali term that describes the matrix of causality. cause-and-effect.


There is a cause-and-effect relationship with regard to software, open source, and freeware.

If no one paid for any software distributions then their is a significant chance that developers would stop developing and distributors would stop distributing.

Cause-effect.

Ergo, there are positive and negative cause-and-effect in all things. I think you are much more moral than you would lead us to believe and that you simply were making a trendy statement in fun....with no harm intended.

Best Wishes, Neo

You have very interesting ideas, Neo. It would appear that I am once again mistaken

I can see how not rewarding developers for coding can result in a shortage of new code. Conversely, i can not see an open source developer living on the profits of his/her release, and i therefore conclude that in most cases, these developers have another source of income, and would not experience a great loss should people begin to take advantage of the Open Source model. In any case, while free software development would survive, it might produce less, at a slower rate. This is unnacceptable, and here my view was flawed

As a side note, trendy statements mean little to me; if the statement holds an ideologic meaning that I myself believe in, I may choose to adopt this into my style of communication, otherwise I will disregard it. As far as morality goes, it will be interesting talking to you over the month(s? I'll be dropping from 'the scene' for a few months and may not return)

Thank you for correcting the err of my views to the Open Source concept, i had previously thought it to be a non-profit structure, but, as with everything in the modern world, it is greatly affected by money.

I must say, this is one of the more interesting threads to read today. I enjoy a good debate. Karma, Interesting turn of events! Are you now suggesting your *are* going to pay for the UNIX version of your choice ? Out of curiosity, which have you chosen? and how much will you pay, err *donate*!

True, there are commercial aspects to the open source movement. However, there are many more aspects and angles.

There is the culture of 'gift giving' as documented in many books; and there is a cause-and-effect in that culture.

There is a culture of recognition, similar to the gift-giving culture.

In other words, cause-and-effect creates a complex matrix that we recognize as our perception of reality. Because all of us have a very limited ability (almost zero) to understand the infinite cause-and-effect relationships that exist from time zero of the world until now, we can only.......

OK, I'll stop now. This is way off topic.

Let's consider this board, this commercial free forum. Is it truely free? No, we spend lots of money to host it, money to maintain it, money to defend it against legal challenges. We do it as part of a 'gift-giving' culture, to give something back to the community.

Posters spend time (there is value to that) contributing and helping others, this is also part of a generous, moral, gift-giving culture.

Charity, kindness, gift-giving, all are parts of the complex cause-and-effect equation of life as we perceive it, just as commercial forces are powerfully influencial. These forces are both in harmony and in conflict. They simply exist.

We all have a choice in how we interact with this complex world-system of cause-and-effect.

Choosing not to make contributions (financial, development time, debug time, teaching time, etc) has a cause-and-effect relationship to the human ecosystem.

Let's close this and get back to work

Karma, a read through the docs and FAQs at www.fsf.org will teach you alot about GNU/Linux|HURD, in both legal and moral terms.
Richard Stallman's 'site at www.stallman.org is also a good read.

wow. that was deep.
thanks for the links tux

cheers to you all!