Beneficial Proprietary?
Hey all,
What do you all think about "proprietary" companies that have been beneficial to the free software movement like id software? I know there are some who are using free software for malicious means like Microsloth and Grovel.. but I think it's worth mentioning the likes of id, who after a good run on the market puts out the source code for games.
Jason
It's great when anyone does good, but that doesn't excuse unethical actions like developing proprietary software. Even if the unethical actions had some part in their contributions, they are still unethical actions which should be condemned.
Consider the following situation: a slave owner helps slaves owned by others to escape, and sometimes frees his own slaves. While this person's assistance of slaves is good, it does not excuse the fact that he himself owns slaves, even if he uses those slaves to help the other slaves escape.
I don't consider it really beneficial to the free software movement. By the time they make their software free, the large majority of its former audience would of moved on to another proprietary platform/game.
That said, it is better late than never to make the software free.
The free software movement mustn't be satisfied by someone who makes the software free some time after the release.
It _is_ better than releasing the source code never, but honouring this puts us in danger to accept the bad practise of this companies.
The user must own his freedom right now, and not in a year or two.
Beneficial proprietary? That sounds like fair trade organic slaves. So no, still mostly bad.
But even bad entities do good things sometimes.
For example Facebook which is a very disgusting and despicable giant corporation [1] [2] releases some free software.
Thus it's better to say that such a deed was good (even though if the entity doing it is rotten).
[1] http://stallman.org/facebook
[2] http://www.fsf.org/facebook