Re: [gNewSense-users] Re: Freedom and webapps

[Declan Naughton]

Hello again Crossland!

On 2/5/07, Dave Crossland <address@hidden> wrote:
> I am proposing that this is a practical problem, not an ethical one.
> Please explain the ethical dimension of this.

Google is of course being unethical in their refusal to release source
code. We Google users, in a sense, are supporting that. Which would be
nearly very excusable except for the fact that there are better
(ethically that is) alternatives which are very much usable. I'm gonna
be looking out for them as of now. It shouldn't be difficult to get
rid of Gmail, but I think I'll need to be excused for not finding an
alternative search engine - although I would HAPPILY support any
better-ethically efforts to put out a search engine to compete with
Google - does anybody know of any? I've come across free search engine
_software_, but usually it's not the software but an interface to an
index of the web I want. If the developers release the backend code,
that'd very likely put them ahead ethically, so they can count on my
support even while I reluctantly use Google to find what I need and
can't find off them.

That's how I look at it all.. I would and do well use non-free
software (at least, in the same way we all do), but very reluctantly.

--
Declan Naughton