Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> Why should free software support companies in not releasing their >> knowledge to the world? Why do we consider the freedom to hoard >> information an important one? > >I'm not sure we do, and this is somewhat off-topic, but: > >- The information in question will be made public in due course. It's >not like a UK state secret.
But that's a period of time where other people could be making use of it. >- If a company is prevented from keeping its plans confidential then >it will have a hard time competing with other companies that do keep >their plans confidential. Indeed. There's several ways in which various licenses fail to make life easy for companies that want to enage in closed behaviour. >- I don't think we should be trying to make a list of all the freedoms >that we consider to be important and allowing licences to restrict any >freedom that isn't in our list. A better approach, I think, is to be >suspicious of any restrictions that are not easily justified as a >means of furthering software freedom. In general, I don't think it >helps free software for licences to restrict privacy and >confidentiality of business plans, hardware designs, etc. However, I >don't necessarily claim that such restrictions make a licence >non-free; I am undecided about that. I entirely agree. It's all a balancing act - I just about err on feeling that forced passing upstream of distributed modifications helps freedom more than it hinders it, but it certainly doesn't make me happy. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
