[Reader-list] Ethics of the Free Software Movement

[Jamie Dow]

I have to give a lecture (part of a module on Computing Ethics) on the
ethics of free software.
I wondered if the list is aware of any particularly good published
pieces (papers / essays) on the claims made by Stallman and the Free
Software movement.
 
I'm pretty sympathetic to the view represented by Stallman et al., and
would like to represent it as robustly as possible. Quite apart from my
personal sympathies, that seems to be a good way to teach ethics
*anyway* on any given issue!
 
In particular, my present view is that there are two easily confused
claims that are made by FS people, one of which looks as though it can
probably be upheld, and the other of which looks as though it cannot
(and certainly does not seem to me to be adequately supported by the
arguments usually offered in support of it).
 
Here are a couple of versions of the relevant claims:
 
Claim 1: it would be better if all software was free ("free" in the
technical sense used by the Free Software movement i.e. did not have
restrictions on copying and modification).
Claim 1*: it would be better if software producers made their software
available without restrictions on copying and modification.
 
Claim 2: it is impermissible to make software available under a license
that restricts the licensee from copying and modifying the software.
Claim 2*: software producers are not entitled to use licenses to control
the use of software they have produced.
 
Arguments are advanced about how much more efficient, beneficial,
educational and generally conducive to the welfare of society it would
be if software producers all made their software available 'free'ly.
These all seem to support versions of claim 1.
 
Claim 2 does not follow from claim 1.
Nor, I think, can it be easily supported. The usual arguments that try
to do this proceed along a couple of lines:
(2a) from denying the existence of intellectual property rights.
(2b) from claiming that licensing software is an objectionable intrusion
into the lives of users (licenses - and the legal support behind them -
are ways of exercising control over aspects of the lives of others, in
ways that the licenser is not entitled to enjoy.)
 
Neither of these seems to me to succeed in justifying Claim 2.
(against 2a) even if there are no intellectual property rights, it does
not follow that I am obliged to divulge to you everything that I know or
anything that I know that you are interested in. Licensing can still be
understood as divulging information in exchange for certain commitments
on the user's part as to how they will treat that information. So the
worry is that even if you grant the FS people their premise, their
argument still doesn't go through.
(also against 2a) Then again, one might worry about how plausible it is
to deny intellectual property rights ... 
(against 2b) licenses are not really aptly compared to a kind of thought
police coming into the user's private domain and insisting that she
refuse to help her neighbour by copying software. Licenses operate by
means of the user making certain promises in exchange for access to the
software. It doesn't seem that the user's rights or privacy or freedoms
are violated by an insistence that she keep the promises she has made.
 
Perhaps there is some argument that it is impermissible to make the
release of information one has (or software to which one has access)
conditional on the user's making promises not to copy/modify. But at
present I can't see how that argument would go.
 
Can anyone help? Have I missed something major in the Stallman /
Nissenbaum  et al. arguments that fills the above gaps. Have I
miconceived the debate?
 
Thanks in advance.

Jamie
 
 
 
____________________________________________
Jamie Dow Research Fellow IDEA CETL <http://www2.idea.leeds.ac.uk/>
Tel: +44 113 343 7887 Email: J.Dow at leeds.ac.uk
<mailto:J.Dow at leeds.ac.uk>  Web:
http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/Staff/JD/index.html
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