Re: Dependence on nonfree software

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > The analogy doesn't hold: the server part of Google Maps
  > is deployed by its developer and copyright holder, Google,
  > on Google's own machines; the server software of Google Maps
  > is free, even though unreleased, whereas we discuss the case
  > where server software is proprietary.

That may be true.  (I don't know whether the software in the server
is proprietary, but maybe you have that information.)

However, the general principle of judging network services is that how
they are implemented is not particularly important as regards the
ethical situation of a user of the service.  It doesn't affect you
much, in practice, whether a service that you use, which is run by
someone else, contains nonfree software.

If Google licensed the running of the Google Maps service to some
other company, including the software, the copies of that software
used by the other company would be proprietary, rather than
unreleased-free.  But that would change nothing for the users that
connect to the service and get map data.

What determines whether the service does something bad to the users
is _how the service behaves_ in regard to that use.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)