Ethics
From Hackstop
Ethical Computing
All computer language constructs build upon decades of cooperative international development of communications technology (telegraphy). Centred on the British--American telephone cable and cryptography, during the Second World War, these were public sector assets. Privately owned digital language chunks (programs) followed commercial industrial manufacture of computers, leveraging the public sector assets.
The emergence of kitset microcomputers in 1974 carried commercial programs into the consumer sphere. But there was still a dominant public sector research role ongoing, in the form of BSD-UNIX, that gave us a shared Internet. With the private collaring of UNIX in 1979, the ethic of a cooperative public programming asset survived nowhere as strongly as in the GNU Project's Free Software, where it was formally entrenched using the GPL from 1989.
Pushing more commercial programming - on Microsoft(TM) platforms or the Open Source brand - is of a lower ethical computing standard, historically and relatively. This is especially chronic where operating systems utilising Free Software tools fail to credit those publicly owned assets, and seek to trade ever more profitably off them without acknowledging their material source. Ethically, such 'Open Source' practise must be opposed, because it isn't (Open).
Links: What's in a name?[1] (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html) & Linux and the GNU Project[2] (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html) & GNU/Linux FAQ[3] (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html) gnu.org + Free & Open Source Software Portal, UNESCO[4] (http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=12034&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html)
Subversion? - No
This is the quiet voice against subversion: by capitalism of nature - environmental and human - turning all into profit and the defence of profit. The world is 99% subverted by material fear ('greed'). Perhaps 1% of us know how to turn back that tide, which has included subversion of our language - by the powerful.
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