MSOFT versus Open Source movement

Kendall Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Fri May 4 09:26:01 PDT 2001



>>>>> "d" == d squared 2002 <iso-8859-1> writes:

d> In heaven's name, why? Black people, women and animals in

d> factories suffer genuine hardship.

So, too, I suggest, do the WA state prisoners -- most of whom, if WA is like TX, are people of color -- who are paid a miserly wage (maybe $1.00 an hour?) to package all of MS's software products. I certainly consider them to be exploited persons, and I can't in good conscience give my $$ to a corporation that's actively exploiting them, when I have other choices I can make. But apparently the willingness to act based on my own moral reasoning, in conversation with members of my local community, makes me, per Carrol Cox's strange universe, *politically reactionary*. Oh well.

I guess it's okay to bash the Chinese companies for using slave labor but not okay to bash MS for doing the same thing?

d> on a

d> global scale, they are completely insignificant doers of harm.

Even if that's the case, and it probably is, I don't feel constrained, *when I have perfectly useful alternatives*, which is what this thread was supposed to be about, to only respond morally to the *worst* doers of harm. Using alternatives to MS software *and* being an antiracist or anti-imperialist aren't mutually exclusive, after all.

d> And when compared to Eric Raymond and gang, they're not even

d> particularly annoying.

Eric Raymond is perhaps the most *annoying* human being on the planet, but that's rather irrelevant to the moral argument about choosing less harmful alternatives when they're available.

Best, Kendall Clark



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