27 Jul 2005
How does ‘that company’ treat free software?
Nice article by RMS on how to ‘judge’ a company. I guess he gets asked that a lot.
So what can we say about Sun? Can we add up these three very different comportments and get an overall measure of how a whole company treats the Free World? Maybe we could, but I think we should not try. Any such combined measure would be simplistic. Except for those companies that do something so nasty that it calls for special outrage, […], we should decline to “add up” all the activities of one company, decline to judge it “as a whole”. It is more useful to judge each activity separately, so we can praise or criticize it as it deserves. I wrote this article because when I was asked to comment on Sun, I forgot this point. We all make mistakes — and we can use them as examples to teach others what not to do.