Morality, Honesty and Legality

[Richard Gaskin]

I can't speak to anything related to the "legality" of any EULA, but I 
do believe in one ethical priority:  the intent of the creator of a work.

The act of creating anything is a special human endeavor, and as such in 
my book it's sacred.  Once a work is created, the creator must, IMNSHO, 
retain the right to decide the terms governing its use.  Anything less 
seems uncivilized, or at least certainly unmotivating.

If I make a software product and decide to license it under terms that 
require the user to give me complete control over their bank accounts, 
that's fully within my rights to ask for.

And conversely, it's fully within the rights of the user to recognize 
the absurdity of such terms and simply use something else.

Of course exceptions to this would include things that violate antitrust 
laws, unfair restraint of trade, or other abuses of aggregated power. 
But those are complex matters I'm happy to leave for the courts to 
decide on a case-by-case basis.

For myself, this thread (now two threads) has a very simple solution:

     If you agree with the wishes of a creator of a work,
     use that work.

     And if not, use something else.

With a ~10% market share, it's not like there aren't alternatives to OS 
X.   If you don't agree with the terms of the Mac/Win duopoly, Linux has 
proven itself a viable third option.

If you've acquired the skills to build your own computers (though it's 
pretty easy these days), or to be able to install OSes designed for one 
computer on another (far less easy), Apple has made it clear that they 
don't want you in their customer base.

You can argue this in a discussion list dedicated to a completely 
different software, or even with Apple themselves, and the outcome isn't 
likely to change:  if you want flexibility with your operating system, 
Apple doesn't want you as a customer.

No problem.  That's fully within their rights as the creator of the work.

And it's fully within your rights to use something else.

So just do it, and enjoy the freedom of having what you want.


For many years I took a quiet pleasure in knowing that I was doing most 
of the work of making my Windows software on a Mac.  Being by far the 
dominant giant, Windows deployments have always brought in between four 
and ten times as much revenue as my Mac versions, but I still enjoyed 
being able to use the humble OS of my choice no matter how small its 
market share.

With cross-platform tools it really doesn't matter much which OS you 
develop on as long as you keep the others around for testing and refinement.

These days I still enjoy OS X, but I split my time almost equally with 
Ubuntu.  I like the flexibility on being able to set it up exactly how I 
like it, and I like being able to run it on machines I've built myself. 
  And I've come to really like the community, in so many ways reflective 
of the early Mac user groups I used to enjoy.

So now I've just expanded my quiet pleasure, knowing that I'm developing 
for the platforms of the two industry giants on the humble but capable 
Ubuntu.


OSes are ultimately just app launchers; apps define the scope of 
meaningful work we can do on them.  Cross-platform tools allow us to 
recognize that OSes are merely commodities, largely interchangeable.

They distinguish themselves in many ways, but ultimately they have more 
in common than they are different.

Among the relatively few differences are their terms of use.  The EULA 
is a feature as much as any UI detail, and we can choose our OSes by 
that criterion if it's important to us.

So enjoy the freedom to choose, choose what you like, and have fun with it.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  Follow me on Twitter:  http://twitter.com/FourthWorldSys