Slashdot Mirror
Ethics In IT
chiefloko writes "I am presently taking a Business Ethics class while earning my MBA. For my final paper topic I have chosen 'Ethics within the Information Technology realm.' Over the past 13 years I have worked for three corporations and have seen everything from the typical BOFH to ungodly pirated software use. I also bore witness to a remote user logging in to a poorly administrated Sun station, finding out s/he was root, and then reading co-workers' emails. I am interested in what the norm is for ethics in the IT world and some of the stories and outcomes."
If you own a computer and you load closed-source proprietary software on it you essentially declare your computer to be the property of the closed-source software makers. By loading their unethical produce on your machine you agree to execute the instructions that their software contains, whatever they do, and since it is closed-source you are not allowed to know what you are executing.
Closed-source software defies the natural law of property: You pay for giving up the control of your machine to a shadowy software maker. Closed-source software is an evil communist, totalitarian, and terrorist concept and ought to be eradicated just as the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were eradicated by their own inefficiency and stupidity. Just like citizens were considered to be the property of the state in communist and fascist countries, closed-source software houses consider your machine to be their property. It is a form of technological slavery, where your machines are owned and controlled by closed-source companies whose produce cannot be checked for accuracy, validity, and reliability. A closed-source vendor asks you to pay for executing instructions you are not aware of. They don't trust you to show you their code, why should you trust them to execute it on your machine? Buying and using closed-source software, in this sense, is not very different than collaborating with the Nazis (of course *in practice* sometimes people *have* to do it for various reasons, such as when a superior requires you to use some specific piece of software, but speaking *philosophically* the act still carries an unethical imbalance).
The only democratic alternative, which is in accordance with the natural laws of the free market and free enterprise, is free software. With free software you maintain control and true ownership of your whole machine, since you can read and understand what instructions you are executing on it. No more uncertainties regarding code reliability (of course *practically* you don't read the whole code, but speaking *theoretically* you can do so if you are willing). Free software is truly *yours*.
The natural concept of property is that you should be able to extract unlimited pleasure (happiness) from what you own without any third party interfering with your use of your property (except in certain cases where your pleasure damages someone's property, for example you cannot pollute your backyard's air because the pollution will spread to the property of your neighbours, therefore environmental pollution is also against the natural law of private property). Of course it has to be said that private property is not philosophically incompatible with sharing, and both can coexist naturally and harmoniously, especially for certain kinds of products such as software where sharing them does not limit your ability to extract pleasure from their use (you still own a piece of software you wrote even if you make copies and share them with everyone else on the planet, as every person owns their own copy and they are capable to extract unlimited happiness from it).
The same arguments are true for DRM as well: If you load DRMed songs to your music gadget, you effectivelly relinquish your property to those who control the DRM schema. You cannot extract unlimited pleasure from DRMed songs, and as a result the songs are not truly your property. But if they aren't your property, it would be an oxymoron to have to pay for them (you essentially pay for the "right" to give up the control of your gadgets to a third party). The only ethical solution would be to use DRM-free music.
Many people point out that while the idea of using only free software sounds good, it creates many practical difficulties. In some cases, this is true, as although you can live only with free software, there are important pieces of hardware whose manufacturer has not opened their documentation to the free software community and various social and economic requirements to stay compatible with users of proprietary software. It s