Evaluating the Harmful Effects of Closed Source Software

New submitter Drinking Bleach writes "Eric Raymond, coiner of the term 'open source' and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, writes in detail about how to evaluate the effects of running any particular piece of closed source software and details the possible harms of doing so. Ranking limited firmware as the least kind of harm to full operating systems as potentially the greatest harms, he details his reasoning for all of them. Likewise, Richard Stallman, founder of GNU and the Free Software Foundation, writes about a much more limited scope, Nonfree DRM'd games on GNU/Linux, in which he takes the firm stance that non-free software is unethical in all cases but concedes that running non-free games on a free operating system is much more desirable than running them on a non-free operating system itself (such as Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac OS X)."

Comments

Re:on the other side of the coin

[sammyF70]

the point that this often repeated argument ignore lies in the "similar spec'd" part of the sentence. With a thinkpad or any other non-Apple PC you can choose your PC's specs according to your need, and not based upon what Apple thinks you will need. You can even, and this might come as a shocker to Apple users, choose NOT to go for the most expensive alternative because your budget doesn't allow for it.
When you buy a Mac, you have a very limited set of alternatives to choose from. When you buy a PC, you have tons of alternatives to choose from (especially if your choices are not brand-centric). This means that you can choose a PC that won't have a Thunderbolt IO port, but a couple of additional USB3 ports instead, for example, and it means that you can choose to have a cheap plastic case instead of an aluminium (or whatever the current flavour of the month in metallic cases is) if you don't see the necessity, or your budget won't allow for it. You can also forgo some aspects to have a similarly priced PC with, if you are a gamer for example, a better graphic card and more RAM while forgoing some other aspects which you might not need.

So, yes .. similarly spec'd PCs might cost about the same as a Mac, but why would you buy a similarly spec'd PC in the first place?