[wilhelmtux-discussion] A new political licence?

Manfred Morgner manfred.morgner at gmx.net
Mon Mar 31 01:07:44 CEST 2003


Hallo Didier,

> Programm associated with some hardware can very dangerous.
> I am against that some "smart" bombs or  missiles are running with Free
> Software.
> In theory, Free Software can be sold very expensively. In fact, it is
> quite unexpensive. If an army has to pay more for each bomb, at the end
> it will buy one or two less.


Sorry, I don't believe so - vice versa looks more correct for me. Typically 
weapoons manufacturer are not interested in low pricing, they are interested 
on profit. The cost of a bomb is as high as the customer is willing to pay 
and has no conclusion to the manufacturing price. If a bomb costs 1 Million 
USD, free software may make it 0.00005 Million USD cheaper - if the 
OS-License comes from a Supermarket.

The Manufacturer costs of hightech weapons are typically 1/10 of there price, 
but also in this case, the pricing effect of free software in such weapons 
will make a difference of 0.0005 Mio. USD for each bomb.

A interesting question is, how the M$ EULA sees the Software License after 
the bomb is exploded. Is the bomb manufacturer allowed to recycle the License 
or has he buy another one?

Don't forget, a bomb manufacturer is - from the point of view of a 
manufacturer of proprietary software - an original equipment manufacturer 
(OEM) he will pay lots less money for the licenses as a normal business.

But in the case of bombs - the controlling software will never become cheaper 
if you use free software. Typically, programmers of free software are not 
developing bomb controlling software.

And don't forget: This problem is a question of ethic and moral. You will not 
make anything better if you fobid the use of a tool.

And further - if these people are crimals (because they build machines to 
kill people) - they will not stop if a license frobids them the use of a 
special part of a software. The military industrial complex can not be 
stopped by law, they made the law! And as you can see - the current president 
of the USA has no respect against the law, against life or any ethic or 
moral. He steelth money from Iraqies, he kills people, destroys cities and so 
on. Do you believe, that anything of this would become better if we disallow 
him to use free software?

This kind of problems has to be solved by the US citizens by starting 
democracy in the USA. It will never be a problem for software licensing, 
for the production of knifes oder shot guns.

There are enought weapons around to kill the whole human population on earth 
more than 10 times - it does no matter if some of the weapons contains knifes 
oder free software. Even if only free software would allow to kill the whole 
human population on earth, the question is not about the software, it's about 
the people.

Greetings,
Manfred.