Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > According to Wikipedia, Skype was thinking of making its traffic available > to the NSA before the acquisition. > > So, I am making two points right now: > > 1. All large IT companies are approached at some point by governments > all over the world. So it is not Microsoft which is specifically evil, > it is the way the society is structured now. I see no reason to single > out Microsoft as a problem. You don't know what GitHub is doing now > either. Well, isn't that the point Free Software has been making from times reaching back further than Linux? > 2. As a separate point - large businesses are not "evil". They are > comprised of normal people who want to do good. I know many people who > work in Microsoft, Apple and Google, including some pretty high in > management. None of them are evil. When Germany surrendered at the end of WWII, there were a few dozen trials and executions. A modern democracy was built from the dozen millions of remaining Germans, including some pretty high in management. Apparently none of them were evil. The point of creating evil empires is creating decision structures that do not engage the individuals' conscience more than other driving factors to a degree where the construct as such is collapsing. Corporations have one binding imperative: serving their shareholders. Due to the structure of stock market and financial markets, the concept of tangible shareholders is diluted to a degree where "serving their shareholders" is reduced to "make more money than the competition". The simplest forms of ethics are expressible in behaving in manners that work as universal governors of behavior. "make more money than the competition" can by its nature not be effective as a universal governor. > And I doubt the founders of these companies are evil too. Google retired the company motto "Don't be evil" when reorganizing as "Alphabet". > The behavior of these companies is explained by an interaction of > their business success and the current structure of society. In > authoritarian societies this is much worse news than in the democratic > societies. The overexpensive clown show the U.S. puts up in order to consider itself part of "democratic societies" is pretty distasteful but most of the power is routed around the purportive democratic structures and controls anyway. > The reason I bring these points up is because I feel that Microsoft is > singled out unfairly. It is not a bad company and it has a lot of > pretty good products, and its behavior is not governed by evil intent, Have you read a EULA recently? How is wresting the power to decide what to do with the computer you pay for from you not evil? How is killing off all competition you can, sabotaging democratic structures with lobbying and bribing, disowning your customers not evil? How is "we did it for money" more ethical than "we did it for racial purity" or whatever other justification evil travels under? Microsoft is not singled out here: it's just one of the most ruthless and consequently one of the most successful corporations since that is what the reward system of capitalism is about. > but rather by a complex interaction of business incentives, government > regulation and corporate structure that is necessary to manage a large > company. This rationalization would hold equally well for managing a concentration camp, you know. If you want to stress "not evil", more than "works under the given parameters of operation" is required. > That does not mean this mix of incentives does not create negative > results - it does sometimes - but I feel that in the FLOSS community > many see it as almost a conspiracy by someone in Microsoft to destroy > the world. Why would Microsoft be out to destroy the world? It is out to shape the world in its image, not destroy it. > Which is just untrue. And a strawman, to boot. -- David Kastrup _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
