Ethics, "The case of the hackers"

A nice document has reached me, “80 cases for the study of ethics”, put together by the Center for Applied Ethics at Duoc UC ¹, a Chilean professional institute, a center concerned with the “formation of human capital”. Human Capital!

Number 24 in this selection is the one that interests me, “The case of the hackers”. It opens with the following nonsense:

“In the mid-70s, in Silicon Valley, a group of hackers and enthusiasts of the nascent field of computing used software passed from hand to hand, that is, they used it without caring who owned it. At first there was no problem, but when companies or organizations that profited from producing software began to appear, difficulties started to arise. This was an obstacle to their professional fulfillment, and from then on they began to see that the solution lay in organizing as a community to seek the common good. Bill Gates, by means of a letter to consumers and buyers of operating systems, wanted to point out to the community of hackers and enthusiasts that they were devaluing the salary of everyone involved in developing projects that were affected by the improper use of copies. Besides, there was a theft; even if it was of something intangible like software, it is a theft all the same.”

The truth is you can tell this is the work of a computing student at this institution, like several of the other cases I managed to read.

So it is not that this is a text being taught to computing students in that program at DUOC. At least, I hope so!

But to be honest, there are plenty of free software fanatics who pass this myth along, and the worst are the university professors who do it!

The clueless student, or the technology enthusiast, is misinformed with the idea that this whole free software thing was born as a response against that cruel despot Bill Gates, who in the late 70s was only just starting his company, and was only trying to sell his Basic interpreter (or operating systems) from Albuquerque, New Mexico, not even in Silicon Valley! By the way, the letter was addressed to the hobbyists of the first microcomputers, who were handing out copies of Altair Basic without paying Gates (I would have complained about the same thing!).

True, the letter is not a very fortunate one; the way it is written, it implies that most hobbyists were stealing software. But it was not that letter that sparked the creation of the free software movement!

The GNU Manifesto, the founding document of free software, was written almost ten years after Bill Gates’s letter, and first published in the March issue of DDJ.

It all came about because Richard Stallman was rather fed up with not having access to the source code, and having to pay licenses for software (actually he was not the one paying, MIT was, but go explain that to a hippie).

It all started when Brian Reid sold his text processing system Scribe, and agreed to put “time bombs” in it, so that the program would deactivate after 90 days if the license had not been paid. To Stallman this was a “crime against humanity”, and so began his obsession, his delirium, and the rest is history (yes, there are madmen who have gotten great things done in history).

A lot of inaccurate things are said about free software, and I think it is about time to start educating, and explaining things as they are, and for that it is good to start with history as it was, not as we would like it to have been.

Finally, what really intrigues me is whether it is possible to talk about ethics while being untruthful. Or without checking whether what is being said is true, or in line with historical reality? Or whether an ethics professor
can accept this work without checking whether what the author cites is true? Where are the references, or the sources that back up so much nonsense?

That does not seem ethical to me. I don’t know, maybe we will have to ask Wittgenstein?