Framing web pages

[Bradley Hook]

Jared wrote:
> Yet how do we manage the folks who believe that they are ethically
> responsible when they are not? 

Simple. We don't. In my opinion, we would be over-stepping our ethical
boundaries to try and force these ethics on others. Telling someone it's
wrong to beat their wife is one thing, telling them it's wrong to
collect excessive royalties is completely different. *You* do what is
right, and hope that in time others will "see the light."

> They cannot be persuaded by an appeal
> to ethics because they already believe they are abiding by a noble
> ethic.

Most of these profit-seeking folks don't believe they are "abiding by a
noble ethic." In fact, many of them are very aware of the fact that
their ethics suck. They simply don't care.

I don't say this just because I "think" this is how it is. I know it. I
socialize with a wide variety of people, several of which fall into the
artist/author-with-sucky-ethics group. I recall one fellow who developed
a simple application that he was selling for upwards of $1K per copy.
The product had some fairly obvious flaws that could have been easily
corrected, and when I suggested the fixes the guy replied with something
to this effect: why fix it when my customers are dumb enough to buy it
how it is? This is an example of an author not having any respect or
ethical responsibility to his customer, and it's wrong.

> Hint 1: For an ethical system to be superior to another ethical
> system, it must apply _less_ force in implementation. Brute force
> is the lowest form of ethics. What is the highest?

Read up on Ghandi.

> Hint 2: I think Linus Torvalds has a pretty good idea of it, but
> a lot of people who "follow" him do not. And as near as I can
> tell, he's okay with that. ;-)

Linus has some good personal ethics. Linus is also very forward about
his refusal to force his ethics on others. This is why he doesn't like
the GPL 3 for *his* projects. Linus doesn't care if you use the GPL3,
and he will likely end up as an end-user of many GPL3 programs. Since
the GPL3 exceeds what he feels is acceptable bounds, he isn't using it.

~Bradley