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Just because you are allowed to do something does not mean that it is ethical. Same with the law. Slavery was once allowed. Many people find that unethical none
by jraph 7y ago
Just because you are allowed to do something does not mean that it is ethical. Same with the law. Slavery was once allowed. Many people find that unethical nonetheless.
The opposite is also true: just because something is outlawed does not mean it is unethical. Many things deemed good now became lawful after people did them.
Ethics is not defined by laws, contracts and licenses. It is defined by your moral compass and different people under a same law may have different world views.
I have seen Mozilla recommend closed source addons. They have all the rights to do that (thanksfully), however I was not too happy with this, especially from an organization that promotes open source and an open web.
I see no point in promoting an outdated fork when you can recommend the better, fresher, original extension.
- kortilla 7y agoWow, thanks for the refresher that ethics != laws. I had accidentally completely forgotten that. Now, back to the point. Nobody has made an ethical argument that Mozilla shouldn’t be pushing an extension that is a fork with a license preferable to them.
- jraph 7y agoWell, these points were made in this thread and elsewhere, but in this case, pushing this extension instead of the original one prevents users to find the better version, and these users might even donate to the fork in the hope it will improve or to thank for the work, instead of donating to the original one, that really did the work and will be able to improve it. Of course, this does not apply to every situation where there is a fork. In many situations, there is real work done in the fork, sometimes this work is even upstreamed. > a fork with a license preferable to them Both extensions have the same license (GPLv3), except the fork removed the original copyright notices from the original source code. This is probably not even allowed, let alone ethical.