A long time ago, sometime in the 70s I believe, a friend of mine used
to work for RCA. Right at that time Japan was expanding its
electronics market in the Pacific and the Japanese were capturing the
market from RCA by selling below cost. My friend bitterly condemned
these practices as unethical.

This practice, called 'dumping', is generally condemned, and can often
be prosecuted under law. It has been used and criticised as such on
several occasions e.g. w.r.t. the dumping of subsidised EC surplus
produce on poor African nations, on Rockeller's ruthless expansion of
Standard Oil by undercutting.

In the defence of open source software, Richard Stallman was willing
to condemn closed source software as unethical. Now here is a
thought. Is it rather *free software which is unethical* because the
supplier is dumping a free product from the position of having a
subsidy?

That crosspost list indicates a pure troll.

On 4 Mar, 19:34, Mark Tarver ukonline.co.uk> wrote:

(...could we please rename this group in 'Philosophical Hypotheses and
Incidental Spamming Group', as the 'Practical Common Lisp Questions'
here are going down every moment coming...)

If you agree, please stay quiet, many "thank you"'s!!

-JO

[I'm not sure where this discussion belongs, so I don't know where to set
followups. A philosophy group, maybe?]

Mark Tarver said:

The world does not owe software company shareholders a living. If software
houses can't produce software that is sufficiently superior to free
software to justify the price they charge, then they don't really deserve
to succeed. After all, they have far more resources than a typical Open
Source developer.

On 4 Mar, 18:46, "j.oke" gmail.com> wrote:

Actually, the first time I heard this question in raised in public was
at the International Lisp Conference 2002 where the speaker delivered
an address on this very question. He got me thinking. I remember who
this person was, but out of courtesy, I leave him out of it here.

In article bt.com>,
Richard Heathfield wrote:

Not that I really want to fan these off-topic flames, but this is just
factually incorrect. People generally do not write open-source software
out of altruism. They do it because they are hoping for some form of
compensation, like the ability to use other people's open-source
software, professional recognition and respect, or monetary compensation
in the form of employment, contracts, or investments in some commercial
venture. Whether this motivation is wise or ethical is a separate
question, but the fact is that most open-source developers do have a
profit motive, even if only indirectly.

rg

On 4 Mar, 20:18, Mark Tarver ukonline.co.uk> wrote:

So, to justify your philosophical hypothesis, you're just raising
another one?

(No surprise on my side, though...)

-JO

Mark Tarver ukonline.co.uk> writes:

Programming in general: maybe, though dubious. The specific subfields
of functional programming or Lisp: no I don't think so.

Spoken like a spammer as well as a troll.

Could you please at minimum take cll and clf out of your newsgroup
list. Well, clf anyway.

Ron Garret said:

Well, some do. I will cheerfully accept that not all do.

Mark Tarver said:

That response, more than anything, convinces me that this discussion is
rapidly heading nowhere useful.

There is a big difference between "we would rather you didn't talk about X"
and "we would rather you didn't talk about X *here*".

If you think that the division of Usenet into topic groups constitutes
censorship, then you don't want to waste time here - there's bound to be a
government conspiracy or two that you could be unmasking instead, or
perhaps you could be thinking up ideas for perpetual motion machines.