Thread: Get Microsoft to release the goddamn files
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juiceme is offline juiceme
2016-08-18 , 07:29
Community Council | Posts: 4,920 | Thanked: 12,867 times | Joined on May 2012 @ Southerrn Finland
#57
Originally Posted by Macros View Post
Originally Posted by juiceme View Post
well, leaks are immoral, heh
Look at Snowden, and the bad rep given to Wikileaks lately...
I hope your smiley meant you are joking, but the wording lets me doubt it. Don't confuse immoral with illegal.

What Snowden did was in no way immoral. He exposed the wrongdoings of the NSA. The case with Wikileaks is similar.
These people are heroes, they sacrifice, or at least risk, their personal freedom just for the chance to stop these wrongdoings.

Its like saying a guy who exposes a group of human traffickers acted immorally because he exposed his working colleagues.
I am partly joking but partly serious in this analogy. And there is a real reason I said immoral and not illegal.

Just as with leaking information that is good for common knowledge but dangerous to and suppressed by some parties leads you to a moral dilemma; you need to make sure you are doing it so it leaves your conciense clear.

Just as @pichlo says;

Originally Posted by pichlo View Post
Morality, like truth, is not something universal, hanging in the air. It is subjective and depends on where you stand. For some, Snowden "exposed NSA's wrongdoings". For others, he "threatened national security".

Regarding the topic of this thread, I know that some people believe that sacrificing anything and everything on the altar of their open-source god is never immoral but the truth is that the sources are Nokia's intellectual property and it is up to Nokia and Nokia alone to decide whatever they damn please with them, however inconvenient it might be for you. Making that decision for Nokia and leaking them would be not only illegal but also immoral.
There is a subtle difference between illegal and immoral;
If something is illegal, the rules are forced on you by external parties. When you break those rules it can be considered OK as long as you get away with it. Remember, you did no make the rules!
If, in the other hand you are doing an immoral thing, it goes against your own self and hurts you.

How this relates to the case of leaking maemo sources;
I could not give a toss about it if the sources and rights were owned my MS; that company has treated my friends and colleagues pretty badly and I have no moral obligations whatsover to them.
However as it has been established that the rights are still owned by Nokia it is a different thing alltogether.
 

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