Alright you haven't directly said it but you've implied it, by saying something's evil it means you hate it and therefore should be eliminated and if you eliminate all proprietary software only free software will be left.
What's wrong with that? I mean, really, where is the problem? A few dozen suits lose their majority stranglehold of the market to the many? Colour me unimpressed.
Proprietary software isn't evil it's just people being selfish looking after number one which is human nature after all.
...and man is sinful by nature, that doesn't make such behaviour RIGHT or even BENEFICIAL to the whole of humanity. In fact, it can be quite detrimental, particularly considering all the products we'll never hear about and can't BEGIN to quantify because they were quashed by proprietary code that managed to creep into the product one way or another. When someone gets to own common knowledge, that in and of itself is totalitarianism, which brings us to the next point.
Forcing the free model on everyone would be a totalitarian policy and will create more problems than it would solve.
That's debatable; that kind of reactionary thinking is not an uncommon knee-jerk opinion formed when someone else gives them the totalitarian option of paying for something that should be common knowledge (unless you happen to think that C and all programming languages should be governed by their financiers instead of their progenitors, in which case I have no objections to you being dragged out into a field and shot). Having said that, I fail to see how a standarised model would hurt FOSS. Let's bear in mind that proprietary (as in truly uninterpretable) software is a fairly new concept - in fact, most of the growth of the PC platform was made between the late 70's and early 90's -
where most of the software was open either to recompilation or at least inspection. Too bad the companies that refuse to share their source are oftentimes the ones that do their best to silence reports of security breaches.
Free software isn't always technically superior, it's the developers that determine the quality which has little to do with the license.
Point one: It'd be nice if idiots would stick to making proprietary software, but this won't happen.
Point two: In light of point one, at least said idiots can have their code corrected, assuming it's worth saving.
Point three: Very often crappy open-source code will die its natural death because of excessively poor coding. The last time I checked, Microsoft still had Vis.
The free model isn't always good business sense and this is why lots of companies refuse to use it.
It's quite good for business, as only the valid concepts receive any attention whatsoever. A program that brings up a terminal and prints "hello world" fifteen-thousand times to a .log file, on the other hand, tends to get left by the wayside. As for Windows, who knows how many other functions Solitaire calls before loading? All kidding aside, IBM, Sun, and a number of other "old-timers" have seen the light and are producing software the same way they produced it twenty years ago. Why doesn't anybody else? Greed is no excuse.
Free software is great.
It's very good to share.
Doing something for the community is excellent, communism can work.
The problem is that we have Rich Stallman on one side espousing the benefits of FOSS, while Vladimir Gates sits on the other side pointing out the cons. I find it convenient - if not ironic - that he rips on the one thing that would topple his empire.
But people have just as much right to choose to share as they do to to choose not to.
Precisely, but greed ultimately leads to a shortage of resources - as has been proven many times prior - and winds up hurting the people it was meant to serve. The question becomes: do I want to serve the community, or serve myself? When you choose the latter, you're hurting everyone,
including yourself, particularly in the long run.
