Alright I'm back in, but first I must apologize for
this post it was written under the influance of alcohol but I wasn't that drunk so it's no excuse.
I just hope you know where I'm coming from.
Don't wory, I've understood your arugument all along.
You don't need a be a programmer to support free software exclusively.
Of course I understand this argument, but open source software benifits programmers more than anyone else. Having said that there are also disadvantages for the programmer too, for example if they can't to sell their code purly to one body. I'm no programmer so I'd rather pay some money for some software that does what I want it to rather than having to improve some existing software.
Non-free developers put effort into restricting their users.
I depends on the restrictions they impose on me, if in this case they just want me to distribut their software as is without modification than that's fine by me.
I don't want to support them. There is a movement for free software, which enables me not to support them. I'll support that movement as much as I can.
It's your right to do that but don't count on my support or the support of most people for that matter.
I don't believe that free software is the only way of doing things. I don't think that open source is the best way to produce novel and creative software. Financial gain is a very big incentive for companies to create good software, and allowing them to keep their trade secrets provides them with a very large motive to innovate because their innovation will benifit them not their competitors thus putting them further ahead. Off course the open source community can make good software too and companies will contribute to it, for example they might add a feature/bug fix to some software they use but I can't see them all giving donating their best code to the public domain.
IMO keeping source code to yourself is selfish and therefore evil. So might be not giving enough of your money to charity (IMO more rich people should give more money to charity.
I say again, money can do more to improve the quality of human life than software ever can.
Some poor people that can't afford it should be excused.
Some companies can't afford to donate their code (we can't), I know they might still be able to scrape togeather some money from services but thir ability to do this depends on the sort of software they release and their bussines model some are more open source friendly than others.
Comfortably OK people should share a bit.), but there is no huge-movement to rid the world of this selfishness and evil, and I'm not gonna start one (at least no time soon 
). If there was, I'd support it as much as I can, too.
Of course there is.
IMO the only way would be if more users supported free software.
There's a big differance between supporting free software and only supporting free software though.
It's the only way free software will ever get ahead IMO.
Which from one side of the fence migh seem like a good thing but I'm not convinced either way as I don't believe that the standard of software on the whole would improve.
Edit: I really should read all of the replies before I post:
My point was that they can be used in ways which benifit only the company. That really wasn't a very well thought out example.
I don't think I have.
I've defanatly read the ones on this site (if your talking 'bout front page) and am in the process of reading another rather lengthy one. I'd like to read some more. Makes a good basis for an argument.
Please take into account that our front page was written a while ago.
As for improving things this goes deeper that software.
Of course it does software is quite an insignificant thing in the scheme of things.
The current buissness attitude is not "How will this benifit people?", it's "Who cares about anything other than myself? How can I make the most money from this?".
In some cases in a weird way this is good as you'd assume that people will choose their products if they are better so they'll get richer but MS has proved this worng.
Now while I realise that this is not true of all people it's still their in one form or another with anything thats paid for. This is the problem with the prevaling market, capitalism, it's based on personal greed and gain.
Until now capitalism works to some degree, we've tried communism and it didn't work so I don't know what else is left.
Now this would not be such a problem if their where checks in place to prevnt this getting out of hand but there aren't. See my sig for more information. I hope I understood you corectly.
The problem is that people can be bribed so I don't know if this'll work.
To remove capitalism we need to get rid of money, but what would that lead to? Communism? We surly don't want the latter do we?
The open source is more communist than capitalist which is a big reason why I don't support it exclusively.
