Thread: PRS-500 RasterFarian 2.5 Beta
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Old 08-24-2007, 01:29 PM   #121
alex_d
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Quote:
However, distribution of a trial version of a commercial tool like this is just wrong,
You mean wrong like kicking a puppy is just wrong? and how cheating on your wife is just wrong? Morality is a tricky thing, but many people, you included, have a tendency to think that if someone wrote it down on paper, then it must be just wrong. You're the kind of guy who tell kids they're not playing their boardgame by the rules.

My sense of morality understands that laws are imperfect. You can't write a legislation that says, for example, "well, if a guy honestly didn't know he was breaking the law then you let him off." It's logistics, practicalities. You don't know who's lying. So you write a law that says, "professed ignorance is always ignored" and send everyone to jail. There's many other such examples too. It's understandable. But only an idiot thinks it's Right or ideal.

So, if you are lawyer representing pdf-tools.com, or a judge, then I could see why you insist on sticking to the letter. But if you're just a guy, then you have a really misplaced sense of morality in thinking that actions which definately (not just sort of) don't hurt anyone are nevertheless Wrong in the ethical sense. You're just not thinking clearly.


p.s. for those who'd like the background: rasterfarian makes use of pdinfo.exe to read the bookmarks in a pdf. It is the only commandline tool that i've found after extensive searching that does this simple task. pdinfo.exe is one of about a dozen executables that are packaged as a single product by pdf-tools.com called "command-line tools." This simple package retails for $360 per user, obviously targeted at businesses who could try to justify something like this (and the high cost arises not from how difficult it is to create the product but rather the dynamics of how much businesses would pay).

Now I'm not going to criticize how pdf-tools would like to make money, or our as-yet imperfect capitalism for not being empowered by fluid competition so that the price of things becomes their cost. That doesn't matter right now. Rather, it's pretty obvious that redistributing this tiny subset of a product that is targeted at a completely different market has caused pdf-tools.com no damages (and I say that with precision). On the flipside, this redistribution has considerably enhanced the RasterFarian tool that was created and is distributed for free for no reason other than to aid others.

If the golden rule of morality is that "the Right is that which increases the sum of the Good in the world relative to its Ills," then pretty clearly what i've done here is good. The fact that the law can't be written to be so nuanced is understandable. Yet people who think that what's been written down is infallible, are not.

This is what I mean when I say your morality is misplaced.

Now that your actions have caused RasterFarian to no longer be offered for download, you have clearly done a significant number of people harm. What you've done is, obviously, legal. But was it ethical?

Unfortunately, it is also in my legal power to forbid you from using RasterFarian. Do I consider this ethical? Certainly not. It is an empty, unfair act meant to hurt. It's also silly that I've been given the power to boss you around in this way. But it's legal. Now I wonder, would you obey or be a hypocrite?

Last edited by alex_d; 08-24-2007 at 01:40 PM.
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