I was recently reading an interview on a blog, and came across this answer to the question: "What's more important? Principle or pragmatism?" Check out the article, as the answer given by Jeroen Vermeulen is brilliant!
You’re eating soup. The bowl breaks. (Not likely, but work with me here). Now tell me which was more important: the bowl or the soup?
I know a lot of people get very worked up about this. But principle and pragmatism are on a two-way street. Going one way, principle is where you look when deciding what you should do. Or, and this is usually what gets people worked up, what everyone should do. But going the other way, you look at pragmatic reality and discern all sorts of principles. That, I think, is the real attractor to the whole debate & mash free software has basically revived classical philosophy. What you learn there, what catches your imagination, what patterns you see and choose to explore, is all very personal.
There are people like Eric Raymond who will say that everyone just does what’s in their best interest, and nothing else will decide the course of events. The big epiphany they take from the free/open-source development is game theory and how it applies to markets. Then there are people like Richard Stallman who see how the given incentives in the market pit us against each other, and decide that it’s a bad thing. They derive a field-specific model of morality. Personally I’m fascinated by both.
But enough weaseling: I’m more on the “principle” side, because I don’t think principles are inherently non-practical. One of the smartest people I’ve known once said that morality evolves. It grows and adapts to help us survive as a group, just like perspective vision or opposable thumbs. Software licensing is at a point where different people try different things and we’re seeing what works. If I “sell” you software, it has to be like a piece of property, except copying is free and unlimited. So should we pretend that the program is still “my property” after the sale, only I’m also letting you use it? Or is it now yours, except I can sell it to others as well? It’s a lot like the old particle-or-wave debate about the nature of light.
Read the interview with Jeroen Vermeulen this quote was taken from. Free software developers rock!