FaTony wrote:When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral duty of any knowledgeable person to remove DRM and put unrestricted version on torrent sites.
I disagree. My point of view is more like:
When there are no free alternatives, it is a moral incentive to create open source "clones".
GuntherT wrote:You talk as if humankind is owed the source code of any program ever written, and any author who doesn't hand it over deserves to have it stolen. Free software is a gift. If no one hands you a gift, you don't get to steal one.
In a way, it could work as a reasoning. Using science as an example, every scientific result belongs indeed to humankind, as it is due to the stream of human knowledge that one arrives to add a result to it, moreover validated by the rest of the community. Hence, it is a collective achievement of humankind, not of single scientists.
I guess one could fit a lot of software in the "science category" and state that it must belong to humankind. In fact, this is the reason why many research groups publish the software they write as open source. However, I see that there is a lot of software that is not "scientific research" but more like "making tools" which does not really have to plug into this logic.
I mean, if a new algorithm of perceptual digital audio compression is closed sourced I get angry as I want to know how it works (in principles... in reality I might end up never looking a it). Still, I am OK with people selling video-games, when they don't hide interesting discoveries into patents.
I hope my point is kinda clear...