Only God has the right to close his source code

April 19, 2009

Everything that everyone learns, researches, discovers, creates is always based on what others have learned, researched, discovered or created. Human knowledge is not original, rather it is a natural consequence of previous human knowledge. We are not ever really creators. Instead we are discoverers of truths.

Knowledge is global property. Imagine a world, where all the progress and discoveries made in say the field of cancer research were treated as proprietary knowledge. Not enough people would have access to life-saving knowledge, and more people would suffer and die. The pharma industry, one of the most sinister elements of the realm of patent-mongery, is guilty of hiding knowledge, and preventing the discovery or spread of knowledge for the sake of material profit. Look at the battles Big Pharma wages against generic HIV drugs.

What Big Pharma is saying is, they get to decide who knows or knows not. Who lives or dies. For the sake of profit. Overpaid executives playing God with the wretched lives of brown children in far away lands.

Knowledge is for everybody. To monopolize it, is to steal from all mankind. I believe in (Free) and Open-Source Software (FOSS). Imagine people like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had closed their knowledge from the eyes of the world. Imagine, a world where only one man or one group of people know how to develop aspirin, birth control pills or band-aids.

Proprietary knowledge is the enslavement of the minds of people.

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