OK, the more I thought about this question, the nastier it got in terms of complexity. The question of whether information should be free and if so, what kinds, hooks up to other subjects, most notably patents and law enforcement. Before we lose ourselves down this rabbit hole though, let's first quickly define what information is exactly. I'm not going to get into philosophy here and I'm just going to say that for purposes of our discussion, information can be defined as simply facts about something or someone. Nothing more or less.
There is one thing for sure though that came to me throughout my thinking about this subject. That the answer of whether information should be free or not is not a this or that answer, meaning, the answer is not that completely all information should be free, period, no matter what, and is also not that completely all information should be restricted somehow.
OK, fine. But how do we decide which information should be withheld from the general public and which shouldn't? We answer that by calculating the risks and benefits of releasing the information we have. Let's take someone's Social Sec. number for example. If we withhold that information, nobody is harmed or can be harmed by not knowing that, besides of course the individual it's assigned to. But if we give it, it would naturally only lead to someone sooner or later stealing that SS number and using it illegitimately.
Now let's take another piece of information. The information that quartz crystal is mostly found in igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks. If we gave that information out, it wouldn't do anyone any harm if the general public knew it. Or if it was, the risk is so small as to be pretty much non-existent. But if we withhold that information, it would only be a detriment to geological studies.
But those two examples are both easy mode. Let's shift gears now and talk about law enforcement and ethical procurement of evidence. Just how far is too far when it comes to how much we allow law enforcement to gather information about our lives? How much is too much? How much is too little? What personal information is off-limits, if any, when it comes to prosecuting others?
And even if we solve that, we haven't even touched how the patenting of software should work. Should it even be allowed? Or if we allow it, can we allow others to see the code but simply not to modify it or distribute it without proper authorization from the programmer/company? Or would it simply be better if the code was allowed to remain hidden entirely? In a perfect society, all information should definitely be free. But we are not in a perfect society, and I don't believe it's ethical to force someone to distribute their software for free if they don't want to. But at the same time, that isn't and should never be an excuse for a software developer to write software that is harmful to users and then turn around and cry about someone invading their patent on it when others inevitably reverse-engineer it and find out just how harmful the code is.
Perhaps we can only pick the lesser of two evils. Honestly, if I had to choose in this case, I'd choose that software must remain free to edit and distribute. But at the same time, the commercialization of software has brought some good things too, believe it or not, such as bringing a certain standard to the table. When you know that a group of people are using the same software, you can build on that much more easily instead of having to accommodate, say, 5 different software standards written by 5 different developers.
I guess at the end of the day, each piece of information needs to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis with a bias towards freedom of information instead of away. There may be some information in which it's murky to say whether it should be contained or set free, but at the very least, there is information that we can all agree should be free. Information that corrupt governments and corporations wouldn't want us to know. Information that the public should have access to. And that's pretty much where Sanctuary stands.
