I have pondered on this subject for quite awhile now and my opinion on it might be controversial. I have recently stumbled upon the title software agnostic, I might be one of those.. maybe.
My sister, a strong open source supporter decided to stop using google as a search engine and has shifted to DuckDuckGo almost completely. To be honest I hadn’t even heard of it prior to her using it. She had recently joined an open source software club in college which has probably influenced her opinions on this.
I as a person am ever so grateful for the existence of the internet, view google as a synonym to it. Every time I think about how most of my most difficult questions got answered it was with the help of google, there is probably nothing in my life that I have not googled.
I had recently gotten into an argument with my sister, she opened a browser that gave her the options Bing and DuckDuckGo on the search bar, she looked at it and said, who even uses Bing..!, to which I remarked, Says the person who uses DuckDuckGo!, intending to mean that both were equally unpopular in my opinion, she stared at me for a minute and started an argument about how Bing’s search results are not as accurate as DuckDuckGo’s and how me saying what I did, is very offensive to her views and how she believes open source is the way to go and hence she has added being open source to her table of ethics and et cetera and et cetera and et cetera. Instant regret.. why did I say that, I don’t even like Bing so much…, never really used it much.
However, I felt not using a software altogether and saying it is not ethical is a bit extreme, I do understand where the open source argument is coming from, I am all for the free software but I also believe that having a bit of both is what creates balance. I don’t find any harm with ads, rather the way it tracks my preferences fascinates me, it helps me cut down a lot of unnecessary searching for products I want to buy, of course there are a lot of bad quality products from nonexistent/fake sites that I get recommended but I don’t mind them much. I know that it is not just my sister who does this argument of ethics and I also understand it is the level of tolerance and acceptance that varies from person to person, not everyone might think it is acceptable to be tracked and that getting even some amount of intrusive and frequent ads is okay.
But like I said it is to be observed that there is truly a need for both types of software to exist, not to just complement each other but to cater to more than one type of community. Everything has its pros and cons and they don’t need to be accepted by everyone, but people need to stop saying that a certain thing is or isn’t ethical. In the end ethics is a rigid subject, it’s not an opinion, being mindful of what we say can help us open channels of discussion rather than a debate on defending the ethics of a subject.
Well that’s my say, what’s yours?
