The question is even bigger: should we trust startups that claim "no evil" when they are small, and quickly forget it when they grow?
Here is another example: http://blog.garrytan.com/infanticide-how-anti-competitive-la...
My favourite, most gregarious example is Privacy Polices. Sure, in certain jurisdictions (i.e. mine) they're legal documents. But equally, a company could bury in their terms of service something along the lines of 'We, the organization, to the best of our knowledge abide by the Privacy Policy. In the case where this is untrue, our liability is limited to XXX'.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Facebook released the full code of their social networking application under the GPL. That promises us very little in terms of our privacy, because they could easily (and perhaps should, from an engineering standpoint) stick all the privacy violation in a separate application for doing the analytics or providing data to 3rd parties.
Open source doesn't even do much of anything to limit what kinds of data can be collected through the front end. The original owner of the code retains copyright, so open source licenses place no legal restrictions on what they can do with the code. There's nothing stopping an unscrupulous company from sharing a squeaky-clean version of the source with the world at large, and running different code on their servers.
If anything, this is where I find Stallman to be at his least useful. He's only got this one hammer in a world where the vast majority of the most worrisome ethical concerns are not nails. His dogged insistence on trying to turn every moral and political issue in computing into one that can be answered by open source[1] is neither realistic nor practical, and only serves to illustrate that his ideas all became fixed long before Berners-Lee came along and changed everything.
[1]: For example: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...
That model - that open source is more trustworthy - was meant to apply to code you could read then compile from source on your machine. But the web is entirely a network of black-box applications you (legally) interact with in a passive sense - send request, get response. You really have no idea what's going on in the back-end, and no control over what they choose to do with what you put on their servers. And you definitely have no way to verify the code, apart from headers and responses.
You also seem to assume a very narrow use case of that FB source code (were it released to public scrutiny).
Free Software licensing only places restrictions on what licensees of the software can do with it. The original copyright holder, by virtue of possessing the original copyright, is not subject to those restrictions. That's why dual Free/commercial licensing is such a common choice for companies who are looking to monetize - it's an easy way to maintain commercial control over a product while still getting to call yourself "open".
If faced with a choice between money and doing the right thing, corporations are legally obligated (c.f. Dodge v. Ford) to pick money every single time.
> More recent cases such as AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow[2] or Shlensky v. Wrigley[3] suggest that the approach in Dodge no longer represents the law in most states, including Delaware, which regards the balancing of stakeholder interests as within a director's business judgment. Dodge has not been expressly overruled, but ceased to represent the law in most states.
Courts will bend over backward to defer to an executive's business judgment when there is no conflict of interest or similar wrongdoing in play.
That is a popular meme, but it is simply not true. More recent court cases[1][2] have found that corporate directors have broad discretion in their decisions as long as there is no fraud or conflict of interest. If the board of directors chooses to prioritize doing the right thing over pure maximization of profit, the shareholders' only recourse is to choose a new board of directors.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlensky_v_Wrigley
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Smith_Manufacturing_Co_v_Bar...
Even then, making money and doing the right thing are rarely a strict dichotomy.
Trying to sue start ups out of existence is not the only way to ensure the profitability of an incumbent company. Lawsuits always have the risk of losing and flushing all of those legal costs down the toilet, or potentially inviting countersuits. A company like Fab for instance could've just as easily decided to buy the new competitor or get more aggressive on price or marketing to snuff them out.
Only a publicly traded company would be subject to Dodge v. Ford.
Don't delude yourself into thinking you can trust a corporation. Corporations are sociopathic by design, barely kept in check by threats of lawsuits and bad PR.
What definition of startups are you using here?
> By 1916, the Ford Motor Company had accumulated a capital surplus of $60 million. The price of the Model T, Ford's mainstay product, had been successively cut over the years while the cost of the workers had dramatically, and quite publicly, increased. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to end special dividends for shareholders in favor of massive investments in new plants that would enable Ford to dramatically increase production, and the number of people employed at his plants, while continuing to cut the costs and prices of his cars. In public defense of this strategy, Ford declared:
> “My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business. ”
> While Ford may have believed that such a strategy might be in the long-term benefit of the company, he told his fellow shareholders that the value of this strategy to them was not a primary consideration in his plans. The minority shareholders objected to this strategy, demanding that Ford stop reducing his prices when they could barely fill orders for cars and to continue to pay out special dividends from the capital surplus in lieu of his proposed plant investments. Two brothers, John Francis Dodge and Horace Elgin Dodge, owned 10% of the company, among the largest shareholders next to Ford.
I don't have time to read the actual court documents, so I'll assume this is reasonably accurate.
It seems Ford was trying to say "screw shareholder value, we're doing the right thing because we want to support society." This was of course a losing argument. But it sounds like the whole problem was the argument. Couldn't the argument be "we did the right thing and took a short-term loss, but we believe this is in the company's, and by extension the shareholders', best interest because [it will create tons of goodwill | it creates tons of good PR for us | whatever]"?
I've watched people destroy companies I've built, and the fact is that there is very little you can do to legally stop them.