If you want to look into the ethical issues of Open Source I would suggest that you take a broader view of Intellectual Property in general, not just software. One good example of the proprietary mindset at its very worst is in the area of GM food. I'm not going to go into all of the conspiracy theories here as this is not the appropriate place but the case of
Monsanto V Schmeiser would be a good start. Essentially, GM food is no better, despite the hype, than traditional farming methods. The problem though is that traditional farming cannot be patented while GM products can, meaning that a company that produces a GM seed holds full "rights" to the seed no matter where it grows or how it got there. Even if the farmer that is found growing the seed did not buy the seed and did not plant it he is still
liable to the company that owns the patent. Many farmers have been ruined by this abuse of "intellectual property rights." The link above gives much more info than this but personally whenever someone starts complaining about the need to protect their "intellectual property rights" my attention is immediately drawn to stories like the one above. Similar stories from the software world are not unknown.
In the open-source world, there are many motivations for writing software and giving it away for free, ranging from "just doing it for fun" to the more serious, politically-motivated purposes. Regardless, In my opinion there are very valid reasons for only adopting free software that extend way beyond "just doing it for fun" and in fact reach as high as ensuring my own personal freedom to use a computer at all. What would happen if I was to write a small bash script that I only used on my own home computer, I didn't make any money from it, and only used it for personal purposes, only to have a corporate lawyer knocking on my door demanding that I hand over a six-figure sum of money because my script had violated someone's "intellectual property." Better yet, what if I didn't even know the program was there, it had been installed by a virus without my knowledge or consent, and the corporation had discovered it was there by illegally hacking into my computer and taking a look around? Insane? Never going to happen? Perhaps, yet, by analogy, that is
exactly what happened to Percy Schmeiser, and don't think no-ones trying to do the same in the computer world.
Writing and using GPL'ed software helps to prevent this situation from occurring, whether or not the user/programmer is aware of the bigger issues, which is why the Linux movement is so important, probably far more important than many of its advocates realise. Maybe in a perfect world, the open-source and proprietary philosophies can co-exist peacefully but patents are too easy to abuse and the bigger the company is that holds them, the easier it is for that company to abuse them.
Sure, so maybe your paper is only dealing with ethical issues in the open-source community itself, but IMHO any article that tries to explain the relevance of the Gnu/Linux movement and the issues surrounding it without at least touching on the more general areas of corporate ethics and patent abuses has missed one of the most important issues involved in the whole scene.
