One of the posters on \/r\/guitar\/, a gentleman (a real one) who advocates for Electronic Freedom (EFF) and Open Source (FOSS), noted that an entire geek faction believes that all software should be free of any copyright or patent protection.\u00a0 It occurs to me that maybe few of those people have any disabilities.<\/p>\n
If they did, they might find that the Supreme Court of the United States has rendered decision after decision holding that business does not have to put up with (accommodate) people with disabilities.\u00a0 The opinions in Toyota v. Williams (2002), for example, were especially tortured.\u00a0 If a business merely decides that any person with a disability interferes with a business necessity, it may freely fire that person.\u00a0 People with psychiatric disabilities, even just bad dreams, have it even worse.\u00a0 If they open their mouths, they can be summarily fired for being “a danger of violence in the workplace” without any history or intention of violence.\u00a0 Can you say “bigot”?<\/p>\n
This leaves most people with disabilities unable to find work, with many attempting to create jobs for themselves.\u00a0 So imagine this – an unemployed person with a disability works for months or years to develop intellectual property to sell in the marketplace or license to manufacturers.\u00a0 Then somebody who has little or no impediment to employment comes along and claims, in righteous outrage, that he should have all that hard work for free.<\/p>\n
I lost my last job in 2001 or ’02, soon after the USDA came out with training modules that identified anyone with a mental illness as a danger of violence in the workplace.\u00a0 By that time, I had been living with depression and PTSD for about 50 years, with little or no history of violence or drug abuse, the major risk factors for future violence.\u00a0 Never mind the injuries from a drinking driver in 1985 that cut down on working full time.<\/p>\n
Not being allowed to do productive work kills the soul.\u00a0 Many of us do what we do to keep our sanity.\u00a0 Then for some turkey to come along and demand a free lunch, or to set up an arbitrary karma block on reddit that kills posts – well now, isn’t that just special?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the posters on \/r\/guitar\/, a gentleman (a real one) who advocates for Electronic Freedom (EFF) and Open Source (FOSS), noted that an entire geek faction believes that all software should be free of any copyright or patent protection.\u00a0 … Continue reading