The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my ally.
My only friend is Truth, AKA God. Everyone in Him is also my friend, but a great many of them still work against His revealed truth. My allies are those who work for that truth.
In every cause men discuss, I often find myself standing alone in the answer I propose. Since I don’t approach any of this with the attitude of needing to win anything in particular, I can afford to lose at every game. There is no competition which interests me. It’s about Truth, and if you start thinking in terms of absolutes, you’re certainly going to miss the point.
For example, I understand the notion electronic data cannot really ever be sold. You can take money in exchange for releasing it the first time, but after that it’s wide open. You have to continue poking and prodding around and finding ways to leverage your ownership, as it were. Given the vast efforts of government and corporations to do just this, it’s still a miserable failure. If I really wanted to run Windows 7 for free, I know where to get it, and Microsoft can’t really do much about it. The running game between corporate control and crackers always favors the latter simply by the nature of the thing. That so many are publicly pilloried with huge fines and sentences is more a testimony to how careless are those who refuse to play by the rules than it is for enforcement efforts.
Frankly, I believe they are doing it all wrong. In a certain sense, the old economic model of controlled access has no place in software. More, I find it not simply wrong headed, but wrong inherently, as in morally repugnant. If you reduce it to bits and bytes, you should know better, and have no justification for trying to control it after that. But I also find it not worth my while to push the issue. That is, not every moral evil is a crusade which calls me. God is God and He reserves the right to decide what will be important to me.
Further, He gets to decide what I will do or not do, not some corporate idiot stiff at Microsoft. The laws of the land are not a moral absolute, and the Bible made it all too clear only laws which fit the revelation of God are godly. Thus, any rule, law or whatever must pass the smell test of Heaven. (Hint: Almost none currently in place pass.) I obey God. That usually works out to obeying man’s laws, but no one should pretend they can count on that. Nor do I pretend there ought to be no consequences as men consider such things. No other man is required to consider my feelings on the matter, unless God puts that on his heart. Either way, it is not in my hands, and I won’t pretend it should be. You are not bound by my calling, nor I yours.
Thus, pirating software is by no means a moral issue. Attempts to control knowledge or information makes you an enemy of God. He is a God of revelation and truth, not of secrecy and hiding. Information is any knowledge which is expressed outside your own mind, and once expressed, it belongs to God. You no longer own it. Read between the lines of Scripture; all knowledge which can be known (information) is the common property of all humanity. It is His very nature to open things up, and I would maintain quite bluntly software piracy, so called, is not a sin of itself. But software pirates aren’t angels, either. Too many of them are moral reprobates. But so it is with a great many software developers, and most certainly true of anyone who takes advantage of laws which favor corporations. The very legal notion of corporations as persons before the law is an abomination before the Lord. So is most crime. How many software pirates do you know who love Jesus and walk in purity? The piracy isn’t the issue.
There is a global war already under way in our world. It’s not good versus evil, but one brand of oppressor fighting another for turf. The very categories of winning and losing themselves are not a part of Truth. When Truth wins, there is no consideration for what it costs any person. It’s not that we don’t matter; the Cross makes it obvious we do. But caring is the path, not the victory. Truth has already won long ago; the issue before us is manifesting the victory by manifesting Truth. We don’t lose ourselves into the great Nothingness or some other Eastern silliness. We lose ourselves into the ultimate Person, even while He regards us each individually. Paradox is the language of Heaven’s logic. We are at war with anything which attempts to reduce Truth from a person to something dead, lifeless and powerless.
There are no moral absolutes in the typical sense. There are some actions which are always wrong, simply because there is no right way to do wrong. But wrong is always defined in the mind of God, which is not quite within our grasp. We can know, at best, only what is required of us at the moment. Chances are we’ll get it wrong in some way most of the time, but God looks upon the desire of the heart — which is shorthand for saying He measures only your commitment to Him. Performance is simply what we can make of this living, dynamic and ineffable Truth.
So while I have friends, they aren’t necessarily allies. Allies are those who share that commitment and understanding. Friends can be enemies at the same time. But a lot of folks out there do things which are useful in my calling who are neither friend nor ally. I care about them as people, and they are a lot more important than the service they perform. The battlefield is not in actions of men to be shaped in moral paths, though we would like to see that. The battlefield in not in the minds of men to make them all see or agree with morality. The battlefield is my own soul, seeking to reclaim it from the years and years of a thousand sucker roots of sinful commitments I don’t even recognize. I’m not fighting people, and I’m not fighting for people, because I really can’t do anything to fix this world or people.
I can’t even fix me, but at least that’s where the focus lies. I keep seeking the path to Truth within my own soul, and in so doing my thoughts and actions produce an image the world around me can see. In both failure and the mere handful of victories, they should see the Truth, and what He says of things. The battle I fight is me, to kill off the desires of the flesh and die as soon as possible. Not according the wishes of this dead man of flesh, but according to the whims of my Redeemer, who owns me in full.
“Software piracy”? Feh. Talk to the sky, or the ground, or my shoes or my clothes … my attention is elsewhere.
