My previous entry drew some interesting comments. I wrote about the motion before the Green Party to boycott Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (which I stress is not policy until it passes, which it may not).

Since then Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has refused to censor Wikipedia, and has called on Google & Yahoo! to justify their supposed constructive engagement. He's even meeting with Chinese officials to press them on the matter. That's good to see.

The attitude of the free software community towards Google is really interesting. On the one hand they produce a little free software (though understandably none of the juicy stuff) and provide some interesting APIs. They run the Summer of Code program that provides funding for lots of student hackers, and they're a sponsor of this year's KDE conference - Akademy. They refused to hand over search records to the Bush administration (though frankly to do otherwise would have been an astonishingly weak and damaging move). Their motto is even that "you can make money without doing evil". So they're good guys, right?

Well there's no need to see the world in such black and white terms. A company can be mostly good but do some terrible things, just as Google are now helping China to censor the internet, and as Yahoo! have assisted the Chinese authorities in arresting journalists. As the GNU Project point out, Microsoft aren't the Great Satan, they do a lot of interesting and valuable work, but they still produce proprietary software, lobby for software patents, extend DRM into our homes, etc. Should we keep quiet about these companies just because they're mostly good? Of course not! Right now are Google "making money without doing evil"? Hardly.

For the KDE Project (for example) to choose to remove Google search functionality from all of its homepages would obviously require a decision by the membership, and would need to take into account the damage it could do to the project in terms of events sponsorship and Summer of Code applications. If an alternative existed, and if it didn't cripple KDE's ability to hold conferences, (two big "if"s) then I'd be in favour of moving away from Google.

The Green Party has no financial worries, and so needs only to find a decent alternative. Why bother? Because if lots of people make a public stand against these immoral practices, bolstered by Amnesty International's Irrepresible.info campaign, then Google comes under a lot of pressure to stop behaving badly. Maybe they'll then push the Chinese government harder, or maybe they'll join Wikipedia and countless others in refusing to bend to the will of an unelected censor.

As for the Green Party fiddling while Rome burns, the party puts most of its energy into the big issues such as climate change, rest assured! When free software projects stop flying hundreds of people all over the globe all year round, then we can start talking about who has the right priorities ;) For the record, I'm going to Akademy this year by bus and ferry.