Free Software is Principled
I recall, several years back now, being in some sort of forum somewhere arguing over the implementation of anti-circumvention legislation in Australia. I recall Rusty Russell talking about ghostscript’s [?] handling of pdf documents at the time and how it respected restrictions settings in the pdf documents. That is, despite being able to ignore them, ghostscript’s authors decided to respect them. In practice that would mean that most ghostscript users would also respect those settings.
By way of contrast, today, looking for information about pdf to text conversion tools I came across closed source software whose primary purpose is apparently to remove restrictions from pdf files. In my experience free software is typically more principled than its closed source counterparts – perhaps stupidly so.
Brendan Scott's Weblog 