The Amazon example doesn’t seem to be that illustrative of the concept you are trying to get across, mostly because the reason academic institutions don’t sell computation is that they aren’t set up for it, not that commerce is considered evil. They have no problem charging for other services, such as tuition.
Here’s a better one: police, military, and government in general. Everyone in that role has slightly different moral codes than the rest of us, in that they are able to legitimately employ violence in various forms, and for the most part we are willing to cede that role to them. The government is our shabbos goy, although too often a master rather than servant.
Commerce is considered evil. We’re sensitive to this at JCVI, because a large proportion of the biology research community hates our founder, Craig Venter, for having had the gall to make money off of biology. Today, it’s better-accepted; but when he started, it was apostasy.
If he hadn’t made money, there wouldn’t be a JCVI now; we couldn’t afford to do what we do just on grants. By its fruits you shall know the tree.
Universities are given a free pass in some ways. Note that the first universities (Padua, Paris) were deliberately for profit. Harvard would make a profit without charging any tuition—so why does it charge so much tuition? MIT may be in the same situation; they get over a billion dollars a year from the government, and have only 10,000 students.
Many of our grants require us to give the results away for free. If we charged people to run the software on our servers, we’d have to make the case that charging for the use of computer time was distinct from charging for the use of the software resulting from the contract. There’s little legal precedent in this area AFAIK. Moreover, legal precedent don’t matter when you don’t get a chance to make your case—it doesn’t matter what the law says; it matters how the next program officer feels about what you’re doing.
The Amazon example doesn’t seem to be that illustrative of the concept you are trying to get across, mostly because the reason academic institutions don’t sell computation is that they aren’t set up for it, not that commerce is considered evil. They have no problem charging for other services, such as tuition.
Here’s a better one: police, military, and government in general. Everyone in that role has slightly different moral codes than the rest of us, in that they are able to legitimately employ violence in various forms, and for the most part we are willing to cede that role to them. The government is our shabbos goy, although too often a master rather than servant.
Commerce is considered evil. We’re sensitive to this at JCVI, because a large proportion of the biology research community hates our founder, Craig Venter, for having had the gall to make money off of biology. Today, it’s better-accepted; but when he started, it was apostasy.
If he hadn’t made money, there wouldn’t be a JCVI now; we couldn’t afford to do what we do just on grants. By its fruits you shall know the tree.
Universities are given a free pass in some ways. Note that the first universities (Padua, Paris) were deliberately for profit. Harvard would make a profit without charging any tuition—so why does it charge so much tuition? MIT may be in the same situation; they get over a billion dollars a year from the government, and have only 10,000 students.
Many of our grants require us to give the results away for free. If we charged people to run the software on our servers, we’d have to make the case that charging for the use of computer time was distinct from charging for the use of the software resulting from the contract. There’s little legal precedent in this area AFAIK. Moreover, legal precedent don’t matter when you don’t get a chance to make your case—it doesn’t matter what the law says; it matters how the next program officer feels about what you’re doing.
Thanks for the illustration—I was wondering about the details.