[LAU] Some disturbing news

Thorsten Wilms self at thorstenwilms.com
Mon Jun 4 21:43:21 CEST 2018


On 04.06.2018 15:48, Louigi Verona wrote:

> You bring up an interesting point: if I understood correctly you say 
> that we should start with the 4 freedoms and then show that not having 
> them is bad.

No, actually I wanted to point out that you got the order wrong. 
"non-free software is immoral" is not the root.

The 4 Freedoms are _not_ postulated as a solution to a problem, they are
descriptive of the situation Stallman experienced as status quo early 
on. Which then got eroded.

Then non-free software is called immoral, because it denies the 4 Freedoms.

It is true that one should now ask: Why would users deserve these freedoms?

Reasons given are, because they:
- increase user power
- decrease a software provider power
- promote sharing and cooperation

One may argue against all of those; I don't think this can be reduced to 
pure reason, as you always run into doubt of what may or does actually 
happen and at some point you require value judgements.

I'm curious how your "anything must be proven" approach fares with so 
called basic human rights.


Just for shits and giggles:
Given a software S under either non-free conditions as NS, or Free 
Software conditions as FS,
any act of encouragement to a person to use NS,
is to seek more power for the licensor and less for the user.
With FS, it is the inverse.
If we assume there to be more users than licensors, with NS there will 
be lower overall power. By comparison with the alternative, this is a 
restriction and unnecessarily restricting people is immoral ;)


Actually, I'm seeing calling non-free software immoral to be more 
problematic than I started out with. Which is not the same as calling 
that judgement "baseless". Though I always thought it is less an issue 
to offer non-free software, rather an issue to accept it.


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