[LAU] Some disturbing news

[Louigi Verona]

Hey Victor!

Thank you very much for your points, really enjoy the direction of your
questions because I think they allow me to explain my position from very
important angles.

"The postulate is not about 4 freedoms. It’s about absolute freedom as a
starting point."

I agree that this is a good starting point. I don't know if Stallman
specifically views the world this way, but I definitely subscribe to this
approach.

In fact, I am not against Stallman's 4 freedoms at all. My position is not
that these 4 freedoms are unimportant or not good to have. My position is
that giving up these freedoms is completely fine in many situations. And
making people give up these freedoms by virtue of providing a service is
also fine. (will clarify below)

This is very important, because due to Stallman's dramatic narrative and
binary positions on ethics, anyone disagreeing with him automatically ends
up in Stallman's bucket of "evil". But I am rejecting this binary view and
assert that one can agree that FLOSS is good, that the 4 freedoms are good,
but not believe that proprietary is inherently evil or wrong or an
unacceptable trade-off.

In fact, the 4 freedoms formulated by Stallman are not unique. You can
basically formulate similar types of freedoms for almost any human
activity. In the article I talk about the restaurant business. You can have
basically the same 4 freedoms there. And when you go to eat out, you are
giving these freedoms up: you no longer have control of where to buy
ingredients, or to watch how the food is prepared, or to understand how
clean everything is. (Sure, there are restaurants where the kitchen is open
or where you prepare your own dish, but you get the idea)

And allegedly food is very important. If you eat something spoiled, things
can become very bad, even fatal. And yet - we find it ok to give up control
of how we prepare food and trade it for the service of being serviced and
fed by a professional.

And yes, sometimes professionals will commit fraud or perform malpractice.
It does not mean that if you got poisoned at a restaurant that the whole
restaurant business is evil and should be completely rejected. What you
need is tighter regulation and higher standards.

So why is software any different in this regard? Of course, restaurant
industry and IT have enough differences, but the main principle is the same
- you give up a portion of your control over the process of creating the
product and even over the product itself in order to enjoy a higher quality
of service, to save your time and be able to focus on something else.
Standard division of labor. And the IT world has regulation being developed
around it.

And today nobody actually prevents people from exercising these 4 freedoms.
You want to completely own your computing? Sure, go ahead. And Stallman is
someone to thank for that, because probably without his push for free
computing it would've been born much later. (Although I don't doubt it
would've been born eventually even if Stallman was not there)

And while in the 80s exercising these freedoms was probably very difficult
and even impossible, and one had to really push for a project to build a
system available to the public to tinker with, today this is no longer the
case. We have many FLOSS systems that allow the public to do their own
computing, build their own stuff, or choose in many cases to do the work
themselves rather than hire a professional.

"I can’t see why it’s "invalid reasoning" to think that human beings are
free to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social conventions."

Because this is not what I am saying. I am not arguing that humans are not
free to begin with to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social
conventions.

But neither does Stallman argue for freedoms to the extent permitted by
laws, norms and social conventions. He argues *against* permitted laws,
norms and social conventions: software patents are bad, using credit cards
is wrong, any form of online presence that is not technologically anonymous
is wrong, using proprietary software is wrong, using web services that do
computation is wrong, using software offered as a subscription is wrong,
etc, etc.

In other words, Stallman wants to change how the world works. And this is
fine. But in order for me to agree that what what he sees as a problem is
really a problem - because currently it is the norm - and that what he
proposes is actually a change that will provide a solution to this problem
and in general make the world a better place - I would like to understand
on what basis does he believe all of that. And this is the justification I
am asking for.


As for the Popper principle, of course I know it, I was a science
communicator for many years and ran an organization that promoted science
and public knowledge about things like controlled experiments, etc.

In case of social sciences experiments are more difficult to run, but you
can more easily do controlled data experiments, proper A/B analysis, etc.
At the very least, you should base your conclusion on statistics, not on
cherry picked blog posts and news items, like Stallman does it in his
"proprietary abuses" section, littered with errors, falsehoods,
overstatements and loaded language.



In conclusion to this email, I'd like to say that this conversation has
been very helpful and I will think if I should rename the article, so that
it does not create an impression that I say one has to prove that freedom
is a default position. I will carefully think about rewriting several
opening sections as well, since I believe thanks to this conversation I
came up with better ways to say what I mean.



Louigi.
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