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Comment by BrainInAJar | Hacker News Reader

That's terribly ironic, since the source code is completely useless to the user, only developers.

That's not really true. Perhaps they can't make changes themselves, but they can ask others to do so, or hire someone.

Mozilla Science, for example, tries to pair up researchers who have ideas together with developers who can code to build open-source projects. Despite the fact that the researchers may not be able to code, the fact that they have the right to share and modify the code is important.

Even if you can't make changes yourself, if you have access to the source you can pay other people to make changes you need.

User as a developer. Not a 3rd party developer.

That is not true at all, I know many non-developers that will compile source code themselves, one that is done often would be FFMPEG where you have several compile flags that will make the software preform differently based on the options you select, This is an example of Source Code being useful to non-developers.

Compiling source code you don't comprehend and aren't capable of rewriting isn't really an exercise of freedom. You could just as well distribute a closed binary with runtime configuration options, for all it matters in that case.

if you're implying that everyone who usefully modifies source code or compiles with options is able to write the code from scratch, i would advise you rethink your position.

to put a finer point on it, the concept of "layers of abstraction" is fundamental to computers and software. i can know quite a bit about adjusting the pieces of a program without having the ability to build it as effectively as i modify it.

Not from scratch, perhaps, but it still takes technical acumen to do anything useful with the source code at all, which implies that a non-technical user can't really exercise the freedoms of free software, beyond simply having access to the source code.

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