Comment by robmusial | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robmusial | Hacker News Reader

> Do you believe in Free Software?

> If we believe in things like right to repair...

> immoral

When it is phrased like that (and it often is phrased like that) it sounds like a religion. Also the notion that there is no compromise to be had also seems very religious. I already have a religion and Free Software isn't it.

I support the majority of the goals of the FSF, SFC, OSI, and EFF. Some of them overlap, some I don't agree with (particularly the FSF's stance on handling nonfree firmware), and some goals of mine aren't represented by any of the above groups.

What I absolutely reject is the all or nothing approach even implicit in the question. If I buy a piece of proprietary software or hardware that does not mean I don't "believe" in Free Software or that it is a lost cause. It means I want to play video games with my friends. It means the way I put food on my family's table depends on it sometimes (although 99% of what I do is FOSS even for work).

Even in religion we make these moral distinctions of how closely we're willing to cooperate with evil in the course of our daily lives. I don't want to live the ascetic lifestyle of Richard Stallman. And to imply that I should to really consider myself a supporter of Free Software is what drives me and a few other people away from such a movement. Not to ramble about my FOSS CV, but I release software under the GPLv3, I've donated to FSF, SFC, OSI, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD just to name a few, I've spent hours tabling for the FSF at different events. Because I sometimes use proprietary software does that excommunicate me from the belief of Free Software?

I think that the difference between where we are now and the RMS view is he sees free software as yet another constitutional right, a right that we could have only known about after the advent of the computer. Many people would die defending their constitutional rights, or at the very least lay quite a bit of their lives on the line for it. What got me thinking about this was an RMS talk where he was saying how the least we can do is suffer some minor inconveniences to support free software. Like maybe tool A is rough around the edges or doesn't have feature X, Y that tool B does, but tool A is FOSS, so we pick A anyway as a vote for free software.

So my question is twofold: do we believe that FOSS is a right, and where do we draw the line between dedicating our lives to fighting for FOSS, and only using it when its completely convenient.

On the one hand we have RMS, whose ideology has led him to a path where he can pick from maybe a handful of computers where he can get everything FOSS, and if he needs something where there is nothing FOSS to cover it, he can't use it. He can't enjoy modern gaming, or VR, etc. On the other hand, we have people who will buy a tool if it's better than the FOSS solution, who never consider FOSS into their calculus of picking one tool over another on principle, or an even greater sacrifice - refraining from doing an activity on a computer because the only solution is not FOSS.

> and the RMS view is he sees free software as yet another constitutional right

Do you have a source for this? His writings and talks are extensive and I have not seen an instance where he makes this argument. He's said evil and not evil, moral and immoral, but I've never seen him make a constitutional argument. I've never seen him lobby to even make proprietary software illegal.

> So my question is twofold: do we believe that FOSS is a right

Would this right to Free Software be absolute where our other rights are not? Let's say we made Free Software a constitutional right. What about Germany? What about Japan? Would we outlaw the use of nonfree software from those countries? Why stop at software? What about copyright and patents? Isn't in immoral to not copy and share a textbook with someone? To try to only solve this at the level of rights it ignores the sociological and economic solutions and impacts as well.

> where do we draw the line between dedicating our lives to fighting for FOSS, and only using it when its completely convenient.

So to be in favor of Free Software I have to dedicate my life to it? If that's the case then I draw the line at the very beginning. I'm not dedicating my life to Free Software, or even to software for that matter. If you mean am I willing to give FOSS the first look and even ignore some of its warts to use it over proprietary software? Then I do that almost 100% of the time. Am I going to to release any software I have control over under a free license? I do that 100% of the time. I jump through A LOT of hoops to try to use as much FOSS as possible. But... I enable DRM in Firefox and install ffmpeg and nonfree codecs so I can watch streams instead of using Chrome. I use Steam on Linux and use Proton instead of just installing Windows. My life _could_ be a lot simpler if I didn't try to support FOSS as much as possible.

Also, there has been a lot of really cool and really interesting work done in FOSS since the FSF. Like I said my job is almost entirely based on and around FOSS. If you would've told me that in 1998 when I first installed Red Hat for the first time I wouldn't have believed you. I would've hoped it would've been true, but it seemed like a dream. There are so many interesting ideas around FOSS. To focus on the narrow definition and work of just the FSF is a mistake.

Once people start crossing the line from promoting an ideal to promoting an identity, that's when they lose me.

See..to me the obvious answer is of course not, for roughly the same reason that church services aren't filled only with e.g. priests and monks.

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