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Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

I think this is fundamentally incorrect.

> equivalent to telling people never to release anything they're not ok with being used in every possible way.

NO! What it's saying is: If you provide a tool, you are not entitled to control how I use that tool. I am allowed to retain my autonomy to use that tool in any legal way I choose.

What it absolutely is NOT saying is: Society has to let anything be fair game.

We can still have laws, regulations, prohibitions, etc - but they can't come from a bunch of rich technocrats who believe that they are the moral police. That way lies ALL sorts of terrible, terrible outcomes.

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Worth noting here that we only have a bunch of rich technocrats bearing the burden of regulating this sort of thing unwillingly and at the behest of advertisers due to massive public outcry after those very same rich technocrats spent decades undermining and dodging regulations in their industry and fostering this notion that all the rules of common society spaces and co-existing peacefully didn't apply to the internet, which in turn fostered an absolutely _stressful_ amount of anti-social individuals coming into Internet spaces, which they perceived they could exist in free of judgement and of the bounds of not being able to function interpersonally.

> If you provide a tool, you are not entitled to control how I use that tool. I am allowed to retain my autonomy to use that tool in any legal way I choose.

That principle eems like it was rule out the GPL, AGPL, and other copyleft software?

I touched on this in a cousin comment, but freedom 0 of the GPL states categorically that the user has:

>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose

Redistributing modified versions of the software it what is regulated under the GPL and other copyleft licences. Even then, the main aim of this restriction is to subvert the system of copyright which works in the opposite way (and unlike copyleft, is not just an academic concern, being constantly wielded by people and companies as a weapon against free speech).

I don't think that's true for the AGPL? If I publish something under the AGPL, I am saying that you are allowed to run it on your server as long as the users who interact with it are able to download the source code including any modifications you have made. That sounds a lot like controlling how you use a tool I have made available?

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