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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Today, I can replicate most software that way. So the promise is more realized than before. The actual code is useful, yes, because it means I don't have to have it written but if it didn't exist I'd still get there.

The copyright and IP maximalism approaches aren't important to me. The world where everyone can have software written easily is much more appealing. The user freedom is better met.

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The software you have generated for your personal use is a micro fraction of all the software that it uses directly and indirectly to fulfill your needs. The rest is OSS maintained by someone at no cost to you.

The rest is not OSS. Some of it is. Lots of it is proprietary software too and maintained at no cost to me. I can't imagine how much network switching software my stuff goes through. Didn't pay anything for that.

If you pay someone for internet access you are paying for most of that, and I’m guessing you paid for the switch and router in your own house. But I was talking about the software running on your computer that your code invokes.

Sure, and I paid for all the contributions to Linux too in that respect. It's fine, if the unpaid ones want to not do any more work, that's fine too. It was always about user freedom, and now we have it.

I honestly wonder about what percentage of the toxicity of society is a result of the awful copyright regime. Certainly another good chunk is a result of the patent system being broken.

I guess these are not the top items in the societal problems list, but they really don't help.

It is odd when you see people freaking out about copyright and patents when they typically have neither of those things personally. They advocate for the intellectual prison.

Not the worst thing society has done but it does end up positioning people as being convinced that they must be beholden to corporations wants.

> It is odd when you see people freaking out about copyright and patents when they typically have neither of those things personally. They advocate for the intellectual prison.

You have at least two comments in this thread lauding the GPL and its effects. So aren't you advocating for the intellectual prison as well?

I would be fully onboard with you if the tools to generate all the code anyone need would not be proprietary and would run on a personal computer anyone could buy.

> The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit.

Eh yes and no. The problem is I am not somebody who is comfortable building their own software, so I depend on the generous communities that create free, open source software I can reliably run on my computer. There are lots of people like me! So the benefit isn’t being able to adjust the software to my liking, it’s the knowledge that I can’t have the rug pulled out from under me as easily since I know in theory I can run the software locally, but realistically (hopefully!) somebody else is going to fork and maintain it.

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