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Comment by gyardley | Hacker News Reader

It's possible for someone to be visionary about some things and nuts about others.

Stallman seems to be right about the government's actions after 2001. That doesn't automatically mean he's right about the way I should or shouldn't run my business.

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He may not be in most cases; but usually if you're going to sell proprietary or closed-source software, you should at least give back to the community somehow with an open source project.

Of course, it's not always right. And that's fine; the issue is yours, not mine.

What he IS right about is that licensed software limits the user's freedom. That's unequivocal, you can't deny it.

What he IS right about is that licensed software limits the user's freedom. That's unequivocal, you can't deny it.

This becomes much less clear if you bother to consider things like how that software came to exist in the first place.

Consider that there are things you can do, things you can't (or aren't permitted to) do, and things outside of possibility (eg web browsing before the internet was invented).

Requiring software to be Free/unrestricted reduces "things you can't do", which given a fixed set of possibilities increases "things you can do".

But the set of possibilities is not fixed. Depending on how any particular software being free affects the rate that things are removed from "outside of possibility", it could either increase or decrease the amount of "things you can do".

Edit: Is your freedom defined by how much you can do, by how much you can't do, or by the ratio of how much you can vs can't do? It's silly to be concerned only with the second of those.

Since this kind of negative can't be quantified, it has to be defined by how much you can do. The fewer the fences, the greater the freedom.

Very true. At least prior to the cloud model (back when companies sold proprietary executables), a software industry limited to F/OSS applications would have meant innovation only came either from personal projects or from trickling down from a big patron who had financial incentive to release the software to the community (e.g. Sun and Red Hat). With proprietary software, innovation was much more market driven and, therefore, more common. You have to weigh that gain in innovation with all the problems it brought or intensified (proprietary file formats, the greatly increased potential for spyware/rootkits, DRM, patent trolling, etc.)

At least prior to the cloud model

Where do you think that came from?

Prattling on like this about how all innovation comes from the market was perhaps understandable back in the 1980s. How can you claim this now, on HN?

I am not saying that all innovation comes from the market. I am saying that at least some innovation comes from the market.

I'll grant that some innovation comes from the market - and, moreover, specifically from the market incentives created by constraining what individuals can do with their bits and bytes in whatever format.

Like most things, there are trade-offs. The question is: does the increased value and freedom afforded by that marginal innovation outbalance the tremendous destruction of value and freedom that these restrictions entail?

"Decreasingly," I would argue (even if we're presently making some people very very rich); I'm working on a project to make it even less the case.

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