Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

dick wrote:
> > Can nonfree refrain from failing to respect user's freedoms?
> >     

You present this as an unattributed quote.  If this is intended to 
represent my previous response, it is a dishonest paraphrase.  As a 
direct question, it is a tautology:  nonfree software is "nonfree" 
*because* it does not respect user's freedoms.  I asked whether nonfree 
can refrain from *further* abuses of users, beyond that basic lack of 
respect, and noted that the track record highlighted at 
<URL:http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html> suggests otherwise.

> I sell magic paint with the insidious feature that if you try mixing it with
> another color, it turns black.  But otherwise the paint performs great.
>   

Mix enough paints together and you will get black.  This is a 
characteristic of subtractive color spaces.  There is no magic here.

> Under most interpretations of consumer commonlaw, so long as I make it clear
> before sale that the paint admits this fatal characteristic, you are, to use
> your politicized word, "free" to buy paint from another supplier.

This analogy seems to be a response to a second question I asked on the 
topic:  Further, can nonfree refrain from attacking libre's right to 
exist with tyrant devices [...]?

There are fatal flaws with your analogy.
First, few tyrant devices are advertised as such prior to sale, and the 
trend has been towards introducing such antifeatures in devices that are 
traditionally expected to be open, with marketing that carefully implies 
that they *are* open devices to deceive as many users as possible as 
long as possible.
Second, your analogy assumes that there is no collusion among paint 
suppliers to all produce the "magic" paint, and that there are practical 
alternatives available to customers, while we are seeing efforts to 
flood the market with tyrant devices and squeeze their non-tyrant 
equivalents out.  For a specific example, consider Microsoft and their 
demands for "secure boot" which, when I last checked, specifically 
required that ARM devices be tyrants.  There are serious ethical, moral, 
(and quite possibly legal) deficiencies here.  The probable antitrust 
violations are probably why Microsoft did not attempt to impose a 
similar requirement on x86 machines shipped with their product; that 
would have been far too obvious as a violation.  However, x86 is 
generally expected to become a legacy platform at some point, and the 
overall effect of a move to ARM with these policies in effect will be an 
attack on Free Software's right to exist.

Why should we accept a claim of a moral right for nonfree software to 
exist when nonfree vendors do not accept our right to exist, or do so 
only when under threat of serious legal penalties for abusive 
monopolistic practices and still seek to chip away at our right to exist 
whenever they can?


-- Jacob