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Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Freedom 0 exists with BSD code, 1-3 are worthless as a non developer.

So I'll ask again: What's the benefit to someone who isn't a developer?

Freedoms 1-3 exist with BSD, too, they just aren't protected.

There are few cases where freedom 0 exists without the other 3, but one case where that's true is with some of the Microsoft tooling around the CLR. In such cases, I, as someone who doesn't know low-level Windows programming, can't realistically change the software myself, but I could pay someone else to do it. But since I don't have freedoms 1-3, my only option is to pay MS if I want that modification. There is a very small group of people in the world who can afford to pay Microsoft for customizations. So even as someone who would never make modifications to the software, I care (and my boss who wasn't even a developer would care) because we had to work around limitations of our tools rather than paying someone to fix them.

To me, the free software philosophy assumes that every user is a developer, or at least, it asserts that any user should be capable of comprehending and modifying any code that runs on their system, and defends their right to do so. The distinction between the two ("user" and "developer") exists because proprietary software and commercial software created a fundamental disconnect between the processes of ownership and development, and because computers have gotten too complex for any single person to fully comprehend. But it's not a distinction that should exist.

Or, it exists because there are infinitely more people who use software than even know how it works. Let's say that tomorrow, society gets together and mandates that any and all computer code is subject to the GPL.

Do you maintain that the user/developer distinction goes away? I don't think it does.

>Do you maintain that the user/developer distinction goes away? I don't think it does.

I would argue that wouldn't be sufficient to remove it in practice, since a good part of that distinction is cultural. People aren't taught to interact with their code because most computers are closed systems, making such interaction impossible, and most software is merely a product to be consumed.

Almost no one (understandably) wants to know how to use a c compiler to build the source code for their applications, much less take the time to review and modify it, no one wants to configure and maintain, even in the open source world it's unusual to actually contribute.

However, it would at least be a distinction without a legal difference.

I can't agree with that. I know how to read and write code, but I do not have the time to maintain, say, a fork of Firefox to fix their questionable UI direction, much less deal with the politics of getting my changes into the mainline app.

Stallman's ideal world, and by the sound of it, yours, is one in which everyone is a programmer. Put simply, as nice as it would be, this is totally impractical and unrealistic. Opening up a field to all comers does not meaningfully change what people enjoy and specialize in and spend their time on.

It's definitely impractical, as ideal worlds usually are. It made a lot more sense when most computers were in universities, being accessed by engineers, and when compiling from source was just what you had to do, and "software" was a much more fixed concept. But complexity has a way of undermining many utopian visions. I'm not certain the modern web would exist in an all free-software world, or what it would look like.

I'm more of an open source than free software person, since I don't buy into the fundamental moral argument of free software, but I have to admit I find the general principle that all software should be editable to be appealing. Knowing how to write software and choosing not to, or at least having the choice one way or the other, to me, is better than not having the choice to begin with.

You're entirely missing the point of what freedom means. The point is that you have the freedom to exercise 1-3 if you choose to do so. It doesn't matter if the user isn't currently a developer, and it doesn't matter if there is any practical benefit. The freedoms themselves are inherently valuable.

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