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Comment by xenophanes | Hacker News Reader

> Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

What he's advocating for the app store may be a good thing, but it's certainly insane to call it freedom. Freedom is when you can do whatever you want. When you restrict stuff, for better or worse, that's less freedom. Taking away all meaning from the word "freedom" is a really bad idea.

There is simply no such thing as freedom from the option to watch porn if one wants to watch it. That's like freedom from truancy, or freedom from marijuana, or freedom from leaving your jail cell, enforced by the police. Some will argue those are good things, but none should argue those are freedoms.

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Actually, I think it's fairly well known that there's a tension between two real concepts of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to'.

Yes, it's well known that there is an ongoing attack on the liberal idea of freedom which seeks even to destroy basic terminology.

They're the same kind of people who made the word "liberal" mean "socialist" or "interventionist" which is something of the opposite of its original and true meaning.

But the fact is freedom has a simple and plain meaning, and it's a meaning we need to have a word for. If you want to say that police stopping you from using marijuana is good, whatever, just make up some other word for that because that's the opposite of freedom.

Or if you think people have the right to "freedom from want" at the expense of others, it's nothing but a nasty and misleading rhetorical trick to call that freedom. It may or may not be good, but you're taking away people's freedom of choice when you force them to provide for the poor. Force is not freedom, it's force, end of story.

What is the simple and plain meaning of freedom?

Pasted from the dictionary:

> the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint

Or in my words "not being restricted or forced".

except right below that in the definition:

"The phrase "freedom from" can have as an object: fear, want, hunger, pain, disease, stress, depression, debt, poverty, necessity, violence, war, advertising, addiction, etc."

the opposite of its original and true meaning.

You're using the word "true" here in the same sense as others do in phrases like "the one, true god". I'll step forward and be the heathen to the absolutist concept you idolize...

But the fact is freedom has a simple and plain meaning

...actually, like many words, it has several. I opened my dictionary and can count seven different nuances in the entry. Here's the one I believe it was used in, and I see no problem accepting the intended semantics:

"(freedom from) the state of not being subject to or affected by (a particular undesirable thing)"

I suppose you think that "freedom from freedom[1]" is a type of freedom?

[1] This instance of the word "freedom" means "not being restricted or forced"

Look, I'm a fan of freedom in the sense that you wish the word was used in. I just recognize that there are other common meanings to the word, and that if Steve would like to use one of them, he should...how you say...be free to do so.

I remember when my son went through a similar phase where he fell in love with the "one, true meaning" of various words, and the endless circular debates I enjoyed coming out of it. Good times. But even he, at a tender young age, learned that your freedoms and my freedoms can come in conflict with each other — that a utopia of everybody being infinitely free was not possible to realize.

I believe the common phrase used to resolve such cases is "your freedom to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose".

Companies have a right to make design choices, set licensing terms, and decide what to stock in their stores (whether they be real or virtual). If you don't like their choices, you're free not to do business with them. If you don't want companies to have such freedoms, you and I will have to agree to disagree.

Do you guys realize there are books written about this? http://www.amazon.com/dp/0374158282

We already know how much Steve likes the use of "freedom from"...

"We have created for the first time in all history a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests of any contradictory true thoughts."

Yes, Steve, save us.

As opposed to your garden of pure hyperbole.

Since that quote is straight from the 1984 commercial, I guess I am learning from the master of hyperbole and reality distortion himself.

But one has to torture the English language a bit in the "freedom from" case.

Fat free?

There is simply no such thing as freedom from the option to watch porn if one wants to watch it.

You're missing his point. There's nothing on the iPad that prevents you from watching porn if you want to - Safari on iPad goes to the same porn sites as any browser anywhere else. What he's referring to is protecting your machine from porn adware, and providing effective parental controls.

Look, I generally agree with Steve. I have no serious problem with how he runs the app store. I think he's providing something that his customers want.

But are you telling me parental controls -- i.e. software to restrict the freedom of children -- should in any way be called freedom? For better or worse, restricting people is not freedom. What I'm saying is it's perverse to use words to mean their opposites.

And BTW, as you surely know, porn apps are restricted in the app store. He thinks that is a way of protecting users from porn. It may well be the right decision, but protecting people from themselves is not increasing freedom.

There are two kinds of freedom. To bring up a different subject:

There is the freedom to allow you to install Flash.

There is also the freedom from the burden of Flash.

My great fear about allowing Adobe to install Flash on the iPhone is that we will, again, be stuck with a buggy de facto standard with rebellion only in designer/developer websites while the big sites still use Flash. Forcing HTML5 forces competition in a much needed area (web video), even when it's competing devices that allows only one or the other.

By all means vote with your wallet and buy something that frees and empowers you. While you might not like it, I personally like Steve's freedoms.

Minors don't have the same freedoms as adults, that's simply a social reality - they can't vote, can't drink, can't purchase cigarettes, can't enter into contracts, etc. Parental controls help protect a parent's freedom to raise their children as they see fit.

I'm not claiming that the porn app restriction is increasing people's freedom. I'm claiming that when Jobs refers to "freedom from porn", he's referring to blocking the malicious pornographic adware that plagues exploited Windows machines, and providing effective parental controls.

So why can't an adult install a porn app, to use this lame red herring? Why can't there be a parental control giving the parent the decision of whether or not to install porn? Why couldn't there be an alternative to the App Store, where you can buy a porn app, but simply have a parental control to disable access to apps not from the App Store? The power over the decision of which content is appropriate lies with the parents, not with the platform vendor.

Fine, there should be porn in the App Store, whatever. I'm just pointing out that it's stupid to act like Jobs was trying to say "you have more freedom because we prevent you from looking at porn".

I would guess the parents who want to use parental controls see it as the freedom to raise their children in a certain way. Though in reality it's probably more about satisfying the parents own sense of responsibility to protect their children. Either way it's fairly well established that minors have a different set of freedoms and rights than adults. The US constitution itself grants different freedoms and rights based on age. Minimum ages for elected office for example. Other laws, upheld by the supreme court, restrict access to pornography by age. Are we going to hold a consumer electronics company more accountable than the US government?

Porn malware is a solved problem, both on Mac OS X and on Windows, the latter if you use a reasonable browser. Neither of these feature a closed, App Store-like model.

Steve knows this, and -- considering he has porn in his App Store, behind the age limit -- he knows that his lines about porn on Android (also behind the age limit) are pure FUD. It's kind of embarrassing.

You're kind of embarrassing if you think porn malware is anywhere near being a solved problem.

Please enlighten us how to get porn malware while using a browser that has a porn/privacy mode. Better yet, on OS X. I haven't been able to do that so far and I use big bad Windows.

Allowing a tyrant to exert his will may result in less freedom for others. Judging by the technical way you couched your argument, I think you're aware of the subtle way freedom works. It wasn't difficult for me to get what Steve was talking about. Suppose you are a developer. You are being given the option -- one might say the freedom -- to sign a contract that limits your freedom and that of others who sign it, in just such a way as to confer specific advantages on yourself and others, such as a porn-free environment. To claim that to be given that option necessarily limits one's freedom, would certainly be insane.

(Edit: added comma, added clarifications)

I think he was knowingly diluting the meaning of the word 'freedom' in response to how the blogger used it. Che Guevara didn't die so we could run Linux on proprietary handheld devices.

Reminds me of a line from a song "Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose'".

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