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Comment by hasenj | Hacker News Reader

IMO this is a side product of the "software must be free" mentality.

Frankly, software should not be free. When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.

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>IMO this is a side product of the "software must be free" mentality.

"Software must be free" usually means free and in speech not free as in beer.

Free as in beer

Thanks for the correction.

RMS definition of free still leads to free as in beer because it requires that the user has the freedom to distribute the sides for free (as in beer).

But Facebook is not "free as in speech" but is "free as in beer". That's why it is a "Structural Threat."

So better pay for the privilege? There's no reason a paid social network service (aside from the fact that no one would ever use it) wouldn't collect the same information. The issue is that Facebook is not free (as in libre) so users don't have personal control of their information.

In fact, paid services such as AOL and Oracle have EVEN WORSE track records when it comes to lock in, privacy, and abuse of users.

>When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.

How is this different from proprietary software? Where you have no idea what's going on under the hood?

Granted, "giving in order to get" is a common and effective social engineering tactic.

> How is this different from proprietary software?

Most free software is proprietary software! Big chunks of Facebook's code base is proprietary, and the data they collect is extremely proprietary. Ditto for google.

By "the expectation that software should be free", parent meant the expectation that you don't pay money for access to a hosted copy.

I believe the OP was talking about cost, not source code.

I'd wager that the FSF disagrees with your statement.

You don't say.

Of course the Free Software Foundation is going to disagree with that statement.

The "Free" refers to freedom, not price. Facebook is not freedom-respecting software as defined by the FSF.

Facebook is not software, it is a service.

Service as a Software Substitute, as RMS would put it.

RMS is fond of making up "cute" names for things. It lets people identify themselves as part of the tribe.

OP is complaining about free services (like Facebook) but said free software (like PHP) so the whole comment is a non-starter. I'm not sure why nobody else pointed that out... Facebook has huge operating expenses.

This is absolutely not true. There's so much wrong with that argument and how it applies to Facebook it's hard for me to provide decent criticism, but I'll try anyway.

Facebook is not provided 'for free'. Nothing is. Facebook is provided to users in exchange for their personal and social data. Facebook is also not really 'a thing'- it's much more complicated than that. The worst part of your argument is that this criticism of free software also holds true for proprietary software- there are plenty of nonfree services which do the same thing. More generally, 'free' software as you define and apply it is not a useful categorization of software to make. What about freemium services? Are those free or do you pay for those? Whether or not you pay in currency for a software license is not really meaningful in the discussion of user freedom. I recommend you actually do some reading on the topic of software freedom and Facebook before you go spouting completely unfounded aphorisms online again.

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