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Comment by wiz21c | Hacker News Reader

God doesn't exist, that doesn't prevent him of being.

The quest for freedom is, of course, an idealistic one. The important thing is that, in their fight to promote freedom, they meet obstacles. Those friction points reveal the lack of freedom. And so, although they don't reach freedom, they actually show that freedom is limited.

IOW, refusing the statu quo is one of the way to change it.

You should look at history and look at how much freedom you have, how much protection you have, etc. and then ask yourself : where does it come from ?

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> IOW, refusing the statu quo is one of the way to change it.

And yet they aren't changing it. The FSF has had exactly zero success in changing the direction the world is moving in with regards to firmware and deep proprietary integration.

In fact, they've done very little for freedom in the past 10-20 years; most of the real breakthroughs have come from much more pragmatic people, such as those developing reverse engineered open source drivers for complex hardware like GPUs.

The FSF shows you how much freedom you lack according to their own bizarre definition of freedom... and then does amazingly little to actually improve your freedom.

>In fact, they've done very little for freedom in the past 10-20 years; most of the real breakthroughs have come from much more pragmatic people, such as those developing reverse engineered open source drivers for complex hardware like GPUs.

Whose efforts get completely circumvented through employment of cryptographic firmware signing, which gate keeps necessary functionality out of said pragmatist's reach.

> The important thing is that, in their fight to promote freedom, they meet obstacles. Those friction points reveal the lack of freedom. And so, although they don't reach freedom, they actually show that freedom is limited.

Well said. If problems are not openly demonstrated and complained about, things will not improve.

> how much freedom you have, how much protection you have, etc. and then ask yourself : where does it come from

Game theoretic behaviour in society that has advanced beyond zero sum.

Same goes for reasonable approach to FOSS, like Marcan is doing himself vs the cult and the arbitrary zero tolerance rules.

i strongly disagree. i think cult, dogma, and religion accusations as well as misrepresentation of FSFs stance (i have zero association with FSF yet i could see thatbtheir position is being crudely misrepresented) do much to discredit any valid points marcan holds

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