Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipdot | Hacker News Reader

I really like how people striving for freedom in software are always ready—and eager—to take away the freedoms of companies they don’t like. “I want to be able to do whatever I wish for with software I use, but I don’t want people who make software to be able to do anything with their own products”, huh?

View on HN

Like slaves were ready to take away the freedom to own slaves from slave-owners.

In today's world it is not a real choice to avoid BigCorp platforms if you want to work and communicate with the rest of society, so society should have a right to at least set some boundaries, otherwise we are allowing BigCorps to set the boundaries for society instead.

What I like most about these new rules is that they are specifically limited to big companies, so smaller companies are not hit by too-hard-to-comply-with-for-smaller-companies regulation, but customers are protected from BigCorp overreach.

"i want to do whatever I want" as a customer. most of the people who hold this opinion are a. only talking about things which have a very high network effect. no one says they want legislation to force adobe to make photoshop open source, or even work well with gimp or anything. this is only for communication software. b. mega corpos with billions of users take a more prominent position, and as uncle ben said, with great power comes great responsibility. we just want the responsibility. imo it should be like this: you are allowed to excercise your right (write software as you want to) all you want unless it interferes with someone else's right (to use whatever software they want to use). while facebook doesn't force me to use WhatsApp, the network effect associated with it does.

The freedom to choose what software you use is more important than the freedom to make your software a walled garden.

Freedom to choose what software you use is completely different than having the freedom to force developers to give you features that you want.

You do have the freedom of software choice already.

> You do have the freedom of software choice already.

Not on iOS (until next January when regulation kicks in)

My school makes me use Microsoft Teams. In order to communicate with my classmates, I have to use Facebook Messenger. The new law will hopefully resolve that. Are you expecting me to drop out of school instead just so I don't have to use proprietary software?

Not when you can't go to university or get employed without using ms teams.

Or buy second hand without facebook or their properties.

Or contact businesses without facebook.

only a sith deals in absolutes.

Human rights are for human beings. Corporations are not people. They're just made of people, like Soylent Green.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com