"Stallman wants you to use Free software because it's free-as-in-ideology, not because it necessarily works well or does what you want."
And I think, that's a better position to be in; I mean, freedom is more important than to have good softwares.
And I think, that's a better position to be in; I mean, freedom is more important than to have good softwares.
Yes, I agree, freedom to have the essentials for human survival is a lot more important than having instant access to the latest BF4 patch.
Care to provide a bit of qualification and relevance to your broad, context-free, ill-defined statement?
If the comment was meant to say that "free software is more important than good software", then it would be great to get a bit of elaboration and qualification for such a contentious statement.
I picked some pretty harsh possibilities there that seem a little dystopian, but I wouldn't rule any of them out, or any of the million other horrific possibilities that increased coupling of technology to our lives, without (self-)regulation could enable.
If you really want software to 'just work', you should probably first ask, who is it working for?
You are aware that all your attempted examples could simply be called 'not working' when evaluating the software.
I'm also not sure how I could say software is working for me if I must first agree to be dictated the terms of it's use, and agree that the vendor may dictate any new terms in the future, which I must agree to in advance.
we’re always telling children that they have to learn to share, to be considerate of each other’s needs, to help each other; then we go off into the real world where we assume that everyone is naturally selfish and competitive. But an anarchist would point out: in fact, what we say to our children is right. Pretty much every great worthwhile achievement in human history, every discovery or accomplishment that’s improved our lives, has been based on cooperation and mutual aid; even now, most of us spend more of our money on our friends and families than on ourselves; while likely as not there will always be competitive people in the world, there’s no reason why society has to be based on encouraging such behavior, let alone making people compete over the basic necessities of life. That only serves the interests of people in power, who want us to live in fear of one another. That’s why anarchists call for a society based not only on free association but mutual aid.
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you...
If I may make a parable: Don’t hate the rebels for being violent; hate the oppressive state against which they rebel.
But - you make a good point - a good reason to be against copyright is because abolishing it would defeat the GPL.
RMS has steadfast refused to even entertain anti-business terms in software licenses as something fitting for a free software license, except to the extent that the "business" involves taking the free software in question and making it non-free.
Not bringing this up to argue that RMS is correct or reasonable (here or elsewhere), but I just thought it was interesting. RMS may be an unrealistic utopian, but his unrealistic utopia is some mutant form of liberalism - with property rights and commerce etc. - not communism or even big-s socialism.
I can see people in the USA having problems to properly frame his position due to the ideological burden of equating any kind of a demand for sharing and cooperation with communism or socialism, regardless if the demand actually has anything to do with left wing political motivations.
Because something might be inconvenient to you, it doesn't make it automatically wrong. There's a distinct line between free as in freedom and free as in arbitrariness. The former comes with responsibilities, the later without.
Furthermore take a look at the "USL v. BSDi" lawsuit, where BSD was sued by AT&T for infringing copyright-laws against their own(BSD) source-code, which was incorporated into USL(AT&T's) UNIX-variants!
"Freedom" comes with responsibility, if you want carefree "arbitrariness", then say so, but please don't mix them together, they are fundamentally different!
Furthermore they are not rights - they are desires.
You are free to negotiate terms with people from whom you obtain software, and you are free to refuse software without source code.
What the GPL seeks to do is force other people not to be free to choose their own terms.
Whether you like the effects of the GPL or not, it has nothing to do with freedom.