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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Hence, everybody owes the community free software.

I think the credo is that developers owe the users of their software certain privileges, like access to source code and the right to modify and redistribute that source code.

What I don't like about the way the free software movement demands these rights is the misuse of the words freedom and liberty. By using these words, they deliberately imply that withholding these privileges from users is tantamount to a human rights violation.

I think that is an insult to people suffering from real human rights violations.

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Ideologies are not binary -- they each have relative importance. I don't think for a second that the FSF places software freedom above human rights or even equates the two. You can be a staunch theft opponent; that doesn't mean you believe theft is tantamount to murder.

The wording they use equates the two and I don't think that is an accident. Either they believe it or they use it for effect, just like the media industry likes to call copyright violations theft.

I don't see how you can imply a human rights violation. "Human rights" are a largely technical term. It's not just rights that humans have, it's a special category of restrictions, and unless you point out the significance of that, you're not talking about human rights. The term "Human Rights" is not very good because it invites confusion. This is not the FSF's fault.

But you can't go from "you have rights" to "that's a claim of Human Rights."

You are imagining what people think and being offended by it, which is your own fault.

>I don't see how you can imply a human rights violation

By using words that are closely associated with that context. This particular article goes even further, using words usually reserved for humans (or animals) to talk about software itself:

"[...] Objective-C was liberated. [...] when and how programming language software is liberated. [...] keep the core operating system of Android liberated."

>But you can't go from "you have rights" to "that's a claim of Human Rights."

And I did not. I specifically complained about the misuse of the terms "freedom" and "liberty". I have no problems with "rights". Quite the contrary, I value my rights as a user of open source software. But they are different, less important, rights than my fundamental human rights like freedom and liberty.

>You are imagining what people think [...]

Well, you know, that's the only thing language can ever do. Make people imagine what you think.

[Edit] Apparently I'm not imagining too much. Richard Stallman himself says it very clearly here: https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/transcripts/rms-fs-2006-03-09....

What words do you think they should use? Don't you think the fact that they are talking about software provides enough context to determine exactly how important those rights are? Clearly they can be no more important than the software itself. So I don't know why you'd think software is on the same par as human rights, and that this'd be a problem with first recognizing the importance of software in human life.

That is, software rights can't be more important than software, and if software is critically important to human life, then software rights are human rights. And whether or not software is that important today, it is quite likely to be in the future.

>Well, you know, that's the only thing language can ever do. Make people imagine what you think.

Yeah... So why'd you quote the first half of that statement to make an irrelevant observation? Language doesn't force you to be offended.

> That is, software rights can't be more important than software, and if software is critically important to human life, then software rights are human rights.

I don't follow that logic either way. Of course you can hold the opinion that the principle is more important than any individual case. And the free software movement clearly does that.

On the other hand, there are many things that are critically important to human life, but that does not mean that specific ways of regulating them are human rights or even important.

Human rights are ends in themselves based on needs that all humans share, like the right not to get tortured. All humans do not share the need to distribute modified versions of other peoples code, even if that code runs the nuclear power plant next door. What humans share is the need for the code to be safe, but there are different means to that end.

The ability to participate in an economy in an informed and voluntary manner is a human right. That's why we tend not to practice Laissez Faire 'let the buyer beware' capitalism: because it results in blatant exploitation and in some extreme cases, slavery.

When purchasing software, the ability to view the source code is critical to making informed economic decisions. (I suppose you could have a regulatory authority that verifies software as well, but that comes with a whole other can of worms.) And unless you can build that software from source, you have no effective guarantee that the source you are looking at corresponds to the binary you are running.

Human rights are just beliefs about the way things should work; there's no guarantee of enforcement; not everybody has the same beliefs.

And?

That's all.

>The ability to participate in an economy in an informed and voluntary manner is a human right.

I think we have worked out the core of our disagreement then. For me, not having exact knowlege of how every product I use is made and not having the right to copy, modify and redistribute someone elses product is not a restriction that is comparable to slavery, torture or imprisonment without trial. And I think people who were slaves and got tortured would agree.

There are so many things that we're not allowed to know, so many things we're not allowed to do, many of them much more important than distributing modified source code. If we start calling all of that a human rights violation, we are watering down the notion of human rights until nothing is left.

The power of universal human rights is that it is a small set of very basic things that people can agree on across all cultures and across most ideological divides. You got to think about whether or not FOSS is important enough to dilute this idea.

But again, I have no problem with the FSF fighting for the rights they fight for and I think Richard Stallman's work is net net very positive for the world. I just don't like this particular way of advocating it.

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