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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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