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Comment by Retra | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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.

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