Yavor Doganov wrote:
This is the equivalent to the question "I want to be a slave, it is my
freedom to choose so". Can you be a slave in the trivial meaning of
the word in a modern society? Would it be allowed by the society to
be whipped and treated like a slave even if it's your choice? I think
that such a social status is prohibited because it's anti-human and
antisocial.
I recall an apropos interview on "Questions Please" with Jonathan
Roberts in which Richard Stallman discussed the paradox of the freedom
to become enslaved (see
http://www.digitalcitizen.info/2006/11/30/questions-please-episode-1-interview/
for my source including audio):
Roberts: Do you not think though, Richard, that a law against it
[proprietary software] is in many ways restricting those people’s freedoms to—
Stallman: No. That’s basically making a Russell paradox out of freedom. The
freedom to give up your freedom, basically, conflicts with the idea of
inalienable rights. There’s some rights that are threatened and important, and
in order to make sure they continue to exist, they must be inalienable. When
people’s right to sell themselves into slavery was abolished, that made society
more free because it closed a path by which people became slaves.
Roberts: Okay, yeah, that’s a good point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_paradox for more on Russell paradoxes.
I don't think that gNewSense, as a distribution, must make extra
effort not to be possible to install non-free software. But it should
not make extra effort not to BREAK the users' systems that have
non-free software installed. That's what most of the other GNU/Linux
distros do -- they refrain from changes that might badly affect
non-free software users or take care to add "Conflicts:" (or the
equivalent of it) to reduce the harm these users could suffer. This
is unacceptable for an ethical free software distribution.
I agree. By way of hypothetical example:
- if you installed a non-free PDF reader and some gNewSense package
somehow clobbered the settings to keep that program working, that's not
a bug.
- if you installed a free PDF reader and some gNewSense package somehow
clobbered the settings to keep that program working, that's a bug.
gNewSense is here to help you become and remain free, not to aid your
dependency on non-free software.
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