[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> In the music making world, it is distressingly common to sell > hardware such as MIDI controllers (think: fancy game controllers > but for music making) with capabilities that can not be accessed > without difficult feats of reverse engineering, or else having > to use proprietary software. Often, the proprietary software > further requires users to provide economically valuable > personal information to the hardware making corporation. There is a fundamental conceptual difference between (1) a mode of usage you don't know how to invoke, and (2) a mode of usage you are prohibited from utilizing. Freedom 0 is meant to prevent (2). For instance, if the developer claims that you are forbidden to run a program unless you have a contract to permit it, that is an example of (2). Freedom 0 means that everyone who gets a copy has authorization to run it. As for (1), releasing the source code enables users to find the undocumented commands, thus how to invoke whatever features exist. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss
