Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
dick wrote: There are so many other documented examples of abuses... Again, "freedom" is the wrong word. Your ability to disengage and revert to agrarian asceticism is orthogonal to the perfidy of nonfree software providers. You do understand that the Free Software movement holds a moral position that there is a human right to *both* participate in civilization *and* avoid the perfidy of nonfree software providers, right? -- Jacob
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
On Wed, Thu, 04 Nov 2021 20:31:50 -0400, dick wrote: > and Github's hosting to improve GNU Emacs. "Improve" is really the wrong word.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
> There are so many other documented examples of abuses... Again, "freedom" is the wrong word. Your ability to disengage and revert to agrarian asceticism is orthogonal to the perfidy of nonfree software providers.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
On 2021-11-04 17:31, dick wrote: Got it. Companies aren't upfront about their motives. Got it. Companies maneuver to eliminate competitors, free or otherwise. Heaven forbid capitalist entities should resort to that kind of unconscionable gamesmanship. Dale Carnegie, you've been put on notice. In the meantime, I'll continue leveraging Google's search and Github's hosting to improve GNU Emacs. I was pretty excited by the YouTube video of your PowerPoint presentation about retargetting Emacs Lisp to compile for the .net CLR, supporting binary-only application delivery. Finally elispers can get paid. Can you add me to your Slack channel? (Or was that Discord?) I had a bit of trouble opening your documentation with Adobe Acrobat DC; can you put the original .docx file into your Google Drive and share it? Thx. Long live fr^H^Hopen source!
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
On 2021-11-04 10:06, dick wrote: There is nothing insidious with such a paint And yet, free software rhetoric emphatically characterizes nonfree as "causing harm in a way that is gradual or not easily noticed," which is Merriam-Webster's definition of "insidious." The paint in the example would only be insidious if, say, it appeared to mix correctly initially and looked fine upon application to the surface, and then the surface turned pitch black several months or years later. It's not insidious if the mixture turns black right in the paint pot. Particularly so if the data sheet for either paint warns against it. If there is no warning, and there is a delayed reaction, then it more or less meets the definition of insidious.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
On November 6, 2021 11:45:47 AM UTC, dick wrote: >> There are so many other documented examples of abuses... > >Again, "freedom" is the wrong word. Your ability to disengage and >revert to >agrarian asceticism is orthogonal to the perfidy of nonfree software >providers. I will show that load of blabbering to my friends here in Uganda, to make them laugh, thanks, Dick.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
On November 4, 2021 5:06:44 PM UTC, dick wrote: >> There is nothing insidious with such a paint > >And yet, free software rhetoric emphatically characterizes nonfree as >"causing >harm in a way that is gradual or not easily noticed," which is >Merriam-Webster's >definition of "insidious." I remember 1999 how proprietary software caused me damages. They have been promising stable system, I got system unstable, freezing, losing thousands of German marks in Internet expenses when I was indexing websites. Imagine you spend 500 marks, then system get frozen, then you try again, but again it freeze. That is true practical damage on my side, which I could not repair or participate in improving. I called Microsoft in Munich and they did not want to know about it. Before the installation, system did not even work as promised. I had compatible computer, but it did not work. When I called them, they gave me secret codes to enter and then system could be installed. It was secret code related to my specific PS/2 computer, not anywhere explained online or in instructions. The time and effort that I have put into making the system running, and trying to solve freezing issues are practical damage examples caused by Windoze. Another example from last year is mobile application Safe Boda in Uganda, when I wanted to use option to share credit to friend, it just took all my contacts from address book, to which I have not consented. There are so many other documented examples of abuses by Facebook, WhatsApp, Google applications and their corrupted staff taking information from users.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
dick wrote: Got it. Companies aren't upfront about their motives. Got it. Companies maneuver to eliminate competitors, free or otherwise. Heaven forbid capitalist entities should resort to that kind of unconscionable gamesmanship. Dale Carnegie, you've been put on notice. In the meantime, I'll continue leveraging Google's search and Github's hosting to improve GNU Emacs. You are asking us to not exert similar efforts towards them. What else is denouncing them as immoral but our form of efforts to eliminate competitors, just as they seek to do to us? Except, of course, that we actually have a coherent and non-hypocritical moral argument against them, based in large part on their own past actions. You ask us to cooperate with those who seek our destruction, without first insisting that they cease seeking our destruction. That would be absurdly and insanely foolish, essentially ideological suicide. -- Jacob
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
Got it. Companies aren't upfront about their motives. Got it. Companies maneuver to eliminate competitors, free or otherwise. Heaven forbid capitalist entities should resort to that kind of unconscionable gamesmanship. Dale Carnegie, you've been put on notice. In the meantime, I'll continue leveraging Google's search and Github's hosting to improve GNU Emacs.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
> There is nothing insidious with such a paint And yet, free software rhetoric emphatically characterizes nonfree as "causing harm in a way that is gradual or not easily noticed," which is Merriam-Webster's definition of "insidious." Your response continues a long, and truly comical, tradition of the movement's invoking epithets of slavery such as the "chains put on users," when the real debate is over consumer expectation. Certainly, in *caveat emptor* times, consumer expectation was effectively nil, and yet we'd be laughed off the podium, possibly carried off in anger, if we described Roman citizens as "enslaved."
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
dick wrote: Can nonfree refrain from failing to respect user's freedoms? You present this as an unattributed quote. If this is intended to represent my previous response, it is a dishonest paraphrase. As a direct question, it is a tautology: nonfree software is "nonfree" *because* it does not respect user's freedoms. I asked whether nonfree can refrain from *further* abuses of users, beyond that basic lack of respect, and noted that the track record highlighted at http://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html> suggests otherwise. I sell magic paint with the insidious feature that if you try mixing it with another color, it turns black. But otherwise the paint performs great. Mix enough paints together and you will get black. This is a characteristic of subtractive color spaces. There is no magic here. Under most interpretations of consumer commonlaw, so long as I make it clear before sale that the paint admits this fatal characteristic, you are, to use your politicized word, "free" to buy paint from another supplier. This analogy seems to be a response to a second question I asked on the topic: Further, can nonfree refrain from attacking libre's right to exist with tyrant devices [...]? There are fatal flaws with your analogy. First, few tyrant devices are advertised as such prior to sale, and the trend has been towards introducing such antifeatures in devices that are traditionally expected to be open, with marketing that carefully implies that they *are* open devices to deceive as many users as possible as long as possible. Second, your analogy assumes that there is no collusion among paint suppliers to all produce the "magic" paint, and that there are practical alternatives available to customers, while we are seeing efforts to flood the market with tyrant devices and squeeze their non-tyrant equivalents out. For a specific example, consider Microsoft and their demands for "secure boot" which, when I last checked, specifically required that ARM devices be tyrants. There are serious ethical, moral, (and quite possibly legal) deficiencies here. The probable antitrust violations are probably why Microsoft did not attempt to impose a similar requirement on x86 machines shipped with their product; that would have been far too obvious as a violation. However, x86 is generally expected to become a legacy platform at some point, and the overall effect of a move to ARM with these policies in effect will be an attack on Free Software's right to exist. Why should we accept a claim of a moral right for nonfree software to exist when nonfree vendors do not accept our right to exist, or do so only when under threat of serious legal penalties for abusive monopolistic practices and still seek to chip away at our right to exist whenever they can? -- Jacob
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
> There is nothing insidious with such a paint And yet, free software rhetoric emphatically characterizes nonfree as "causing harm in a way that is gradual or not easily noticed," which is Merriam-Webster's definition of "insidious." No, it doesn't. You do not qualify what is non-free. Non-free _software_ does harm to society, and users. There is little to dispute. In either case, this list is for serious discussion about the GNU project, etc, and not trolling -- please find some other place to do that.
Re: "Freedom" is really the wrong word
There is nothing insidious with such a paint -- its just paint. When talking about software ethics one talks about what chains are put on the users from those who control the software, in the case of a paint manufacturer it might be by using Paint Restriction Managment that would prohibit painters from modifying the chemical composition to allow mixture with other paints.
