> Again: should/could != is. Still you sit in that vehicle and ride, you turn > on that radio (proprietary chips inside) and listen to music (copyrighted > non-copyleft material).
Yes, and before libreboot existed RMS must have used a proprietary BIOS. If instead he had refused to touch a computer and advocated that others to the same, much free software would never have been created, perhaps including libreboot. It is the creation and use of proprietary software that is unethical, not its use. If circumstances coerce you into using it, your are a victim and this is unfortunate, but sometimes there is no other option. The solution is to fight for the freedoms we don't have, not give up the ones we do in order to be more consistently oppressed. > Exactly: the fight is for CONTROL, not for FREEDOM. Two very different and > incompatible things. Freedom is absolutely about control. Freedom isn't sitting around inert so that no one has to exercise control over a situtation. We must make decisions to interact with the world. They question is, who makes decisions for you? When you make them for yourself you are free. When someone else places restrictions on your control over these decisions, you are a slave. Your definiton of freedom, lack of *all* restrictions (imposed or natural) is a less common but valid use of the word. However, it is not useful in this conversation because it is morally irrelevant. If a man is blind, the fact that he cannot see is unfortunate but not a violation of his freedom in a moral sense so there is nothing to argue about. If a man is pysically able to see, but his government forces him to wear a blindfold 12 hours a day, then even though he is able to exercise his ability to see more than the blind man, his restictions are an immoral violation of his freedom. If a man is not required to wear a blindfold but chooses to do so anyway, this is not a violation of his freedom because he controls when he may use his ability to see. > Would you give it to the dying person or philosophize about how a particular > person defined what freedom is. Give them the drug of course. The restrictions placed on the drug are the moral violation, not its use. We should fight these restrictions, at minimum so that the patent-holders cannot use their monopoly to price gouge, but that is no reason to let anyone die in the meantime. > You see - one can > believe in a great ideal, fight for a cause, for control over one's device > forever but that is nothing. A drop in the ocean. I agree. The bad guys are winning by a lot and may keep winning until it is too late. It is important not to underestimate them and assume that things will eventually get better, but we also can't let the enormity of what we're up against paralyze us into inaction. > You say community control but control is centralized. If tomorrow Google > decides to shift the search results so that ideas about FOSS start to sink > slowly and ideas about something else go up - the whole matter of FOSS will > gradually start to sink too. The drop in the ocean will shrink more even > though it may remain. That is the big problem - we (in the ocean drop, who I'm not sure if you are saying that control is centralized inherently, or is currently centralized in our society. I use centralization/decentralization to describe the concentration or distribution of control. If this is what you mean, then yes we live in a highly centralized world. Google's ability to do as you describe is indeed terrifying. > The drop must explode > through some radical change. Unfortunately the United States military makes this strategy unviable. Working to advance the cause of freedom within the system is a flawed approach as well, but is less futile. > > I doubt a perfect solution exists. > > Why? Have you looked for any? It is not productive to tell someone that what they are doing is not good enough without suggesting an improvement. Incremental improvements are a path toward a better solution. Being able to jump to a perfect solution would of course be objectively better. RMS, the FSF, and many free software supporters have given and continue to give thought to better solutions. Are you really under the impression that the reason no one has found a perfect solution because you are the first person to wish there was one? In the meantime, we do not let perfect become the enemy of the good and undermine efforts that are the best we have right now. It is very unlikely that a perfect solution that no one has been able to see exists, and the burden of proof is on the one making the positive claim. Any ideas you have are more than welcome, but it only makes sense to give up on an approach *after* finding a better one, not *before*.
