Where do you draw the line? ( of Software User Freedom )
An article by Troler about Libre Software made me remember an email conversation I had with Richard Stallman the other day. I suggested to have a sort of freedom ladder analogue, to encourage non-libre software developers to, at least, move closer towards user-freedom. I thought ranking software based on how close they are at achieving user-freedom. How close they are to being Libre. If they have source code published, but no license. This is still better than having no source code published at all. Stallman firmly stood his ground against my idea, claiming that anything less than Libre, anything less than software that grants all 4 essential freedoms to the user, is automatically not good enough. But then in that article by @Troler I saw something interesting. Maybe merely granting the 4 essential freedoms, might be not good enough, either.
An article by Troler about Libre Software made me remember an email conversation I had with Richard Stallman the other day. I suggested to have a sort of freedom ladder analogue, to encourage non-libre software developers to, at least, move closer towards user-freedom. I thought ranking software based on how close they are at achieving user-freedom. How close they are to being Libre. If they have source code published, but no license. This is still better than having no source code published at all. Stallman firmly stood his ground against my idea, claiming that anything less than Libre, anything less than software that grants all 4 essential freedoms to the user, is automatically not good enough. But then in that article by @Troler I saw something interesting. Maybe merely granting the 4 essential freedoms, might be not good enough, either.