> > Being insecure shouldn't be a reason for a program to be declared > > non-free, but being unreasonably difficult to understand should be. > > Not if the program is difficult to understand even for its > maintainers... A program will never be *unreasonably* difficult to understand for its maintainers. A program that is unreasonably difficult to understand cannot have maintainers as such because being a maintainer involves bug-fixing, and bug-fixing requires non-trivial modifications to be made. But even if the person who wrote a program wrote it in such a way that it was unreasonably difficult to understand (something which is very unlikely), then we must say that that, even though no better form of modification ever existed, it is non-free. > > > > Otherwise, the distinction between proprietary and open-source would > > be academic, both users and developers seeing no practical difference > > between the two. > > The difference is that a program where the source is kept secret is > difficult to understand for everyone, except for its developers. > A program where the former source got lost, instead, is difficult to > understand for everyone, without exceptions: nobody has the monopoly of > a secret that helps him/her to understand/audit/modify the program. Someone not having a monopoly on a secret may be necessary for a program to be free, but it is not sufficient.
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