Re: FSF condemns partnership between Mozilla and Adobe to support Digital Restrictions Management
On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 12:13 AM, Gary Dale <garydale@torfree.net> wrote:
> Just as no one forced Americans to own slaves, the fact that slavery was
> allowed was an insult to notion of freedom. Arguing that the "freedom" to
> choose whether to own slaves or not made Americans freer would be called
> ridiculous by any sane person, yet the same argument is being bandied about
> in this discussion as if it made any sense.
>
> The Free Software Foundation got this one right.
Is it wrong, then, for Samba to be included in the 'main' section? It
encourages the use of both Debian and Windows, making it that much
easier for people to use non-free software. Is it therefore a bad
thing? What about the various tools that read and write Microsoft
Office file formats? Are they bad because they give people the freedom
to work with non-free systems?
I have a Windows laptop and a Linux (Debian, currently, though
previously Ubuntu) desktop. Is it true freedom to embrace
alternatives, or is the truer freedom found by preventing the use of
any software, firmware, or hardware, that isn't itself free?
People who take the extreme stance of refusing to use *anything* that
isn't absolutely free are making that deliberate choice. That's fine.
They don't use the non-free section, and avoid any computer with a
non-free BIOS, and so on. (I don't know how you get around the
possibility of backdoors in your hard drives. Can you use free drives
only??) But that can't be mandated on everyone, or it's no better than
what Apple tries to do: use *our* hardware and *our* software in *our*
ways, or you're violating the TOS. Is that the freedom you want?
Chris Angelico
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