> Think about a cell-phone which has a built-in battery you can't replace. Isn't that bit like software you can't modify? No, it misses the essential point: So

> Think about a cell-phone which has a built-in battery you can't replace. Isn't that bit like software you can't modify? No, it misses the essential point: Software freedom is primarily about power, not about being able to modify software. If by "you", you mean "noone", that's not really what free software is concerned with. What free software is concerned with is if there is only one party that can swap out the battery, and that party is not you, therefore making you dependent on a monopoly. Building software that literally noone can modify (aka "unmaintainable code") might be a bad idea, but for reasons largely orthogonal to software freedom.