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Devil's advocate though: You have the requisite technical knowledge to do those things. Not everyone does. If someone non-technical's stuff breaks, you can't

Devil's advocate though: You have the requisite technical knowledge to do those things. Not everyone does. If someone non-technical's stuff breaks, you can't distribute the changes you've already made yourself. It limits the value of the work you're putting in and it limits the repairability of an item based on the owner's skills. It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car. Most people would have some pretty junky beat-up cars or they'd be buying new ones every year.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
Car shops are a good example, there is no prevention of repairing other people cars, or their equipment, based on the knowledge from complete schematics / source code. The thing you can't do is make your own version of the thing and sell it. When my parents wireless router breaks, if I had the source code to the system installed on it I could both better understand the documentation to explain it to them, and I could perhaps patch a security problem that caused the breakdown. There should be nothing preventing me from re-distributing the fixes, just as Sams FotoFacts used to distribute radio repair manuals, or the Chilton car maintenance manuals.
- jopsen 8y ago
  I still can't fix poor Bluetooth support in my new Toyota. Also it's quite possible that the mechanics of a car are simpler than most software, for starters software often runs on an extremely complex operating system.
ben509 8y ago
> It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car. It's a great analogy: just look at the Mac repair shops being sued by Apple, or the idiotic things printer manufacturers and even coffee pod makers do to prevent people from "pirating" their machines. Free software, and arguably free markets, mean free secondary markets for used goods. That includes all the repair shops and a cottage industry of craftsmen who provide those goods and services.
- gitgud 8y ago
  Free secondary markets is a great analogy for open source. What comes to mind is forks and plugins of open source projects, I guess they are a secondary market for the main project.
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    Full forks are very rare. I could count important ones on my fingers. GNOME forks Cinnamon and Mate (active), libav vs ffmpeg (now closing), mplayer/2/mpv (mostly overtaken by last one). Most common pattern is multiple packages solving the same problem, rather than forks - and incompatible versions.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
      LibreOffice? MariaDB? Ubuntu?
      - syshum 8y ago
        I would not call Ubuntu a Fork... The rest are good examples but of the millions of projects very very few are forked successfully I could add a couple to this list as well but that does not change the fact that successful forks are exceeding rare
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        MariaDB and LibreOffice were forked for license reasons - the fork was not avoidable. They also took over original code development.
StillBored 8y ago
I think the difference is that instead of shipping a modified copy of the software, you ship a "patch" which fixes the software. That was very common years ago, whole markets existed for providing improved functionality of some portion of various OS's (macos, dos, s390, etc) via hooking and patching. Of course its seems that that freedom is now restricted as well, but that is a fairly recent development that can be laid at the feet of the DRM advocates.
- reificator 8y ago
  Relatively recent? There are developers in the workforce today who were born after the DMCA. That's not recent anymore.
  - syshum 8y ago
    Man I am old, makes me sad for those who did not experience more freedom so have no frame of reference to understand why DMCA is bad Also makes me fearful that we will ever be able to reform or get rid of DMCA
babapapa 8y ago
the structure of oss more often than not leads to improved user sophistcation.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

Car shops are a good example, there is no prevention of repairing other people cars, or their equipment, based on the knowledge from complete schematics / source code. The thing you can't do is make your own version of the thing and sell it. When my parents wireless router breaks, if I had the source code to the system installed on it I could both better understand the documentation to explain it to them, and I could perhaps patch a security problem that caused the breakdown. There should be nothing preventing me from re-distributing the fixes, just as Sams FotoFacts used to distribute radio repair manuals, or the Chilton car maintenance manuals.

jopsen 8y ago
I still can't fix poor Bluetooth support in my new Toyota. Also it's quite possible that the mechanics of a car are simpler than most software, for starters software often runs on an extremely complex operating system.

ben509 8y ago

> It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car. It's a great analogy: just look at the Mac repair shops being sued by Apple, or the idiotic things printer manufacturers and even coffee pod makers do to prevent people from "pirating" their machines. Free software, and arguably free markets, mean free secondary markets for used goods. That includes all the repair shops and a cottage industry of craftsmen who provide those goods and services.

gitgud 8y ago
Free secondary markets is a great analogy for open source. What comes to mind is forks and plugins of open source projects, I guess they are a secondary market for the main project.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  Full forks are very rare. I could count important ones on my fingers. GNOME forks Cinnamon and Mate (active), libav vs ffmpeg (now closing), mplayer/2/mpv (mostly overtaken by last one). Most common pattern is multiple packages solving the same problem, rather than forks - and incompatible versions.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
    LibreOffice? MariaDB? Ubuntu?
    - syshum 8y ago
      I would not call Ubuntu a Fork... The rest are good examples but of the millions of projects very very few are forked successfully I could add a couple to this list as well but that does not change the fact that successful forks are exceeding rare
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      MariaDB and LibreOffice were forked for license reasons - the fork was not avoidable. They also took over original code development.

StillBored 8y ago

I think the difference is that instead of shipping a modified copy of the software, you ship a "patch" which fixes the software. That was very common years ago, whole markets existed for providing improved functionality of some portion of various OS's (macos, dos, s390, etc) via hooking and patching. Of course its seems that that freedom is now restricted as well, but that is a fairly recent development that can be laid at the feet of the DRM advocates.

reificator 8y ago
Relatively recent? There are developers in the workforce today who were born after the DMCA. That's not recent anymore.
- syshum 8y ago
  Man I am old, makes me sad for those who did not experience more freedom so have no frame of reference to understand why DMCA is bad Also makes me fearful that we will ever be able to reform or get rid of DMCA

babapapa 8y ago

the structure of oss more often than not leads to improved user sophistcation.