4 ms·

"the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes" What if my "software" was just an exe that played all the D

"the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes" What if my "software" was just an exe that played all the Disney movies? Is free software against copyright laws?

gowld 8y ago
> Is free software against copyright laws? Mostly. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.en.html > To make copyright fit the network age, we should legalize the noncommercial copying and sharing of all published works, and prohibit DRM. But note that "being against copyright" is different from "advocating violating current copyright laws"
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  Ok i think i understand it just mostly sounds delusional considering the lived reality of capitalism. Perhaps if UBI becomes a thing?
jodrellblank 8y ago
Why would "free software" imply that you could ignore other people's copyrights, take other people's non-free work and give it away? If Disney offered you a program to play all their movies, you could say "I refuse to use their black-box proprietary movie player, I will only use a free software video player that I can inspect, to make sure it isn't scanning my computer for copyrighted Disney movies and reporting everything it finds back to Disneyland, and one I can recompile to put the video stream into the background of my transparent terminal because I'm not watching dozens of hours of movies unless I can work at the same time". That's the kind of thing it's supporting.
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  I understand the nature of the problem. Its everywhere ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17237792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17237792 ) I just think lived reality is more complex than a moralizing ideology. Something you understand: quote "Open Source" (as if it's a single movement) didn't win in creating desirable, accessible, commercial or beautiful software. It 'won' in the worst possible way - big companies like Amazon and Facebook took the work, hid it in their datacenters behind their paywalls, and use it to extract money from people. Nobody has any more freedom with their data and their computing because Facebook uses PHP, than they would have on a proprietary desktop OS. "you can have an open source OS and browser which connects you to a restrictive interface where your data is under someone else's control" is a lose for all of us.
  - jodrellblank 8y ago
    mmhmm, I remember writing that. What was more in my head with that was privacy and freedom vs cloud computing rather than closed/open ("open source has won", "not in the ways I care about it hasn't"); I lament the loss of the late 90s and the enthusiasm for desktop voice recognition, particularly, and how that's all gone cloud based and will probably never come back leaving the only options as "give your data to this company or that company". And recently Microsoft has predicted they can extract 8+ billion dollars from years of free work of Git developers (GitHub) and other open projects, yet open source advocates are trying to spin this as some kind of win for open source and a loss for Microsoft. I agree lived reality is more complex, but if you can start from a moralizing ideology you agree with, that can make decisions for you to simplify it. But then you risk living with a Leemote Yeelong laptop and using the web over plain text email.

gowld 8y ago

> Is free software against copyright laws? Mostly. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/freedom-or-copyright.en.html > To make copyright fit the network age, we should legalize the noncommercial copying and sharing of all published works, and prohibit DRM. But note that "being against copyright" is different from "advocating violating current copyright laws"

petermcneeley 8y ago
Ok i think i understand it just mostly sounds delusional considering the lived reality of capitalism. Perhaps if UBI becomes a thing?

jodrellblank 8y ago

Why would "free software" imply that you could ignore other people's copyrights, take other people's non-free work and give it away? If Disney offered you a program to play all their movies, you could say "I refuse to use their black-box proprietary movie player, I will only use a free software video player that I can inspect, to make sure it isn't scanning my computer for copyrighted Disney movies and reporting everything it finds back to Disneyland, and one I can recompile to put the video stream into the background of my transparent terminal because I'm not watching dozens of hours of movies unless I can work at the same time". That's the kind of thing it's supporting.

petermcneeley 8y ago
I understand the nature of the problem. Its everywhere ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17237792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17237792 ) I just think lived reality is more complex than a moralizing ideology. Something you understand: quote "Open Source" (as if it's a single movement) didn't win in creating desirable, accessible, commercial or beautiful software. It 'won' in the worst possible way - big companies like Amazon and Facebook took the work, hid it in their datacenters behind their paywalls, and use it to extract money from people. Nobody has any more freedom with their data and their computing because Facebook uses PHP, than they would have on a proprietary desktop OS. "you can have an open source OS and browser which connects you to a restrictive interface where your data is under someone else's control" is a lose for all of us.
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  mmhmm, I remember writing that. What was more in my head with that was privacy and freedom vs cloud computing rather than closed/open ("open source has won", "not in the ways I care about it hasn't"); I lament the loss of the late 90s and the enthusiasm for desktop voice recognition, particularly, and how that's all gone cloud based and will probably never come back leaving the only options as "give your data to this company or that company". And recently Microsoft has predicted they can extract 8+ billion dollars from years of free work of Git developers (GitHub) and other open projects, yet open source advocates are trying to spin this as some kind of win for open source and a loss for Microsoft. I agree lived reality is more complex, but if you can start from a moralizing ideology you agree with, that can make decisions for you to simplify it. But then you risk living with a Leemote Yeelong laptop and using the web over plain text email.