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Because nobody can exercise it anyway. Freedom 0 is really just a corollary of freedom 1, "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does
by cwp 13y ago
Because nobody can exercise it anyway. Freedom 0 is really just a corollary of freedom 1, "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish." If you can't change a program, you can't run it for any purpose, you can only run it for the purpose intended by the original author.
Freedom 1 is pretty hard to exercise too. For any given bit of technology, there are very few people outside of the original authors that are capable of changing it in meaningful and useful ways, and even they will need to put in a lot of effort do so.
It may be apocryphal, but the Apple II discussed in the article is said to be the last computer designed entirely by one person. Modern computers are just too complex for any one person to entirely understand. We can only answer questions, fix bugs and add features in a narrow speciality. In order to use a computer system we have to rely on other people to handle issues outside our areas of competence. Those people might be part of communities that help each other for free, or might work for companies that provide support to their customers.
So freedom 0 is a bit like the freedom to go to the moon. Having it is better than not, but most people don't benefit from it.
- rmc 13y agoNot totally true. If I, as a programmer, can excercise Freedom 1 to write a new programme, then I can give it to you, and you can excersice Freedom 0 to run it on your device. If the Overlords™ don't want that type of programme to run on your device, there's nothing they can do about it.
- ctdonath 13y agoXcode is free. Write/download source code, click Run. Where isn't Freedom 0?
- betterunix 13y agoIt is worth keeping mind that Freedom 0 can be denied to a greater extent than just preventing you from modifying the software. I first understood this when I was an undergrad, and my EE professors assigned us homework involving Matlab. The school had a license that allowed 50 concurrent users, and the software enforced that, which was a big problem when 80 students had homework to do. Yes, the freedom to modify the software would have allowed anyone to circumvent this restriction, but the inability to modify the software does not imply that such a restriction must exist. All of the four freedoms complement each other. In a world without Freedom 0, you might be denied the freedom to modify your software, because you might not be able to run the software needed to modify other software (e.g. imagine a simple world where all software is distributed as Python source, but where your text editor is designed to not be able to edit such source, and where your OS is designed to not run any other text editors -- modifying your software suddenly becomes much harder).