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Someone switches to your product, or a new user chooses your product over the open-source alternative. The proportion of people who can modify their software de
by superuser2 13y ago
Someone switches to your product, or a new user chooses your product over the open-source alternative. The proportion of people who can modify their software decreases. That is a decrease in software freedom.
Not necessarily a bad thing (your product might be legitimately better), but it is a decrease in software freedom.
- gress 13y agoFreedom hasn't decreased at all. Those people have exactly the same choices as before. They can use the open-source alternative if they want to change the code. Merely 'using' a closed source product doesn't prohibit them from doing that.
- superuser2 13y agoLots of people who would otherwise be Linux or BSD users instead use OSX. Consequently, they are not free to modify their operating systems where (had it not been for Apple) they would have been. Their freedom has been reduced voluntarily, but it has been reduced. Forking FreeBSD is not remotely the same thing as forking OSX and you can't "just use the open-source alternative if they want to change the source code" of OSX.
- dsuth 13y agoTheir freedom has not been reduced, as they are still free to choose an alternate, FOSS operating system if they prefer. Instead, they have access to more options than they otherwise would have, because it's highly unlikely that Apple would have expended so much effort in improving their OS, which is a competitive advantage for them, if they were forced to turn over all of that work to anyone who wanted it. I really don't like the idea of licences which compel their users to act in a certain way. Freedom cuts both ways.
- superuser2 13y agoSoftware freedom has a specific meaning which necessarily encompasses freedom to study and modify the software you're running. OSX users do not have this freedom. Hence, prevalence of OSX reduces software freedom. Ability to choose between OSX and alternatives is something but it is not software freedom.
- dsuth 13y agoThat seems like a narrow definition of software freedom , but in that case I'd argue that the utility gained from software freedom is not as valuable to users as the incentive gained by developers for being able to distribute their software under a more permissive licence.
- dllthomas 13y agoThere's never a need to distribute software under a more permissive license except enabling distribution of software under less permissive licenses.
- gress 13y agoThat's a very important need.
- dllthomas 13y agoYou're going to need to elaborate, for discussion to be useful.
- gress 13y agoSo that people can make money out of software and incentivize its development.
- dllthomas 13y agoIf such an amount of software is being produced under the GPL that inability to borrow from that pool of work is significantly hampering proprietary development, I'd say it's plainly false that this is the only way to incentivize software development and quite possibly the case that it's not the best way.
- gress 13y agoFreedom has still not been reduced. This so-called gain in freedom of OSX users to modify the code has come at the expense of a corresponding loss of freedom of Apple to choose whether to release their code or not.