This has been hashed out before in better ways, but I'm going to take a stab at simplifying the issue at hand for modern and future computing. The developer wa

This has been hashed out before in better ways, but I'm going to take a stab at simplifying the issue at hand for modern and future computing. The developer wants freedom and so does the user. Most of us are both developers and users. Closed code or non-foss code is geared to give developers freedom, but at the cost of user freedom. FOSS licenses such as GPLv123/LGPL favor user freedom, but at the cost of developer freedom. For me, the bottom line is that I believe, given the trajectory of computing, FOSS is closer to protecting actual freedom of both developers and users than any alternative. I think a good thought experiment is to imagine we are a bit further in the future, and now brain-computer interfaces are prevalent. I often joke with my boss that he would be an early adapter of "Apple-brain", but the point is that I would never plug in a brain-computer interface without having the four freedoms on it. There is a glaring issue at hand here though, with FOSS, that I think fails to address this issue: namely "ou should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way." I don't think that goes far enough. Due to our legal system, I don't only want the ability to modify my brain-computer, but I also want the ability to make sure no one but me has access to that particular source code. Generally FOSS licenses would protect me from someone copying my brain code if they failed to adhere to the FOSS license, but it does nothing to protect what I would consider proprietary brain-code. Is your computer as it is not already an extension of your brain to some extent? Do you have full control of it, or at least the ability to take control of it? If no is the answer, I consider that a weakness. Freedom comes with a price, and in this case the primary cost of freedom is a lack of features, and time and effort necessary to get a functional set of features. eg. in reality, I think I really ought to be compiling everything from source (Gentoo, etc) and checking hashes/checksums and reviewing code (maybe in an automatic way). We all make tradeoffs, but as the future progresses, I believe very strongly that those who embrace pieces of proprietary software now will be at a large disadvantage later, and that includes companies. Sure, Apple has the freedom to determine their licensing schemes, but do keep in mind that it affects a huge number of users (eg, actual people, instead of a company), and many users will embrace it, but I don't have any issues with FOSS proponents calling out the facts whenever a company with so large a userbase degrades user freedom, because no matter how you want to defend Apple, that's what they do.