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Balancing accessibility and software freedomBalancing accessibility and software freedomPosted Aug 10, 2010 17:41 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544)In reply to: Balancing accessibility and software freedom by rsidd Parent article: Balancing accessibility and software freedom
You're inventing stuff again. For example: And if proprietary text-speech programs were "banned" [...] You're extrapolating what you think RMS would call for, and you've gotten it wrong. RMS has said that if a law could be passed tomorrow to ban proprietary software, he would be against it. His reasoning is based on the idea that laws that don't express the will of the people are unjustified, and because there are freedom of expression considerations. First public opinion has to be changed, and then society could consider a law banning proprietary software, or banning just the sale of proprietary software. You've also a factual mistake here: the problem was not the closed-source program, but the opaque interface. If the printer standards had been open and documented, RMS could have written his own driver program. Nope, it wasn't about drivers or APIs or documentation. They previously had a printer that ran free software, and they added a feature to the printer to send out a message when it was jammed. Then they got a new printer and wanted to add this feature to the printer, but couldn't because they didn't have the source code.
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Balancing accessibility and software freedom Posted Aug 11, 2010 7:04 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] The word "banned" was not mine: it was taken from the GNU manifesto and I quoted it in adequate context, I believe. A literal-minded person could argue that RMS is not himself calling for a ban, only saying it would be nice if the ban occurred. And he wrote, as of a couple of weeks ago, "Our goal is therefore to eliminate proprietary software." Of course proprietary software can theoretically be eliminated via free-market competition, but surely not even RMS believes that that is a practical possibility. Can you supply a link to RMS's stance as you describe it? It sounds inconsistent with his reiterated "good versus evil" view. Slavery was evil: if public opinion supported slavery, would RMS have been opposed to banning it? I think not. I stand corrected about the printer, but that makes it even more irrelevant. It is usually impossible to change the software (firmware) on a device like a printer. The realistic situation today would be that the printer can communicate a paper jam, and the proprietary Windows driver can read the communication, but the interface is not documented properly and therefore that functionality is missing on a Linux system.
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