The limits of positive and negative [LWN.net]

The limits of positive and negative

Posted Sep 30, 2011 12:46 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
In reply to: goals of the FSF by pjm
Parent article: Papering over a binary blob

I'm not sure that the categorisation positive/negative is useful here.

Does FSF campaign for your positive freedom to modify software? Or for the negative liberty to prevent others from stopping you from modifying software?

Kinda the same thing really.

RMS addresses this at the start of his speeches:

Free Software [...] is software that respects the user's freedom. What do I mean by this? Because it's never enough just to say "I'm in favour of freedom", the crucial issue is always: what are the essential freedoms that everyone should have?

From One of RMS's usual free software speeches, March 2006.

So it's not so much a question of having as much positive liberty as possible, or as much negative liberty as possible. The point is to have whatever freedoms are necessary to live in a society where everyone can and be friendly and helpful to each other and can make use of their skills to improve their quality of life.

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The limits of positive and negative

Posted Sep 30, 2011 13:13 UTC (Fri) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link]

> Kinda the same thing really.

In the situation discussed in the parent article, the FSF advocates removing the positive freedom to upgrade software, while (at least in the FSF's eyes, using the argument that circuitry can be overlooked) increasing negative liberty. So this is an example where they are not the same thing, which is why it seems like a useful distinction to make. However, I welcome your attempt to provide a different explanation, which looks promising even if incomplete (see below).

> The point is to have whatever freedoms are necessary to live in a society where everyone can and be friendly and helpful to each other and can make use of their skills to improve their quality of life.

[Was there text missing between "can and", or is the "and" spurious?]

The first of those seems connected with negative liberty. The second (improving quality of life) seems more connected with positive liberty, but might be seen as being in conflict with the recommendation to prevent people from improving their quality of life by upgrading software.