motherhood and apple pie

Everyone here recognizes the value of having the freedom to study the source code of one's software, the freedom to redistribute software to help one's neighbour etc.

Yet we know from the variety of comments posted on LWN that readers vary in how much software & hardware functionality people are willing to forego to have those freedoms: differing attitudes to provision of non-free hardware drivers or codecs, for example. We can also see that some LWN readers don't even understand why anyone would go without functionality if it doesn't come with those freedoms.

If there were a proposal for laws that would in most cases require software companies to give their users these freedoms, then we'd all be somewhat inclined to support the proposal. But if the law had a negative impact on what software was developed, then some readers here would feel that that policy wasn't in fact in their interests.

Similar comments could be made about other copyrighted material that might be more directly affected by this declaration of Internet freedom: it's easy to sign something saying we want everyone to be free to connect to the Internet and not to be subject to control from copyright owners (BSA, MPAA, ARIA etc.), but in reality we'll differ in how far we'd go to give people freedom to breach copyright of software authors or prevent our favourite artist from being able to work full time making the art that we so appreciate; different people would draw the line between the two in different places.

By engaging conversation about what costs are or aren't worth paying for a freedom, we'll find out that there is disagreement about things that we thought obvious, and we can work towards better understanding of what the right policies should be. Without that conversation, that improved understanding, I don't think we'll get far in improving the decisions of policy makers.