lmel
серафими многоꙮчитїи😐🫸 "is it free software?"
😎👉 "does it free people?"
Brit
Szescstopni@djm62 Perhaps you want to buy my state-of-the-art proprietary software that is very effective at freeing people.
Luis Villa@Szescstopni @djm62 there’s a lot of state of the art proprietary software that frees people to achieve the goals they want to reach in life.
Overwhelmingly, source code doesn’t free people because most people can’t code and even more people don’t want or can’t fix a given piece of code.
Inspired by this excellent toot I traveled back in time and gave a talk on this at Libre Planet 2016: https://lu.is/2016/03/free-as-in-my-libreplanet-2016-talk/
@luis_in_brief I wasn't completely serious. Of course there's a lot of great proprietary software, and it helps people in life. And of course some FOSS runs to keep concentration camps running. Life is complicated.
If I need a good axe I buy it from someone I trust made it good enough for my needs. I don't want the axe maker to make it worse to cut costs. I don't need WiFi or LLMs in the axe. Software is of course different. Once you have a great program you can make zillions of copies of it. But it still costs. I don't want the programmer or the team to go hungry or tired, or to cut corners. And code, like an axe, needs maintenance. I don't know how to make an axe, but I do know how to maintain it. Software is different. There is no single type of rust to prevent. Maintenance can be more complicated than writing it was.
For a while I lived off the program I wrote. It worked. If someone asked for features I thought were bad I didn't add them. I sold it – single payment for a license to use.
Now I'm paying someone to write code that I badly need and can't write myself. The code will be free, still not sure what license, MIT, copyleft, whatever, but it will be free for all to use.
Life is complicated.