@gaditb I think that disagreeing in part with Freedom 0 is not, in fact, a particularly niche view.

It's not ascendant, but things like the ethical source movement are pretty visible and seem to have a fair number of high-visibility supporters.

@gaditb I think I've been unclear.

Freedom 1 is much broader than what I'm thinking about: a continuation of the physical Right to Repair campaign into software.

There's basically no chance in the foreseeable that the EU would (or even *could*) mandate that all software sold needs to come with source; a movement for a software Right to Repair needs to have an attainable intermediate goal that *would* be possible to mandate.

I'm not sure if there *is* such an intermediate proposal; this is what I'm thinking about. Maybe mandating unobfuscated debug symbols be available? Maybe mandating that users be able to disable (some level of) software integrity checks, so that binary-patching can be assured to work? Maybe something else?

What *could* be done, what could be worked towards with a reasonable chance of political success? Free/libre software, for all its benefits, is not that project. What is?

@halcy particularly: the GPL is set up to enforce equality of interaction. Everyone has the same rights, you need to provide the preferred form of modification, and so on.

I'm wondering if there's something that's more like extending the existing right to reverse engineer.

It's not plausible that, say, the EU would mandate all software must be GPL. Is there a plausible extension of already supported reverse-engineering to get something that *would* be mandatable?