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Either the user controls the program or the program controls the user. Those of us who don't want proprietary lock-in generally do it for one, some, or all of the four basic freedoms as defined by RMS: 1. Freedom the run the program, for any purpose.
2. Freedom to study and change the program (source code required)
3. Freedom to redistribute copies.
4. Free to redistribute your modifications. (source code required) For the kind of people who frequent hacker news, I would expect you to be familiar with these very basic principles of software ideology. If you disagree with them, that's fine, but let's not pretend that proprietary is anywhere close to FOSS in the realm of freedom. Sometimes you must sacrifice functionality and usability to use FOSS, and that's a choice that only you can make, but what I don't want is you making that choice for me because you don't understand the basic ideas of software freedom. On the subject of Slack, I can give you a quick example of this. Let's say you want a good chat app but it needs to be secure, and you don't want to trust another company (slack). So obviously you want to self-host internally right? Oh, sorry, no source code, no self hosted version, too bad, fuck off and wait until slack releases a self-hosted version. Oh, and if they do, and you want to implement your own internal feature X, too bad, fuck off, you get what you are given. Very disappointed in the level of understanding of these things on hn lately. |