| "Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in making software that the general public can modify, or in designing, promoting, or doing anything at all to encourage the existence of such software." That's unfair. Let's say we're talking about vehicles rather than software. The liberty to share information, to modify one's own vehicles, and so on is valuable even without a research program to educate every commuter about engineering or make motors modifiable by someone with no special knowledge. The benefits of software (or vehicle) freedom extend to every user even if they aren't directly involved with software engineering. As a non-programming user, you can find someone who can help you modify programs. You can also begin to learn yourself, as I and many others have done. Free software is itself an enormous library of learning resources simply because you can study its source code and reuse its components. To talk about a "highly educated and exclusive technocracy" in this context seems pretty overblown to me. Yes, efforts to make programming more accessible are very cool. But any motivated kid with a computer can get into coding right now. With the availability of free software, they can study working software packages written by experts, for free. The GNU project was a pragmatic initiative to ensure the existence of a free operating system mostly conforming to the typical Unix-like environment. Call it old-fashioned, but even iOS is built on such a foundation. I agree that eliminating barriers to entry for newbies is important, but basically I think it's long-term future work and that the FSF is right to focus on the fundamental freedoms for hackers. |