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by JBiserkov 3452 days ago
"companies like Microsoft try to limit people's freedoms."

According to the author this is bad. I agree with this point for the purpose of this discussion.

The author tries to limit people's freedoms.

The author tells me I should try to limit people's freedoms.

For the sake of their freedoms.

P.s. I'm not familiar with the author or their software.

P.p.s. Luckily there's less need to port Linux software to Windows these days since Microsoft has partnered with Ubuntu to create a Windows Subsystem for Linux which is capable of running an Ubuntu user space and bash shell directly on Windows.

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/about

and https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/install_gui...

1 comments

No, the author doesn't try to limit anyone's freedom, he only asks people to understand him and to work against proprietary platforms, not prohibits them to do anything.
He doesn't prohibit them because he can't. He directly says as much in the second line of his piece. IF he could limit you, he would.

He then goes on to say that he won't permit his software to be compatible with other platforms like Visual Studio, _even at the cost of performance_.

If that's not cutting your nose off to spite your face, it's still definitely a direct attempt to limit your freedom.

No, he doesn't say that if he could he would limit you and that he won't permit his software to be compatible.
He just says that he won't do it and explains why you should not either. That's hardly limiting you from doing anything.

Even though I don't agree with his position (I fit in the "I don't care if it works on Windows or not, if you care pull requests are always welcome" camp), it's a reasonable one to have.

Of course he does. By choosing a GNU license he explicitly limits the choices available to anyone that might make use of his software in their own software projects. That's the whole point of the license to limit the freedoms of developers in favor of users... his favored group. Even then, his plea is for developers to willingly limit user choice in regard to proprietary software. Sure, his license doesn't legally prevent this, but he's asking developers to de facto limit user freedom to choose their operating environment in favor of his approved systems.

If he were merely trying to convince users to move to Libre systems while making no plea to the developers that might otherwise enable users to choose against his wishes, you might have a point: but that's not his goal.