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> Or take the AGPL, for instance, sponsored by now-defunct startup Affero. There are many people (myself included) who believe the AGPL is a restriction on use, freedom 0, because it prevents you from using AGPL software in certain contexts where the requirements cannot be fulfilled. > The GPLv2 itself starts by saying, "To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions" - there is a coherent political view that this is contradictory. There will _always_ be such restrictions. For an extreme, but derived from the same philosophical core, example: the act of murder is an individual freedom, but it imposes on other peoples' freedoms. So we have to make a choice between which freedom is more important: that of the person whose life is at risk, or that of the person who wants to take lives. The formal concepts are referred to as negative liberty (freedom from murder) and positive liberty (freedom to murder someone). The modern world leans heavily towards negative liberty because we recognise that freedom isn't some absolute individualistic freedom, but rather that it is better to balance freedom in favour of most people. That's why stealing, killing, sexual assault, and many other things are freedoms we deem unethical and unnecessary. Some people say, "well, it's just software" which is dismissive of the idea that software can have very bad effects, indirect and direct, on the world, so we must empower ourselves. > Or, in the left-libertarian direction, consider the folks who want to abolish copyright entirely. There are also those on the left who want this, but also to go _beyond_ simply abolishing. If you abolish copyright without requiring code and build instructions to be open source as well, you just end up with people and companies who instead keep their code secret. It's why, when slavery was abolished, it wasn't enough. The former slaves were free, but were now in a world where the power structures were not in their favour, meaning they could still be taken advantage of and treated like slaves and were still being oppressed. Libertarian views are usually rejected by the left as right wing, instead when you talk about leftists with less authoritarian views, they call themselves anarchists (or even reject that label, and say they're "doing anarchism" rather than being "anarchists"). |
Your example seems messy because people seem very opposed to the notion of a freedom to cause harm as even being a freedom. So why not avoid that complication entirely?
I think there is an even simpler example that'll work. If one is truly a free person, can they sell themselves into slavery. If we say yes, then allowing slavery is part of the package of ultimate freedom. If we say no, then there is at least one restriction we must include in the package of ultimate freedom. Package of ultimate freedom just being a spur of the moment name I've given to the legal system under which we are most free. Lastly, an answer of the form 'no one should exist in a position of being able to stop you from doing such', such as provided by anarchists, it just an alternate way of answering yes to the question.