[andsoitis]

> I do agree with the "information should be free but someone's time should not be" statement.

While it is a nice idea ("information should be free"), I don't know that the statement is rooted in practical reality. Information doesn't have autonomy so needs to be created, it can have time value, it certainly has relevance value, or entertainment value, has quality value (signal > noise); all these things require effort to produce, maintain, curate, distribute.

Leaving the practical constraints behind, I also struggle to see moral or ethical reasons for information to be free. Which information should be free? All information? Why?

[pjmorris]

"What does society need? It needs information that is truly available to its citizens—for example, programs that people can read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate. But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can’t study or change. Society also needs freedom. When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of their own lives."

- Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman

[dingnuts]

"But what software owners typically deliver is a black box that we can’t study or change"

I think a lot about how RMS's view on software freedom was warped by the highly intelligent and intellectual peer group that he must have been involved in at MIT.

It strikes me as endearing, but naive, to believe that most people would be able to treat software as anything but a black box simply if the source code were available to them.

Certainly, for most people using computers at MIT, when RMS was writing, this was true. But it is definitely not true that source code would have any use to most computer users (smart phone users, really) today. They simply would not have the ability to do anything with it.

[ta1243]

I have never looked at the source code for vim, but I have used features that people other than the original developers have created.

I have however looked at the mod_proxy_wstunnel module in apache and edited it to suit my needs. I never expected to do this, I'm not a developer -- certainly not a C++ developer, however running

   sed -i 's/WebSocket/websocket/g' ./modules/proxy/mod_proxy_wstunnel.c

Means it works for my use case. In a world without free software I would not be able to do that simple thing.

Likewise I have changed some custom filters on ffmpeg for my own build. Again that's C, and my C is horrible. I don't need to deal with the somewhat opinionated views of the ffmpeg developers to fold them back upstream - I can just have my 2 or 3 changed files to use them for my purpose.

Just because I don't look at the code for 99% of the software I use, it doesn't mean I don't benefit from it being free software, and for the 1% of cases when I do need to change something, I can. That's freedom, and I'm happy that the GPL ensures my freedom.

[EvanAnderson]

> It strikes me as endearing, but naive, to believe that most people would be able to treat software as anything but a black box simply if the source code were available to them.

I don't think end users modifying software is a realistic scenario, but that doesn't mean there aren't realistic scenarios enabled by Free software.

Having (appropriately licensed) source code available means people can pay others (with the necessary skills) to adapt software to their needs. Closed source software greatly restricts or removes that possibility.

[brnaftr361]

I don't think that's fair. There are a lot of instances where people go out of their way to experiment with systems despite limited literacy. The example that seems most salient is PSP homebrew, something I was doing at the age of 13 without a single hint of how anything computer related functioned.

The question becomes one of community and accessibility, and community begets accessibility. Opening source allows for easier access to fundamental aspects and lowers the "activation energy" of the whole process to develop and thus invites greater participation. Like how many man-hours get spent probing for vulnerabilities that enable jailbreaking? And note that these are specialized rarefied man-hours, and the whole system is also adversarial in that those seeking to crack the code are in competition with those trying to conceal it.

Pull all that out and make it all accessible and perhaps 13-year-old me would've tried to recode that 64x64 limit on the icons and learned something in the process, enable, iterate, participate...

[EvanAnderson]

I think Free software encourages exceptional end users to participate as you're describing. I didn't mean to imply differently. Encouraging this kind of development is definitely good.

The bigger win that I see, though, is enabling communities of users to band together and work together or finance development of software with the community's common goals in mind. That's not something that proprietary software has historically done much of, and proprietary software doesn't permit that community to fork the software when goals don't align.

[carapace]

> programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his [Bernie Greenberg] office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off. They read the manual, discovered they could do useful things and they learned to program.

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

[Ardon]

It doesn't really need to be them doing the studying, making the code viewable allows end-users to choose who to trust or to get second opinions, instead of only having the word of the company producing the software.

One or multiple people who can study the software, even in small numbers, are still adding more information, and so more potential trust, than the alternative.

[hn_acker]

Free software is not just about having the technical means to modify the software (access to the source code and not being impeded by technical measures against running modified versions instead of the original software) but also the legality to do so. Free software grants any users a legal right to modify it. That many users won't modify free software (because they lack the motivation/time/money/need) is not a strong argument against the usefulness of free software, because the users who would modify free software can do so without worrying about being sued. Additionally, the end users who won't modify free software can still benefit from the freedom because copyright is two-sided. Not only is it legal for people to modify free software, it's legal for end users to use other people's modifications of free software.

Free software is especially important in cases where the developers of proprietary devices use DRM as a secondary legal barrier (provided by 17 U.S. Code § 1201, section 1201 of the DMCA, in the US [1][2]) against otherwise non-infringing actions such as inspection (which is why access to source code remains a crucial requirement of free software alongside the freedom to modify) and repair. (Tangent: The EFF is arguing in Green v. Department of Justice that the anti-circumvention portions of DMCA 1201 violate the First Amendment [3].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_and_Performance...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

[3] https://www.eff.org/cases/green-v-us-department-justice

[bobajeff]

Yeah, I was recently reading the history of smalltalk and some of it's creators goals was to make it possible for everyone to be "computer literate". That is everyone being able to make their own programs without specialist programmers doing it.

In that book it seems that Kay eventually gave up that idea. Noticing it seemed that people would take years to be capable of doing interesting stuff with computers.

Which I think might be why his later research was more about just making code smaller and more comprehensible by domain experts.

Edit: It is worth noting that the idea seems to have been picked up by Dynamicland via their Realtalk protocol. Though I suspect they have ways to go before achieving that goal.

[pjmorris]

> But it is definitely not true that source code would have any use to most computer users (smart phone users, really) today. They simply would not have the ability to do anything with it.

It seems like GitHub and other sources of open source software offer an opportunity to test your hypothesis empirically. I am biased to think that its existence demonstrates that source code is of use to at least many users.

[Zambyte]

Consider the situation where people bring their car to a mechanic other than the manufacturer to have changes or maintenance done to it. Imagine a world where the same thing is both possible and encouraged with software. That is the Free Software vision.

[carapace]

The lack of practical constraints on copying bits is exactly the rationale for the statement.

Since the cost to copy information (once the original bit patterns have been crafted, which process is, as you point out, typically costly) is close to zero it becomes regressive to charge for copies of information.

Clearly we should pay handsomely those who develop the original useful information.

- - - -

edit to add:

Sorry, I realized I was just paraphrasing the clip, and you probably already get it and are asking a different question, something like, granted that copying information is very cheap, still why should we just freely give each other useful information? Eh?

The answer there is that we're all in this together and we have serious challenges to face (climate, plastic and other "forever chemicals" and pollution, crashing of the marine ecosystem by destruction of plankton resulting in widespread famine (we eat more fish meat than all other animals), asteroids, etc.) and so we should do our best to accelerate our capabilities and power-with-wisdom to cope with it all.

[andsoitis]

> we have serious challenges to face

Who will ensure the information is accurate? Why would we trust them (which is also a form of information).

Should all information (false, true, and everything in between) have equal cost in production and distribution? How do we update information?

Price as well as cost are tools to shape (for better AND worse) how we can prioritize information or decide how it should flow. There are countless examples of information that we as a civilization probably don’t want everyone to have easy access to. Also you as a private individual…

Freedom: would we force everyone who has some information to make it freely available and prohibit them from charging? Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s some information that should be much freer than it is today (looking at you, scientific community), but overriding people’s freedom to choose what information they make freely available and what they charge for strikes me as unjust.

[carapace]

> Who will ensure the information is accurate? Why would we trust them (which is also a form of information).

In the most general sense I think we are going to rediscover the value and necessity of honor (or descend into a dystopia not worth thinking about.)

Systems of elements that can trust each other are more efficient than systems of elements that cannot.

> Should all information (false, true, and everything in between) have equal cost in production and distribution? How do we update information?

I don't understand these questions.

> Price as well as cost ...

Are these not the same?

> ... we can prioritize information or decide how it should flow. There are countless examples of information that we as a civilization probably don’t want everyone to have easy access to. Also you as a private individual…

Well there it is, eh? Control. Who's "we"?

Anyway, the original context would suggest that Brand meant something like "information that people can use to improve their lives" so he probably didn't mean like nuclear bomb plans, eh?

If you have information that people can use constructively without disadvantaging you then it's kind of venal not to share it, eh? That's the moral or ethical reason for (some) information to be free.

- - - -

As an aside, you are inverting the logic here:

> overriding people’s freedom to choose what information they make freely available and what they charge

Physically we do not have that freedom, once data has been encoded in digital bits it becomes difficult to prevent dissemination of those bits. (I'm old enough to have seen Napster in action back in the day.)

Copy prevention (DRM) and commercial activity had to be implemented on top of the fundamental ability of the computer network to duplicate and transmit bits.

In other words if you have information you would keep secret don't put it in a computer.

[iteygib]

I feel it's essentially what a library is. There is a public or private cost behind it (like taxes to pay for it), but for all intents and purposes, the information inside of it is 'free' from the standpoint of the sheer amount of use and good it can provide for that cost. It is not technically free, but as close as it can be, and the information it provides has undoubtedly paid it self back a countless amount of times to the public (getting inspired, research to create things, relaxation, etc. etc.).

[adhamsalama]

To advance our civilization.

[Gormo]

> Information doesn't have autonomy so needs to be created, it can have time value, it certainly has relevance value, or entertainment value, has quality value (signal > noise);

The point is that information per se is non-rival and non-scarce, so the normal drivers of market exchange don't apply to it. Since we want to incentivize the creation of information, we have created positive law that generates artificial scarcity, and allows market forces to work mostly as they would for physical goods, but this is just a stopgap solution due to the difficulty of commoditizing the downstream uses of information.

To echo another commenter in this thread, if we were better at commoditizing and marketing the uses of information directly, rather than the information itself, we wouldn't need to use artificial scarcity as a proxy to generate that incentive.

> all these things require effort to produce, maintain, curate, distribute.

But these inputs are not the determinant of the value of the end product. They only describe the process of creating it, but value is determined by the subjective utility enjoyed by the end consumer.

If you view time and effort necessary to create and distribute information as a capital expenditure on par with the time and effort necessary to design and manufacture any physical good, perhaps things come into clearer relief. Is anyone entitled to a guaranteed return on capital investments, or are they bearing risk in making them in pursuit of a potential, but uncertain, return? I think most people would hold the latter view.

> Leaving the practical constraints behind, I also struggle to see moral or ethical reasons for information to be free.

I'm not sure I see where moral or ethical considerations even come into the discussion. The closest moral consideration that applies to the question is the way it affects property rights, but in that regard, it seems that it's the artificial scarcity in information that seems to lack sufficient moral justification.

There are no natural property rights in information itself, due to its conceptual and non-rival nature, and the attempt to take the norms of ownership associated with natural property and apply them to information actually constitutes an abridgment of natural property rights: functionally, 'intellectual property' amounts to a restriction on what patterns other people may arrange their own physical materials into, based on fallaciously reifying the pattern itself into a putative concrete thing to which rivalry applies.