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by Altern4tiveAcc 19 days ago
PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt.

That being said, I agree with the premise. Most of those cultural preservation issues wouldn't be a problem if users had control over their computing.

The problems caused by game servers going offline aren't necessarily specific to games, and the cultural preservation aspect can be applied to other programs as well. This essay explain what those problems are in a very accessible manner: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
3 comments
andai 19 days ago
> If a certain activity is essentially your own, then maintaining your full control over it requires that you do it using your copies of free programs, running them on computers you control. Doing it in any other way is SaaSS because it denies you the control you deserve.

The word deserve is interesting here.

There's a social sense (based on the just world fallacy, see also Karma), and a natural sense (by natural law, you deserve whatever you are able to get).

In the natural sense, which is the only real one, a person deserves computing freedom if they are able and willing to obtain it. If they care, and if they're willing to work for it.

It's the same way with freedom in other contexts. If you don't care, at least not enough to defend it... well, we can see the results of that.

I think Stallman is using the word deserve here in the sense that computing freedom should be some kind of human right. That's an admirable position, but I don't think I see it catching on. (Heck, regular freedom is still pretty niche, especially globally, and computing freedom is a strict subset.)

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metabagel 19 days ago
> PSA for anyone considering reading it: this article is full of LLMisms and was probably generated from a prompt.

Possibly, but it doesn't appear that way to me.

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addandsubtract 19 days ago
"Freedom 2" makes zero sense:

> A multiplayer game cannot survive if only one person has the server files. Freedom 2 ensures that the community has the legal right to share the server software

In most online games, only the developer has the "server files". You'd need access to them first to even share them. Freedom 2 should be access to server files, if anything.

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croisillon 19 days ago
> a $70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon

and so it begins...

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