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1718627440last Tuesday at 3:31 PM2 repliesview on HN

Why? When your goal is to have free software, having non-free software with better architecture won't suit you.


Replies

Analemma_last Tuesday at 5:02 PM

This argument has been had thousands of times across thousands of forums and mailing lists in the preceding decades and we're unlikely to settle it here on the N + 1th iteration, but the short version of my own argument is that the entire point of Free Software is to allow end users to modify the software in the ways it serves them best. That's how it got started in the first place (see the origin story about Stallman and the Printer).

Stallman's insistence that gcc needed to be deliberately made worse to keep evil things from happening ran completely counter to his own supposed raison d'etre. Which you could maybe defend if it had actually worked, but it didn't: it just made everyone pack up and leave for LLVM instead, which easily could've been predicted and reduced gcc's leverage over the software ecosystem. So it was user-hostile, anti-freedom behavior for no benefit.

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bigstrat2003last Tuesday at 3:59 PM

I would describe this more as "trying to prevent others from having non-free software if they wish to", which is a lot more questionable imo.

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