On Tue, 19 Jun 2012, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2012-06-19 at 09:40 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
On 06/18/2012 06:18 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> I hesitate to put words in people's mouths, and correct me if I'm
> wrong, but it reads to me as if Jay and others are arguing from an
> incorrect premise. That premise is to assume that there is a
> God-given right for people who own computing devices to retrofit
> alternative operating systems onto those devices.
>
> I want to put it out there that this is _not true_.
The problem with this claim is that it equivocates on the meaning of
"a right". There are at least two definitions of "a right" in this
sense: moral rights and legal rights. These are not the same. Moral
rights are not in the gift of any Government. While we may not have a
legal right to run whatever software we wish on hardware we own, it's
not at all unreasonable to claim a moral right to do so.
See later discussion. In the sense of 'attempt to do so', this is
certainly supportable, but is a side track to our actual topic here. In
the sense of 'demand that the manufacturer make it easy to do so', no, I
don't believe it is reasonable to claim such a right, moral or legal.
--
Adam Williamson
Adam, just a short bald claim:
In the United States and Europe there is a large body of statute
law, regulatory rulings, and court decisions which say that yes,
a large powerful company cannot take certain actions to impede
competitors. In particular entering into a compact to make
Fedora harder to install on every single x86 home computer sold
is not allowed. Or once was not allowed. Recently neither
regulatory bodies, nor courts, have enforced these old once
settled laws and regulations.
oo--JS.
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