Hey Victor!
Thank you very much for your points, really enjoy the direction of your questions because I think they allow me to explain my position from very important angles.
"The postulate is not about 4 freedoms. It’s about absolute freedom as a
starting point."
I agree that this is a good starting point. I don't know if Stallman specifically views the world this way, but I definitely subscribe to this approach.
In fact, I am not against Stallman's 4 freedoms at all. My position is not that these 4 freedoms are unimportant or not good to have. My position is that giving up these freedoms is completely fine in many situations. And making people give up these freedoms by virtue of providing a service is also fine. (will clarify below)
This is very important, because due to Stallman's dramatic narrative and binary positions on ethics, anyone disagreeing with him automatically ends up in Stallman's bucket of "evil". But I am rejecting this binary view and assert that one can agree that FLOSS is good, that the 4 freedoms are good, but not believe that proprietary is inherently evil or wrong or an unacceptable trade-off.
In fact, the 4 freedoms formulated by Stallman are not unique. You can basically formulate similar types of freedoms for almost any human activity. In the article I talk about the restaurant business. You can have basically the same 4 freedoms there. And when you go to eat out, you are giving these freedoms up: you no longer have control of where to buy ingredients, or to watch how the food is prepared, or to understand how clean everything is. (Sure, there are restaurants where the kitchen is open or where you prepare your own dish, but you get the idea)
And allegedly food is very important. If you eat something spoiled, things can become very bad, even fatal. And yet - we find it ok to give up control of how we prepare food and trade it for the service of being serviced and fed by a professional.
And yes, sometimes professionals will commit fraud or perform malpractice. It does not mean that if you got poisoned at a restaurant that the whole restaurant business is evil and should be completely rejected. What you need is tighter regulation and higher standards.
So why is software any different in this regard? Of course, restaurant industry and IT have enough differences, but the main principle is the same - you give up a portion of your control over the process of creating the product and even over the product itself in order to enjoy a higher quality of service, to save your time and be able to focus on something else. Standard division of labor. And the IT world has regulation being developed around it.
And today nobody actually prevents people from exercising these 4 freedoms. You want to completely own your computing? Sure, go ahead. And Stallman is someone to thank for that, because probably without his push for free computing it would've been born much later. (Although I don't doubt it would've been born eventually even if Stallman was not there)
And while in the 80s exercising these freedoms was probably very difficult and even impossible, and one had to really push for a project to build a system available to the public to tinker with, today this is no longer the case. We have many FLOSS systems that allow the public to do their own computing, build their own stuff, or choose in many cases to do the work themselves rather than hire a professional.
"I can’t see why it’s "invalid reasoning" to think that
human beings are free to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social
conventions."
Because this is not what I am saying. I am not arguing that humans are not free to begin with to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social
conventions.
But neither does Stallman argue for freedoms to the extent permitted by laws, norms and social
conventions. He argues against permitted laws, norms and social conventions: software patents are bad, using credit cards is wrong, any form of online presence that is not technologically anonymous is wrong, using proprietary software is wrong, using web services that do computation is wrong, using software offered as a subscription is wrong, etc, etc.
In other words, Stallman wants to change how the world works. And this is fine. But in order for me to agree that what what he sees as a problem is really a problem - because currently it is the norm - and that what he proposes is actually a change that will provide a solution to this problem and in general make the world a better place - I would like to understand on what basis does he believe all of that. And this is the justification I am asking for.
As for the Popper principle, of course I know it, I was a science communicator for many years and ran an organization that promoted science and public knowledge about things like controlled experiments, etc.
In case of social sciences experiments are more difficult to run, but you can more easily do controlled data experiments, proper A/B analysis, etc. At the very least, you should base your conclusion on statistics, not on cherry picked blog posts and news items, like Stallman does it in his "proprietary abuses" section, littered with errors, falsehoods, overstatements and loaded language.
In conclusion to this email, I'd like to say that this conversation has been very helpful and I will think if I should rename the article, so that it does not create an impression that I say one has to prove that freedom is a default position. I will carefully think about rewriting several opening sections as well, since I believe thanks to this conversation I came up with better ways to say what I mean.
Louigi.
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