> Do you think these cloud companies could get away with the abuses that they do...

ForHackernews · on Sept 21, 2020

You're refusing to engage with the point I'm making (as is your right).

But just to summarize:

- "Nobody could have foreseen people getting sick when we fed them these poisoned cakes! Oh if only I hadn't made these millions of dollars making people sick!"

- "Actually, many people over decades have argued that people should be able to see and modify the recipes that go into their food."

- "No, that's completely different because, you see, these days Facebook is baking the poison cake in their own oven. It's not even a cake. It's a service that offers cake slices, and you're free to not eat them. (ps we also put little bits of our cake in 90% of the other food in the grocery store)"

rbanffy · on Sept 21, 2020

You fail to see the simple point Facebook's software runs on Facebook's computers. The four freedoms are not touched by that. People voluntarily use the services they provide.

Besides that, the four freedoms include the freedom to use the software (Facebook's proprietary software, after all, runs on top of free software) for anything the user seems fit, including serving poisoned cakes and make billions of dollars out of that.

I am not engaging with your argument because it doesn't make sense. Facebook (and Google, and Twitter, and Hacker News) are services provided to us. We don't have a natural right to inspect the source of their software because the license it's under doesn't give us that right. Would it be better if we could? That's unclear, since a lot of the behavior is tied to the data that is collected and we can't inspect more than the data we have the right to see (our own).

ForHackernews · on Sept 21, 2020

> You fail to see the simple point Facebook's software runs on Facebook's computers.

a) This isn't strictly true. The Facebook app runs on users phones.

b) I don't know why you think this is a compelling argument. Why shouldn't we demand ethical behaviour from software accessed over a network? I can't tell if you're just a fatalist who can't even imagine expecting better, or if you really believe doing shitty things to your users doesn't count if you do it over TCP.