One of my disappointments is that Richard Stallman fails to see the big picture of people should care about free software. He’s a hacker so he feels like the best way to sell his position is “ok you can have the source and edit it”. But to the vast majority of humanity this is basically irrelevant! They can’t code, the don’t want to code, having access to the code is “basically useless”. The things people actually want: accessibility, data portability, privacy, agency-they’re all as relevant and universal as ever. But the GNU and RMS remain dead set on “oh we’ve got to push everyone to adopt the GPL”, which I respect but fundamentally ends up being an ineffective use of resources. When you train a pubic to care about free software and understands why they need it, that’s how you get true freedom. Leaning into the fringe appearance, and definitely continuing to remain socially inept if not entirely inappropriate, is just shooting yourself in the foot.
With Chromium and VSCode, there are 'pro-privacy' forks which which remove the telemetry from the codebase. With Windows, there isn't an equivalent ad-free option.
I think "freedom to manipulate the source code" may not be a popular point, but it seems foundational in that it restricts what the software can otherwise get away with.
e.g. I don't like the idea of buying 'smart' TVs which come bundled with adware.
> But to the vast majority of humanity this is basically irrelevant!
Oh, it's very, very relevant. For example, I can't think of a person who wouldn't ask a programmer friend, or hire a freelancer, to remove ads from their devices, if they had the option to do so.
People want to control their software, even if they're not programmers, because people like being in control of their lives - it's natural. I don't see how could anyone argue against human desire to control their own machines.
