On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 12:22:19AM -0500, Robinson Tryon wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Will Hill <will.hillnotes@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Free software is the only kind of software people should trust, so it's
> > ultimately the only software people will be able to do business with.
>
> I agree that it's hard (impossible?) to trust software for which one
> does not have the source code, however trillions of dollars of
> business are conducted every day using both Free and non-Free
> software. Do you mean that Free Software is ultimately the only kind
> of software that people will *want* to use for business?
I like to think about what will people want to use for themselves.
What would you install in your own body?
While for computing software it is mostly pertinent to AGI,
however humans install human-language programms on a regular basis.
For instance we read some news, and compile/understand it, then form
native-code/belief, which is added to our libraries/knowledge.
Or if we read a how-to, then we install a skill.
Proprietary binaries are akin to pre-compiled beliefs,
it's like being given orders, without knowing the bigger picture,
such as perhaps in the military and authoritarian
governments/businesses. or regurgitating memorized answers on a test,
without knowing how or why those answers are correct.
libre source code is more authoritative, you can see the big picture,
why a particular action is taking place can be identified,
how a result is calculated can be observed.
> > People
> > do understand this, even if they have not had software freedom explained to
> > them well.
>
> How would people innately know that Free Software can provide better
> guarantees of trust than non-Free software if they don't really know
> what 'Free Software' means?
In the same way that people don't like when politicians make decisions
behind closed doors. The people want the doors of policy to be always
open. Proprietary software is dictatorship, where the people don't
know how or why a certain rule is enforced, most decisions are behind
closed doors.
Libre software is transparent democracy, where all (most) decisions
are out in the open, on mailing lists, forums, logs, and comments.
from Logan ya