Re: FSF continuously harms Free Hardware

[Richard Stallman]

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[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > In the music making world, it is distressingly common to sell
  > hardware such as MIDI controllers (think: fancy game controllers
  > but for music making) with capabilities that can not be accessed
  > without difficult feats of reverse engineering, or else having
  > to use proprietary software.  Often, the proprietary software
  > further requires users to provide economically valuable
  > personal information to the hardware making corporation.

There is a fundamental conceptual difference between
(1) a mode of usage you don't know how to invoke, and
(2) a mode of usage you are prohibited from utilizing.

Freedom 0 is meant to prevent (2).  For instance, if the developer
claims that you are forbidden to run a program unless you have a
contract to permit it, that is an example of (2).  Freedom 0
means that everyone who gets a copy has authorization to run it.

As for (1), releasing the source code enables users to
find the undocumented commands, thus how to invoke
whatever features exist.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)