this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Forgive me if I trivialize, but we should not mourn too much: the obvious solution is to pirate it all. Do not waste time and energy for reinventing the wheel in the form of writing open source software. These resources can be used better for Revolution. Instead of diving into exhausting dispute and overintellectual arguments of Stallman, just do what said Marx: seize the means of production. That is, fucking pirate it. It is simple as that.
There’s more to it than just having free software. The source code is important too because it lets people learn from it, improve it, and use it to write or improve their own projects. Free software is only half the equation.
Unless you mean pirate the source too, in which case yeah absolutely but easier said than done.
All right, that's an argument. Also, having fun from coding is also a valid argument. Though, from my experience, it is easier to start learning programming from some simple, isolated cases, as in thextbooks, than from real life programs, which can be very nasty and domain-dependent.
To start learning yes, but as I’ve gotten more experienced I find myself getting a lot more value out of real life examples. Cracking open a git repo and seeing how they did something can save me hours of reading documentation or at least give me a better context to grasp it. People learn differently from each other, and also themselves at various stages of their understanding.
One time, I spent whole day arguing with some anarchkiddies about that, and no one gave me a short, convincing argument like that. Their posts were emotional rather than seeking for truth. That's the difference between debate and dialectics.
I’m mostly just paraphrasing Stallman’s own arguments. They’re worth checking out. He’s not without his faults, but his reasoning in this area is very sound.
Pirating a program doesn't let you study what it does or change it. So you still don't control it. It solves nothing.
I got your point, but please look out of the programmer perspective. For a moment, look from the perspective of, for example, mechanical engineer: all she or he needs is a copy of AutoCad, Inventor or Catia. They know nothing about code, they do not need to modify the code, they are just use the software as any other machine. That's all they need. BTW, there is no open source competition to these programs. Free CAD, with all respect, is not so good. Not because it is made by bad programmers; simply because making such complicated software costs tons of people, time and effort, so only big enterprises can do that, and now they are sadly capitalistic.
Free/Libre Software solves this too. One of the 4 rights that it gives you is the right to distribute. So if AutoCad was Libre Software, any mechanical engineer could legally get a copy for free, from someone else. But this is only one problem in our society. We also want to be able to control our computers and in order to do that, we need to be able to control the software that runs on them. Otherwise our devices are not uder our control, but under control of corporations. Someone who developed a program might not have your best interest in mind. On the other hand spyware, DRM and other unethical practices are usually pointless to add to Libre Software, because anyone can remove them from a program and share this modified version with others. This benefits everyone, not just programmers.
Nobody says that Libre Software can't be commercial. Corporations can make Libre Software and sell it. Just because most Libre Software is released for free, doesn't mean people can't charge money for it.
Perhaps FreeCAD isn't as good as AutoCAD. That's a shame, but there are other areas where Free Software is just as good or better compared to proprietary alternatives. Blender is one example and it is available for free and funded entirely through donations from users and companies.
You are wrong at so many levels.
If you were to pirate something, not only it doesn't work all the time, doesn't scale to large corporations, the large corps control you.
The whole point of this is to gain full control, meaning legally, of what we think should be free.
Neither FOSS. There are excellent programs in open source, but many are in some ways much inferior when compared to the cummercial. First example from head: many printers and other devices have drivers only for window$
i consider pirating software for private use
They are spying using regular software too
Why should we bother by unjust capitalist law? Today I shared with my students pirated books which would cost shitton of money in Poland. This should be free for education. But the law forbids it so fuck the law