Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > To me, I find free software more of a philosophical, political and > social choice than technical.
> I use proprietary devices with proprietary software (e.g., macOS or iOS) > and by almost any metric any random person could think of, they are > "better". I think macOS is vastly inferior to Debian in many respects, so I would not concede that, but that's beside the point. (iOS, sure, the free software situation for mobile phones isn't great.) > Thus, to me the reason to prefer (strongly) copyleft software is not > about getting "better" software. > I think that if we don't have, and promote, strongly copyleft software, > we risk end up being subjugated by those who want to control my software > usage. Through tivoization or some more modern method. Right, I understand all this. So does everyone else. I would be surprised if there is anyone reading debian-devel who has not heard these arguments more times than they can count. You are not wrong to feel this way. I am not disagreeing with this argument. I am pointing out that regardless of whether *you* care about having better software, you are trying to convince *other people* to use copyleft software, and many of those people *do* care about having better software. You can think that they shouldn't care and preach yet another round of the copyleft sermon, but when you do that to an audience who has heard that sermon literally thousands of times, you can't expect this to accomplish very much. Originally, one of the big appeals of GNU software is that it was *good software*, which was also copyleft. In fact, one of the original arguments for copyleft is that it would create a virtuous circle of development by forcing new work to also be free software. That was a quality argument. A lot of people started using that software because it was high quality and then got curious about how that was done and became believers in the underlying philosophical structure as well. GNU coreutils continues following this model to this day, and I think quite successfully. There is no substitute for writing good software. Telling people to use worse software because it's copyleft will convince some people up to a certain point, but if the copyleft software is clearly inferior, well, the number of people who *only* care about using specifically copyleft software is, at least in my opinion, not that large. You can keep trying to convince those people they're wrong to have that attitude, I guess, but I don't think it's going to work. Certainly not by just repeating the same arguments they've heard many times before. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
