Leo Famulari <l...@famulari.name> writes: >> Morally, at least in the short-to-medium term, I'm not convinced. >> The smell of privilege becomes hard to ignore with the costs and other >> assumptions involved. > > I think I agree with you here, Tobias. > > To me, the right choice is not to suggest that people replace almost > every general-purpose CPU that exists, but rather to help them fix these > bugs while keeping the CPU they've already paid for, and that the > Earth's ecology has already paid for. Even though microcode updates are > not free software.
I really appreciate the viewpoints expressed here, thank you. It's a great reminder that software freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, and that its intent is to do good. It's worth considering what that means in a more global context. > This is a situation where some definition of "user safety" beats "user > control", in my estimation. I've been reading up on the philosophical differences between BSD and GNU licenses, and one of the points that's often made is that BSD is the freer of the two -- allowing users to do as they please -- but GNU expresses the most freedom globally and is therefore more ethical. It is a fun thought experiment to extrapolate and apply the same logic to this situation: what would express the most freedom globally: faithfully applying the GPL, or assisting users with securing their computing environments. Please note that I'm advocating any approach; only having a nice discussion with like-minded folks. -- Katherine
