A short critique of Stallmanism
essentially brilliant.<p>I&#x27;ve been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code.<p>That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you&#x27;d like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn&#x27;t be able to copy your code directly.<p>My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer&#x2F;owner authorization. The developer also should not be allowed to stop users from sharing modifications amongst themselves, as long as they were paying for the original code, so as to stop him from using it as a weapon agaisnt users who modify it and wish to share their mods.<p>Any other defence of free software is basically an attack on capitalism itself. Regardless of your opinion on capitalism, this is too radical a change for most people.