Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement
&gt;Some important packages are now distributed only through their non-freedom-respecting package system<p>Wait, why is Ubuntu&#x27;s <i>package manager</i> &quot;not freedom respecting&quot; but dpkg is? I thought snap was licensed under GPLv3.<p>&gt;It should be illegal to sell a computer that doesn&#x27;t let users install software of their own from source code.<p>Agreed, but this is such a low bar that even iOS meets it. Apple has never attempted to restrict users&#x27; ability to compile and run source code. In fact, for almost a decade now the automatic signing in Xcode will sign and provision your compiled code, even if you didn&#x27;t have a verified and paid-up developer account. The App Store rules about not executing code outside the app bundle also have exceptions specifically for apps that let users load apps from source. The whole debate people are having about sideloading is specifically about distributing <i>binaries</i>; not source - Apple&#x27;s security model is that you don&#x27;t get to do that unless they can review your app.<p>While I would <i>much rather</i> have an iPad that Apple just <i>lets me</i> unlock and accept the risk of doing so, and I do not oppose sideloading... I must point out that much of the people asking for sideloading are proprietary software vendors and not users. Being as vehemently opposed to proprietary software as RMS is means that he&#x27;s actually on Apple&#x27;s side of that debate, even though Apple is &quot;the enemy&quot; so to speak.<p>The comments about Macs being more locked down I don&#x27;t entirely understand. Apple&#x27;s bent over backwards to keep a working owner override on Macs, both for the operating system as a whole and individual apps. If you want to run an untrusted binary[0], you right click the app bundle, accept the risk, and continue on with your day. If you want to run a third-party OS, there&#x27;s a process to do that. Apple even engineered cryptographic verification of the owner account so that, instead of just &quot;turning off Secure Boot&quot; like on PC, you actually sign the new kernel you want to run with your owner key and still have some level of verification that the kernel hasn&#x27;t been changed behind your back. This is basically &quot;everything the FSF wanted for Secure Boot a decade ago&quot;, with the only downside being that it requires a locked-down boot chain in order to provide security guarantees.<p>&gt;Well, first of all, I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s anything bad about playing a game. Unless the game is non-free — then it&#x27;s bad for you, if you play it.<p>Ehhhheheh...<p>Modern game design has basically turned a lot of games into microtransaction pumps. This is a more complicated issue than just &quot;proprietary bad&quot;, because proprietary games used to be far less harmful than they are now. You used to just be able to buy a game and enjoy it, despite it being chained to standard no-touchy copyright terms. Yes, you were running non-free software, but the usual proprietary harms did not apply as they did for other kinds of software. Now they do: games are constantly making excessive time or money demands before you can actually have fun with it and their developers are employing all sorts of psychological tricks to get people to overspend in them.<p>[0] I do want to point out that codesigning and notarization on macOS was a lot easier to set up than a lot of people have made it out to be.