Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power
<p><pre><code>   &gt; While the most egregious violations of user freedom come from companies publishing proprietary software
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I would say the actual most egregious violations of user freedom and privacy come from companies that are powered by open source infrastructure and that actually are big backers of open source.<p>&quot;Software freedom&quot; is the big enabler and partial driver of centralized computing. It is the big enabler in that if you were paying a per CPU license for Windows NT Server, you would go out of your way to make sure that as much as possible was being done on the users computer. In addition, the most widely used copyleft license, the GPL, actually penalizes you if you make a client program that uses GPL libraries(by requiring you be release the source code for your program if the user asks for it), but happily allows you to instead run the program in a datacenter and never have to share the code with the user.  Thus you are incentivized to put as much of your program in the datacenter as possible and not on the user&#x27;s computer. The thing is, if software is on the user&#x27;s computer, whatever the license, they actually have far more de facto control. They can control what is getting shared. They can reverse engineer the files to allow perfect export and backups. They can own their data. They can also verify what the software is doing with the data (even if it might take a lot of efforts). Once computation happens in a data center, the user is at the complete mercy of the corporation. The corporation can make it impossible to get a true copy of their data, requiring use of legal means instead of technical means. The corporation can store and share and process the data in ways the user has no control or even awareness about.<p>Sometimes I wonder if we would have been better off from a society point of view and user freedom and privacy, if the old Microsoft vision of the PC as the hub of a users digital life, and users paying money for software they find useful, instead of what we have now where the cloud is the hub of a users digital life (even stuff that could work on a local network, will by default try to contact the cloud), and users are provided useful software in exchange for their engagement, privacy, and attention.