The boiling frog of digital freedom
The other day I read an HN comment that thought that when you buy consumer PC hardware, it comes with a ToS that limits your property rights as the owner. It's the kind of uncanny experience I run into more and more often lately: talking with people so immersed in our new normal of cyberpunk dystopia, they seem not to remember how things were in the before-times. So accustomed to exploitative corporate gaslighting, we're forgetting the basics of civilization, like, what are ownership rights?In the before-times, when you bought something, the seller relinquished all claims to it, as an established legal principle (and a social norm and a moral obvious-ity). You can do whatever the fuck you want to your own PC, in your own house! Who would step into your home and tell you "no"?Stallman was right: if you erode the norm that you control your own software, you lose the hardware, too. Free software is sort of a consumer right that enshrines what ownership of computing hardware means.