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Comment by anonymars

6 months ago

> Part of the fun of free software is that it might do terrible things

Yeah you lost me here

Freedom is the freedom to say rm -rf /* and accept the consequences.

If you want to give someone else control over what you can and can't do with your machine, iOS is over there -->

  • False dichotomy.

    Why should I expect that merely installing a dictionary will silently opt me in to sending everything in my clipboard to some third party?

    You don't need some strawman tyrant to want it to require a user opt-in if that's what you really want to do

    • You can expect that any software might do anything, either because of a bug or because it's intentional, and you won't know until you see it happen. It's why the major FOSS licenses say things like THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

      You can want software to be well behaved, and in most cases it is. But if you want some level of assurance that the software is behaved as you'd like it, some requirement in law that the software is not allowed to exist unless it meets your requirements, or the platform it runs on is neutered so it literally can't do the thing you don't want it to do -- that's where the tyrant comes in.

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