[security-discuss] Freedom 0: the utilitarian vs. the deontologist (was: gnuradio..)

[Anonymous]

Dr. Stallman said:

> You have misunderstood freedom 0.  Freedom 0 means the program does
> not impose limits on how you are allowed to use it.  Whether it does
> what you want in any given situation is another question.

You might want to change the language of freedom 0 to match what
you're saying above.  In this post:

  https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/security-discuss/2017-03/msg00000.html

if you scroll down to the paragraph containing the word "stopping",
you'll see what I mean.

> For instance, GCC carries freedom 0, so you are allowed to pass it a
> Lisp program as input.  But it is unlikely to compile the Lisp
> program in a useful way unless you modify it a lot.  Even if the
> Lisp program is free software, it still won't compile in a C
> compiler.  And you have no right to criticize the developers of the
> Lisp program for "violating freedom 0" for failing to make GCC
> compile it.

Consider two scenarios:

  scenario 1) GCC is incapable of Lisp compilation because no one has
              invented the code to do so.

  scenario 2) GCC is inherently capable of Lisp compilation because
              all the working machinery for that is already there for
              whatever reason.  But there is a line of code saying "if
              lisp_code_found then abort".

A utilitarian either detects no difference between the two scenarios,
or they see the difference and disregard.  To the deotologist, the
difference between scenario 1 and 2 stands out like D.Trump at a
reggae festival.

You seem to be strongly utilitarian.  I'm a bit of both.  So when
encountering various manifestations of scenario 2 in software, data,
hardware, network services, or otherwise, I'm a bit disturbed (the
extent of which depends on the rationale).  But I don't consider it
worthwhile to complain, petition, or act against people/orgs as long
as I have freedom 1 to act on the software or artifact.

In the case of GNU Radio Foundation, Inc., freedom 1 is useless for
changing the code that executes on the server of CloudFlare,
Inc. which discriminately blocks some users from reaching the
documentation.

(Note that the DoS attack mentioned just above is the rationale for
 keeping this mini-thread in security-discuss if anyone is wondering)

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