Hi Carmen,
Carmen Bianca Bakker carmenbianca@fsfe.org writes:
If you start treating rights and freedoms as something that can be negotiated individually, the "powerful" will misuse this to transfer the rights of the "weak" over to them.
I agree, but I see this as an issue with specific implementations. It might be difficult in reality to allow people to waive certain freedoms because you cannot really tell if they were coerced in some form, but when talking about the abstract idea of giving up rights, I think the individual should be allowed to do that.
I'm a staunch individualist, but the individual right to opt out of freedom is not one that I can comprehend or support.
I also cannot comprehend it and I am not sure I can support it in cases where the decision cannot be reversed, but a decision for non-free software can be reversed at any point, so I think anyone is free to decide for non-free software even if I would recomment against it. And just to make this clear: I think writing non-free software is a different question and perhaps should not happen, but I have not completly figured that out for myself yet. :-)
Happy hacking! Florian