Joseph Graham has written a very short blog post about software freedom and the direction we might take to achieve it.
The free software movement, founded in the 80s by Richard Stallman and supported by the Free Software Foundations 1, 2, 3, 4, preaches that we need software that gives us access to the code and the copyright permissions to study, modify and redistribute. While I feel this is entirely true, I think it's not the best way to explain Free Software to people.
I think the problem we have is better explained more like this:
"Computer technology is complicated and new. Education about computers is extremely poor among all age groups. Technology companies have taken advantage of this lack of education to brainwash people into accepting absurd abuses of their rights."
Source : The Free Software movement is Barking up the wrong tree
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 27 2017, @03:24AM
"Computer programs without the code is like a car where you aren't allowed to lift the hood for any reason, and could be sued if you tried to tinker with anything. Even if the problem was that your car was busted and you needed to fix it."
An interesting point is that one population that understands this problem perfectly well are farmers, because John Deere has been using code copyrights to make it illegal for farmers to repair their own tractors.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.