Richard Stallman – The state of the Free Software movement

Try to imagine something that you find unethical but some others do not: burqas, abortion, war, public schools, private schools, eating meat, rolling coal or whatever it may be.

If you start from the position that such a thing is unethical, you can't enter an argument with someone who asks you "how should I do X to make you happy?", because you simply won't be happy if this gets done at all.

None of the issues you brought up are necessaries in the same way right to repair can be. Right to repair can save people thousands of dollars while the examples you provided are more of nice to have sorts of things.

Don't get me wrong. I am very much in favor of free software and I think if people understood it they would like it as well. I just don't think they would really care about it anywhere near the same level as right to repair.

>The game Guacamelee crashes at 30 minutes in to the game for me and quite a lot of other people, but I can't fix it or download an "unofficial patch" (how many games have reverse-engineered unofficial patches btw?).

A lot of games have mods. These games are proprietary and the mods often are as well. Look at a game like Skyrim. There is literally a mod called the Unofficial Patch. It fixes a lot of the issues with the game. I think most people care about mod capabilities not an actual open source game. If all games had mods people would be content.

>I happened to have bought Hyperlight Drifer on GOG.com today; it seems okay, but the controls are horrible to the point of being almost unplayable. Pretty sure someone would have fixed it if they could.

How many people play games that don't have remappable controls? That seems like such a niche issue that it wouldn't impact the average person I was referring to.

>Back in the day KPN (Dutch AT&T) gave everyone a wireless dongle with their internet, but the driver was bugged and after a certain Windows update it would cause BSODs, and I had to sell a lot of new wireless dongles because of that.

I don't think this is really a big issue anymore. More and more people don't even have computers and when they do, they have wifi card built in. Again not appealing to the average person (in the present day).

>How many people and organisations would have preferred running Windows XP/7 instead of more or less forcibly updating to 8/10 because Microsoft no longer maintained it?

While this is probably the best one you brought up, I don't think you would have enough people maintain older versions of something as complex as an OS and this would create a massively insecure situation for users of it. I think this would do a lot to harm the free software movement.

>How many people wished they could get a version of Windows 10 that doesn't forcibly reboot on updates?

I think Microsoft already fixed this? There are also third party software that can fix this without modification to the OS.

Regardless, let's say that was not the case. If it was something desirable I have no doubt that it would have been trivial for Microsoft to implement. This means Microsoft would be choosing not to implement it. Windows being free software would do nothing to get this change implemented as Microsoft would not accept the pull request.

People would have to fork Windows to add this in. Given Window's habit of reverting settings the fork couldn't just change a setting and provide the ISO. This means they would have to continually provide updates. I have no reason to think Microsoft would collaborate with Windows fork maintainers so we would have slower updates assuming the forks actually update regularly.

When the forks inventively take too long to patch there would be security issues resulting in the negative press from security issues.

Linux and associated software are made by open source people for open source people. If Microsoft turned Windows into free software I just don't think they would make it convenient for people forking it since they would still want people to pay for Windows.

I understand these were just random ideas you thought of, but only one seemed like something the average person would actually care about and it could very likely turn into negative press for free software.

I think the fact you had to through out so many different items and still not find things that could appeal to the majority of users is the problem. When it comes to right to repair it is simple. Phones and cars. Large numbers of people have one or both of them and would like to be able to repair them instead of getting a new one.

I fully agree the FSF should get better at communication, but I think the issue is not their failure at communicating well but that the issue just doesn't really impact as many people.

Claiming that knowing how the code works lets you break the code is basically advocating for security by obscurity which I'm fairly sure we're all aware it's not the holy grail of a secure system. If you will allow me a bit of a hyperbole, it'd be like saying that since I have access to the entire code of my SSH client, that gives me the capability of modifying it so it lets me connect to every server (even those that I do not own) without a password. That's simply not how it works.