<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>enriquto</author><text>&amp;gt; Stallman&amp;#x27;s position is pretty extreme.&lt;p&gt;Stallman&amp;#x27;s position is not extreme.  It is consistent and firm, but he tries to reach a reasonable compromise.  In political parlance you could say that he&amp;#x27;s a reformist, not a radical.  Notice that he argues that it is OK to use proprietary softare, for example for developing free software if  it is the only option, or for communicating with other people that cannot use free software at the moment (e.g., zoom meetings).  If that is the case, he urges you to at least tell your colleagues from time to time that there are other options and that you would prefer to use free software:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;philosophy&amp;#x2F;saying-no-even-once.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gnu.org&amp;#x2F;philosophy&amp;#x2F;saying-no-even-once.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;The linked text is very clear and cannot be construed at all as &amp;quot;extreme&amp;quot;.  At the same time, he holds that while we can reach temporary compromises, proprietary software is always unethical and that we should strive towards freer options.</text><parent_chain><item><author>MaxBarraclough</author><text>Stallman&amp;#x27;s position is pretty extreme. One can reasonably object to proprietary code in all sorts of domains, such as medical devices say, but it seems a bit much to say that &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; proprietary code is necessarily unethical.&lt;p&gt;The GameBoy used proprietary software. Was that unethical?</text></item><item><author>enriquto</author><text>&amp;gt; I was very surprised by that sentence, because &amp;quot;immoral commercial software&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Being commercial is independent to being proprietary; there is a lot of non-commercial proprietary software and there is also some commercial free software.  Regarding the immorality, it is definitely common to justify the necessity of free software on the grounds that proprietary software is immoral towards the users: they cannot know, verify, or control what the program does to them.  In the writings of Richard Stallman you certainly find the notion that free software is a necessity precisely because proprietary software is unethical.</text></item><item><author>toyg</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was very surprised by that sentence, because &amp;quot;immoral commercial software&amp;quot; is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the &lt;i&gt;lack&lt;/i&gt; of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don&amp;#x27;t build it up into a strawman.&lt;p&gt;I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>&amp;gt; while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license.&lt;p&gt;I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.&lt;p&gt;Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data.&lt;p&gt;Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Free Software in Jeopardy</title><url>https://linuxreviews.org/Qt_Could_Go_Proprietary,_KDE_Relationship_And_Qt-Based_Free_Software_In_Jeopardy</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>fsflover</author><text>Yes, it was. The developers of any proprietary software have unjust power over its users, i.e. they could implement any anti-features they wanted and the users cannot not do anything about it. In this sense, the users do not own the device if it runs proprietary software.</text><parent_chain><item><author>MaxBarraclough</author><text>Stallman&amp;#x27;s position is pretty extreme. One can reasonably object to proprietary code in all sorts of domains, such as medical devices say, but it seems a bit much to say that &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; proprietary code is necessarily unethical.&lt;p&gt;The GameBoy used proprietary software. Was that unethical?</text></item><item><author>enriquto</author><text>&amp;gt; I was very surprised by that sentence, because &amp;quot;immoral commercial software&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Being commercial is independent to being proprietary; there is a lot of non-commercial proprietary software and there is also some commercial free software.  Regarding the immorality, it is definitely common to justify the necessity of free software on the grounds that proprietary software is immoral towards the users: they cannot know, verify, or control what the program does to them.  In the writings of Richard Stallman you certainly find the notion that free software is a necessity precisely because proprietary software is unethical.</text></item><item><author>toyg</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I was very surprised by that sentence, because &amp;quot;immoral commercial software&amp;quot; is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the &lt;i&gt;lack&lt;/i&gt; of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don&amp;#x27;t build it up into a strawman.&lt;p&gt;I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.</text></item><item><author>RcouF1uZ4gsC</author><text>&amp;gt; while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license.&lt;p&gt;I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.&lt;p&gt;Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data.&lt;p&gt;Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Qt Could Go Proprietary, KDE Relationship and Qt-Based Free Software in Jeopardy</title><url>https://linuxreviews.org/Qt_Could_Go_Proprietary,_KDE_Relationship_And_Qt-Based_Free_Software_In_Jeopardy</url></story>