On Tue, 2012-06-19 at 09:40 +0100, Andrew Haley wrote:
On 06/18/2012 06:18 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> I hesitate to put words in people's mouths, and correct me if I'm
> wrong, but it reads to me as if Jay and others are arguing from an
> incorrect premise. That premise is to assume that there is a
> God-given right for people who own computing devices to retrofit
> alternative operating systems onto those devices.
>
> I want to put it out there that this is _not true_.
The problem with this claim is that it equivocates on the meaning of
"a right". There are at least two definitions of "a right" in this
sense: moral rights and legal rights. These are not the same. Moral
rights are not in the gift of any Government. While we may not have a
legal right to run whatever software we wish on hardware we own, it's
not at all unreasonable to claim a moral right to do so.
See later discussion. In the sense of 'attempt to do so', this is
certainly supportable, but is a side track to our actual topic here. In
the sense of 'demand that the manufacturer make it easy to do so', no, I
don't believe it is reasonable to claim such a right, moral or legal.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net