They actually do.

The whole system used to be paper based until few years ago. My guess is they'll be going back to the paper version for a few days/weeks.

But for obvious reasons, it's more practical to repair the digital version and resume operations ASAP.

Easy fix: if there is no truthful and complete nutritional information on display, youree not allowed to sell it.

There. No violation of free speech anymore.

They couldn't.

They had distributed binaries, they had to open the source. That made it possible for people (like me) to have free software on their routers. The starting point was useful one (i.e. a version of the manufacturer's ownfully functioning stack), as opposed to zero.

What Linksys could've done is move to BSD afterwards. But the cat was already out of the bag and couldn't be unbagged, the hardware was already out there and a free OS had hit the public,.even had they chosen to reimplement yet a different version based on BSD.

For later products though, that might've been a possibly (an expensive one, since they'd have had to start from scratch).

Yes it does.

But ut doesn't argue as if the software itself had "freedom", it always talks about the user's freedom to use the software.

Beaodes, an inanimate object cannot have freedom (as in "speech", not "beer") because it doesn't have intention, and freedom is tightly coupled to intrinsic intention.

You're thinking wrong.

You don't have to speculate, the GPL says what it wants right there in the preamble (emphasis mine);

Category error.

We're talking here specifically about moving within the regulation, not breaking it. Specifically about which regulation ("license") ia more suitable to preserve specific aspects of freedom.

The GPL aims to protect freedom for the user.

Frankly anyone who accepts this sentence as valid is a simplistic idiot, regardless of whether they agree with it or not.

The problem is the framing.

There's no such thing as a stand-alone "free".

There's alwaya a free to do something, or free from something, or free with regards to something.

Specifically with software, it's the freedom of the user to use it (for starers), then to study and modify it, and for it all to be meaningful, to share their work with others because modifying a realistically-sized software package is impractical.

Those are specific freedoms.

Whatever BSD gives, it's less of that than the GPL. It might give a different freedom.

Doesn't this run counter to the very concept of "freedom"?

If you apply this to a person, can toh say "I acknowledge you're free, but I define what freedom means"?

No, I'm not confuwing anything. I'm simply uaing the differentiate concepts as expressed, not pulling word games out of my hat.

And that the GPL "denies access" isn't true. It simply was defined at a time where such applications were highly irrelevant to mostly nonexistent, so it doesn't cover such cases.

As that became a thing, for that purpose you can look at the AGPL, which does what you'd expect.

The GPL isn't built around a general concept of "freedom", it's built around very specific freedoms for the user , spelled out loud, and associated with the user's continued ability to use the software.

"Free" doesn't stand in a vacuum. It's a term that aplies to something.

Changing the balloon is freedom of the artist. Using the baloon is freedom of the kid.

If the kid changes the baloon, they become an artist.

The GPL is expressly only interested in preserving freedom of children, not of artists. And only specific freedoms associated with continued ability to use the baloon, not all freedoms.

But those freedoms the GPL protects better than BSD, because they're elevated to absolute state - even before the freedom of the developer to choose their own license.

Like it or not, but that's the GPL. No point in arguing about "more" because GPL never aimed at that.

Let me explain then.

One man's freedom is another man's restriction.

The game GPL is playing isn't about "more" freedom, it's about specific freedom for the user related to continued ability to use the software.

BSD doesn't expand, it actually restricts that freedom, by giving a different kind of freedom to the developer over the user.

This isn't about freedom of choice, it's about the user's freedom. Actually, about *specific* freedoms for the user, associated with the continued ability to use the software.

There's no freedom that BSD preserves here except the freedom of the deceloper to restrict the user.

There's "allowed" as in "legally", and as in "morally".

The GPL stance is that non-free software is immoral because it rndd up giving the developer power over the user that they shouldn't have.