Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society?

Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by hasenj on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:26AM (#13868242)

IMO this is a side product of the "software must be free" mentality.

Frankly, software should not be free. When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by newbie2017 on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:33AM (#13868323)

>IMO this is a side product of the "software must be free" mentality.

"Software must be free" usually means free and in speech not free as in beer.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by hasenj on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @08:09PM (#13872755)

RMS definition of free still leads to free as in beer because it requires that the user has the freedom to distribute the sides for free (as in beer).

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by newbie2017 on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @10:39AM (#13876391)

But Facebook is not "free as in speech" but is "free as in beer". That's why it is a "Structural Threat."

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by simplehuman on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:46AM (#13868460)

Free as in beer

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by newbie2017 on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @02:24PM (#13870081)

Thanks for the correction.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by lordCarbonFiber on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:55AM (#13868581)

So better pay for the privilege? There's no reason a paid social network service (aside from the fact that no one would ever use it) wouldn't collect the same information. The issue is that Facebook is not free (as in libre) so users don't have personal control of their information.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by timthelion on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @12:01PM (#13868644)

In fact, paid services such as AOL and Oracle have EVEN WORSE track records when it comes to lock in, privacy, and abuse of users.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by wu-ikkyu on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:31AM (#13868307)

>When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.

How is this different from proprietary software? Where you have no idea what's going on under the hood?

Granted, "giving in order to get" is a common and effective social engineering tactic.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by throwaway729 on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @12:29PM (#13868926)

> How is this different from proprietary software?

Most free software is proprietary software! Big chunks of Facebook's code base is proprietary, and the data they collect is extremely proprietary. Ditto for google.

By "the expectation that software should be free", parent meant the expectation that you don't pay money for access to a hosted copy.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by ksk on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @02:36PM (#13870200)

I believe the OP was talking about cost, not source code.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by CaptainZapp on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:32AM (#13868308)

I'd wager that the FSF disagrees with your statement.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by mynameisvlad on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @12:06PM (#13868704)

You don't say.

Of course the Free Software Foundation is going to disagree with that statement.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by jcbrand on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @12:22PM (#13868863)

The "Free" refers to freedom, not price. Facebook is not freedom-respecting software as defined by the FSF.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by inimino on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @02:56AM (#13874305)

Facebook is not software, it is a service.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by bahjoite on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @04:26PM (#13879446)

Service as a Software Substitute, as RMS would put it.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by inimino on Wednesday March 15, 2017 @09:39PM (#13881645)

RMS is fond of making up "cute" names for things. It lets people identify themselves as part of the tribe.

OP is complaining about free services (like Facebook) but said free software (like PHP) so the whole comment is a non-starter. I'm not sure why nobody else pointed that out... Facebook has huge operating expenses.

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Re:Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? by xatan_dank on Tuesday March 14, 2017 @11:53AM (#13868560)

This is absolutely not true. There's so much wrong with that argument and how it applies to Facebook it's hard for me to provide decent criticism, but I'll try anyway.

Facebook is not provided 'for free'. Nothing is. Facebook is provided to users in exchange for their personal and social data. Facebook is also not really 'a thing'- it's much more complicated than that. The worst part of your argument is that this criticism of free software also holds true for proprietary software- there are plenty of nonfree services which do the same thing. More generally, 'free' software as you define and apply it is not a useful categorization of software to make. What about freemium services? Are those free or do you pay for those? Whether or not you pay in currency for a software license is not really meaningful in the discussion of user freedom. I recommend you actually do some reading on the topic of software freedom and Facebook before you go spouting completely unfounded aphorisms online again.

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