> It literally goes back to Plato and arguments about how you can be free if you're not free to make other people slaves.

He may have been the first (recorded) philosopher to make that point. But he's not exactly the last to think about this, and the enlightenment was largely about finding a good answer to it.

Basically (hyper-abridged version), the answer is self-ownership, and self-ownership precludes selling yourself into slavery, because once you've sold yourself, you don't own yourself and therefore cannot accept consideration for the sale, which then is invalid (a sale without consideration isn't a sale, it's a give (or take!) away). It does not preclude contracting a limited commitment (eg. to do work for renumeration), nor does it preclude accepting conditions in such a contract.

In short: A definition of Freedom is wrong (or at least sub-optimal, bigoted, biased) if it can not pertain to all humans at the same time without creating a paradox.

At the risk of being down-voted (but less so due to this very sentence), the quote below can be true for everyone and I believe it to be very important Interpreting it I would say that a creator is free to choose a license, any attempt to try and force the use of another license upon a creator than that of his choosing will lead to paradoxes in freedom. I.e., such a definition can not be applied to all humans (for example: I can force conditions upon you by which you should share your work, you can do so to me and you can they force me to not share my work or at least under arbitrary conditions):

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

-John Galt (Ayn Rand; Atlas Shrugged, which is a nice book if you like the philosophy of freedom)

With regards to forcing "a mind" I love this piece of literature: [0]

[0] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/physical_force.html

An excerpt:

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no “right” to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.

Exactly, by forcing a license (you made up) onto my creation, you are basically taking my property and enslaving me.

You are saying to me: "Nice work you got there, now, I am going to use it under my conditions. Oh you don't want me to share the software? Too bad, not sharing is evil! I'm sharing it anyway."

Yes, you are free to say this but then I can choose not to share my software with you. I will only give you my software if you agree to MY conditions. I made the software hoping to share it with people on my terms, so that I can earn a living from it.

Am I evil for expecting you to honor the terms we agreed upon when we made the exchange of your money for my software product? Am I evil for setting terms that I like for the trade that we are making?

Imo any party can have any terms in a trade, if you agree to mine and I agree to yours we have a deal, otherwise: go find another solution to your problem.

I would argue that you are evil if you do not allow the user to use for any propose, distribute, and modify the software.

The best metaphor I have ever seen to understand why proprietary software is evil.

But the metaphor does not actually succeed at doing the heavy lifting required to demonstrate that the licence for photoshop falls into the category of "contracts which are unjust and ought be prohibited".

The freedom to make other people slaves creates a paradox because such freedom can not be applied to all humans at the same time. We can not logically be each others slaves, now can we? I find this metaphor (or thought experiment... is this actually a metaphor?) to be very poor personally.

Your argument: Not giving away what you wrote for free under the terms dictated by Richard Stallman is literally slavery.

The argument is that freedom is often restricted if the end results is harmful.

Proprietary software depend on copyright to prevent owners, which today often mean property owners of physical objects with DRM in them. Property owner is deprived of all rights that personal property is normally given to their owners. That power is instead taken by those that produced the object.

If sale of property actually follow traditional first sale principles and gave the new owner rights which used to be naturally aspect of private property, then practically all freedoms under Richard Stallman definition is given. You don't have to give away the apple (in the classical example), but once sold you can't have copyright or patents preventing the new owner from using the apple to grew a orchard.

Tell that to Monsanto.

Yes, because you becomes dependent of the good will of the seller if you encounter bugs, limitations, incompatible hardware or if the OS updates in incompatible ways.

Isn't that comparable to going to a restaurant where they don't give away their recipes? If you encounter a problem with one of their meals you are dependent on their good will to change it for you. Isnt it that you are just using a service someone provides? Or are you enslaving yourself the moment you walk in a restaurant where they keep their recipes secret?

If you use FOSS only, you still remain dependent on the maintainers of your stack since realistically speaking you don't have the time to understand and hack every piece of software you rely on.

Just because you yourself cannot be competent in everything, does not mean that being dependent on a monopoly is the same as having to buy certain things from people who are more competent at producing or maintaining them than you are.

Noone guarantees you that a year from now you will be able to find anyone who is willing to fix your plumbing. That does not mean you might as well have proprietary Microplumb products installed in your house that noone can repair or extend without permission from Microplumb Inc.

That's just the consequence of professional specialization. But the expected consequence with FOSS is that, if you can't or don't want to do it yourself, you can always pay a third-party specialist to go in and fix your copy of the software. In fact, it may be further expected that in this case, you'd have multiple competing specialists to choose from - just like it is in e.g. appliance / home / car repair, where you can go to whichever repair person you like and they'll fix stuff for you.

You can observe that most software is leased, not sold, thus restrictions apply. And indeed - the same holds in physical world; if you're the house/appliance/car, you might not be able to use it the way you like, or get whoever you like to repair it. But that's precisely the problem! Renting instead of owning has serious drawbacks, and Stallman is fighting against those, trying keep us at something more akin to personal ownership model.

"I don't have time to learn how to fix it myself! Fix it now, asshole!"

If you have any open-source project, you've probably received a lot of e-mails like that.

There is nothing in the GPL that prohibits charging money for your software. You just have to provide the source code and allow users to make modifications & redistribute.

GPL mandates that anyone that gets hands on your software can give it away for free, effectively making it impossible to sell it

The existence of bittorrent means that anyone that gets their hands on your software can give it away for free, effectively making it impossible to sell it.