Possibilities for commercial software?

[David Schlesinger]

>And that consequence is that the more people who do it  
>the more reliant on non-free software free software becomes, and the  
>more reliant free software is on un-free software the less free the  
>whole system becomes: meaning, when you look at the whole picture,  
>users will have less freedom to use software, and the systems run by  
>that software, in the way they want.

Sorry, this doesn't follow. If I run, e.g. a proprietary navigation application on my Linux-based system, the free software isn't relying on the proprietary in any way. The proprietary software relies, instead, on the free, and that's unproblematical.

In fact, if a situation were to arise in which free software _did_ have a hard dependency on proprietary software in the way you describe, the free software would effectively no longer be buildable at that point without the proprietary, a situation which no one would tolerate: if it happened, it'd get fixed _real_ quick.

People who don't want to add proprietary software to their systems don't (and shouldn't) have to. But to claim that people who choose to add proprietary software are somehow reducing freedom in general has no basis.

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