According to Wikipedia, human rights are:
the basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law.
On the other hand, Wiktionary defines Liberty as:
The condition of being free from control or restrictions.
So, it is obvious that a free computing environment is a human right, an undeclared one. Then, it must be illegal for someone to forbid others from:
- using a software,
- reviewing or adapting its source code,
- redistributing the original or the derived work,
- transporting information by using unconstrained means,
- storing information by using unconstrained formats.
It is not enough to have free alternatives: These constraints must not exist; nothing justifies them.
Software products have a key difference from other products: They can be copied almost instantaneously and its cost tends to zero. This is where the real problem begins: Many software vendors have been using typical commercial strategies in order to make a profit from an unprecedented product type.
These vendors must look for other ways of making money, without depriving their clients of their freedom in their computing environment. But they won’t, so we must stand for a free society and let our governments know that this is an undeclared human right.
