The current mobile ecosystem is a vindication of everything RMS warned would happen in a world where free software was a minority, and proof that copyleft is absolutely not “less important” than in the 90s.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that it became harder to define, either. The natural definition just got more inconvenient. And so people stopped using it, free software shrank to nothing, and the vast majority of computer users now have devices that they cannot program, cannot program on, and are only dimly aware that they could, in theory, program.
RMS was right. We didn’t protect the right of users—particularly children and students—to modify the software they use, and this had the result of steadily reducing the ability of users to control their devices and their ability to become programmers. Students in programming classes now write code on their phones, in word processors. Not universally, but regularly. That was the nightmare scenario, and it’s arrived.
The current mobile ecosystem is a vindication of everything RMS warned would happen in a world where free software was a minority, and proof that copyleft is absolutely not “less important” than in the 90s.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that it became harder to define, either. The natural definition just got more inconvenient. And so people stopped using it, free software shrank to nothing, and the vast majority of computer users now have devices that they cannot program, cannot program on, and are only dimly aware that they could, in theory, program.
RMS was right. We didn’t protect the right of users—particularly children and students—to modify the software they use, and this had the result of steadily reducing the ability of users to control their devices and their ability to become programmers. Students in programming classes now write code on their phones, in word processors. Not universally, but regularly. That was the nightmare scenario, and it’s arrived.