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Thought experiment: imagine a language model where you can describe exactly how you want software to behave, and it produces a binary that does that. You don't get the source code, but it works 100% of the time. As long as you can install this binary on whatever device you have, does this achieve the goals of free software?

@mjg59 it should be/isnt obvious that the more you obfuscate the process of compilation the farther you get from a compiler that gives you freedom 1- regardless of the input giving you 4freedoms & the output being a result of that input.

btw i wrote a toy transpiler that turned stallmans verbatim-copying-only essays into transformative, executable scripts and he didnt get the humour or the point. he thought i was trying to prove something- i was just trying to get him to look at it differently.

@trdebunked I completely agree there, you're pushing a free idea into an opaque blob in order to receive free code. But free software as defined in the 80s was fine with opaque compilers, and I don't think anything ever happened to expressly redefine that

trdebunked

@mjg59 one of the things that really pisses me off about the movement in general- and i bet you share my pain on this- is that to create gnu it was necessary to temporarily enlist non-free components to bootstrap something more fundamentally free... and while of course this is not denied and even granted an explicit exception- when you do it, it becomes subjected to all sorts of double standards and bad takes from the orthodoxy.

for example: free hw deserves the same graces to become viable.

@trdebunked That is a take I hadn't really considered, thank you!