Re: [Audio-video] http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/ghm2013/Samuel_Thibault_Jean-Philippe_Mengual-Freedom_0_for_everybody_really_.text

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

Le 31/07/2014 à 22h37, Richard Stallman a écrit :
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     You misunderstood the problem: the problem isn t that France did use a
>     free software/non accessible software, the problem is that this free
>     software *weren t accessible*, while it should have been. We can t ask
>     people to use proprietary software because it s accessible, as we can t
>     ask to use non-accessible software because it s free.
>
> We would support your campaign to convince free software
> developers to design initially for accessibility;
> but when you claim that lack of inaccessibility is just
> as bad as oppressing every user, we have to oppose you.
> A free program that lacks accessibility is much better
> than any proprietary program.

I didn’t say that. I did say that both conditions *should* *anyway* be
respected. Then I don’t think we can say one is better than the other,
since importance isn’t a linear thing. For example, it’s like if I said:
in GNU/Linux, what is better? Linux or GNU Libc? It is a nonsense,
because one without the other can’t work, so you can’t compare these
linearly because they’re *completely different things*.

> Only a fraction of people need accessibility, but everyone needs
> freedom.  It is better to free most people than free no one.

The fact is that not only accessibility is integrated in a much larger
way of making better software interfaces that could benefit absolutely
everybody, but also accessibility can regard anybody one day. You could
break a bone and need accessibility for some time, you could have an
accident and need accessibility, or you could just become too old and
need it, etc. We never know, that is a much more global problem. Beyond
a technical issue, it is an human problem.

I don’t say “we should have kept Office”, I say “oh, LibreOffice isn’t
accessible, that shouldn’t be that way”. Beyond that we can’t notice
that there’s already plenty of free software that could do the job in an
accessible manner (I mean, just for example, simply emacs could do it).

> We reject the idea that we should refuse to free anyone
> until the day that we can free everyone.

We didn’t say that, quite the opposite: we should free the most of
people we can when it is possible. So that mean more and more people
along time.

> We will free those we can free with whatever we have got.
> Our chances of helping the disabled some day are bigger
> if we strengthen our movement as much as we can.

Of course, a stronger free software movement would give better chances
for accessibility, just as a better accessibility would strengthen the
free software movement. We need to improve on all side in same time, to
parallelize. That is our goal.

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature