You have the requisite technical knowledge to do those things. Not everyone does. If someone non-technical's stuff breaks, you can't distribute the changes you've already made yourself. It limits the value of the work you're putting in and it limits the repairability of an item based on the owner's skills.
It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car. Most people would have some pretty junky beat-up cars or they'd be buying new ones every year.
> It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car.
It's a great analogy: just look at the Mac repair shops being sued by Apple, or the idiotic things printer manufacturers and even coffee pod makers do to prevent people from "pirating" their machines.
Free software, and arguably free markets, mean free secondary markets for used goods. That includes all the repair shops and a cottage industry of craftsmen who provide those goods and services.
Free secondary markets is a great analogy for open source. What comes to mind is forks and plugins of open source projects, I guess they are a secondary market for the main project.
Car shops are a good example, there is no prevention of repairing other people cars, or their equipment, based on the knowledge from complete schematics / source code. The thing you can't do is make your own version of the thing and sell it.
When my parents wireless router breaks, if I had the source code to the system installed on it I could both better understand the documentation to explain it to them, and I could perhaps patch a security problem that caused the breakdown.
There should be nothing preventing me from re-distributing the fixes, just as Sams FotoFacts used to distribute radio repair manuals, or the Chilton car maintenance manuals.
I still can't fix poor Bluetooth support in my new Toyota.
Also it's quite possible that the mechanics of a car are simpler than most software, for starters software often runs on an extremely complex operating system.
I think the difference is that instead of shipping a modified copy of the software, you ship a "patch" which fixes the software. That was very common years ago, whole markets existed for providing improved functionality of some portion of various OS's (macos, dos, s390, etc) via hooking and patching.
Of course its seems that that freedom is now restricted as well, but that is a fairly recent development that can be laid at the feet of the DRM advocates.
You have the requisite technical knowledge to do those things. Not everyone does. If someone non-technical's stuff breaks, you can't distribute the changes you've already made yourself. It limits the value of the work you're putting in and it limits the repairability of an item based on the owner's skills.
It's a bad analogy but it's as though car repair shops were illegal and you could only repair your own car. Most people would have some pretty junky beat-up cars or they'd be buying new ones every year.