ぐぬ管 (GNU social JP管理人)Sorry for late. Surely, I understand RMS supporting privacy.
If software is free (4 rules), we can do that (0=run, 1=study, 2=redistribute, 3=modify).
>For example, if a software has millions of lines of code, it is effectively unmodifiable. So how is it different than a closed source one?Closed source code has no 1=study free. You and community/company can modify it even big code. This is important difference for free. I modify chromium code (about 5 million of lines in total) by my work.
I think privacy is software feature same as performance, file size, support platform.
What people judge to be harmful and what is harmless about software functions depends on the law, individual subjectivity, and the times.
You might think of Firefox or systemd as spyware, but others might not think of spyware.
Web browsers are software whose main purpose is communication. When software communicates without permission, some people call it spyware, but for software, it only means communication. Whether or not you consider it spyware (harmful) is up to you.
The user is not restricted in any way by spyware for someone else.
In the first place, free software is defined as satisfying 4 rules, so if you add privacy protection to this, it's a different thing.
You should use another name such as Ethical Source | The Ethical Source Working Group Blog.
So firefox/systemd are free software by definition.
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