2) Running two copies at the same time doesn’t mean “distribute it to yourself”, just “using it”.

3) People are free not to accept the service license agreement, and host their own data.

4) Code for services are useless for the direct users of the service, only useful for those who want to host a copy of it.

1) Windows license forbids running it on more than 2 CPUs. The server editions has that bar at 128 I believe.

Ah yes, good point. Which reminds me, the limit of 10 incoming ’server’ connections for the non-server Windows editions is also completely arbitrary, and a blatant attempt a market segmentation, also contrary to Freedom 0.

2) Running two copies at the same time doesn’t mean “distribute it to yourself”, just “using it”.

You’re not convincing me, although I can see that the interpretation could go either way.

3) People are free not to accept the service license agreement, and host their own data.

What’s this in relation to? Licensing of web services?

It seems what you’re saying is “if you don’t like it, don’t use it” and no one is arguing with that.

The point is that people need to be aware of the freedoms they are giving up when they make the choice to use software of a given license. Most web software is non-Free, and people apparently don’t care the freedoms that they give up when using it, and for each individual case that’s fine. But as a community, as a society, I would say it’s not fine. Or at least needs some further discussion.

4) Code for services are useless for the direct users of the service, only useful for those who want to host a copy of it.

Not sure I agree with this either – the code has lots of uses. For example, I can inspect the code to work out how to get my data out of a hosted service. Or I could inspect it for security flaws, to ensure that my hosted data is safe. Or many other uses.

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/16/juggling-oranges

I also mentioned “Free Data” in passing here: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/08/01/lolwreck

Sorry for the LOLwreck pic, I’ll quote the relevant paragraph here: “Also, Eben Moglen punctured the Web 2.0 hype bubble and said what I’ve been trying to say for years now. Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel. I’m not saying data export isn’t important, it’s just aiming kinda low. You mean when I give you data, you’ll… give it back to me? People who think this is the pinnacle of freedom aren’t really worth listening to. Please, we need a Free Data movement. (Yeah I know, Tim [O'Reilly] predicted it already. I was the one who told him, at FOO Camp the month before.)”

Anyway, the bottom line is that both Free Software and Free Data are important for different reasons. They usually go hand in hand, though this is due to correlation, not causation. For a long time, GIMP was the poster child of a Free Software program with undocumented data formats. (Undocumented outside of the code itself, of course.) And MS Office formats were pretty well documented despite the absence of Freedom in the software itself, due to a massive worldwide effort to reverse-engineer them. But those are corner cases.