If I buy a car, then, yes, "my hardware my choice". Software should be no different.
I personally think end user license agreements are immoral. If you want to attach conditions to use, you should have to spend the time to work out a proper contract, executed by both parties, with consideration provided on both sides.
But I still think that's weird. To use your "commercial use" example, if I buy a lawnmower, the company that sells it to me should not be able to dictate that I can only use it for personal use, on my own lawn. If I want to use it to mow my neighbors' lawns and charge them for it, they can't stop me.
Copyright licenses like the GPL are interesting. I've released software under the GPL in the past (though these days I usually choose more permissive licenses like Apache or MIT). The GPL itself is essentially a hack that rides on our current awful copyright law in order to creatively subvert it. If our copyright laws were more reasonable and more aimed toward benefiting the public commons, we may not even have a need for the GPL; it's even possible that big parts of it would be unenforceable in a more reasonable copyright regime.
Just a note on this:
> If you agree not to use the software for commercial purposes when you purchase it, you can't morally decide "my bytes my choice" and just to use it for commercial purposes anyway
While this may be true under current law, there's nothing inherent in the universe that makes it this way. We as a society have decided that, legally, some things are out of bounds when it comes to contractual obligations. As an extreme example, you can't contractually sign yourself into slavery. No court (in the US and quite a few other places, at least) would consider that contract valid. The idea that you can sign away your rights to use a piece of software commercially is not some absolute moral good. We could decide as a society that this sort of thing isn't ok, and enshrine it into law.
If I buy a car, then, yes, "my hardware my choice". Software should be no different.
I personally think end user license agreements are immoral. If you want to attach conditions to use, you should have to spend the time to work out a proper contract, executed by both parties, with consideration provided on both sides.
But I still think that's weird. To use your "commercial use" example, if I buy a lawnmower, the company that sells it to me should not be able to dictate that I can only use it for personal use, on my own lawn. If I want to use it to mow my neighbors' lawns and charge them for it, they can't stop me.
Copyright licenses like the GPL are interesting. I've released software under the GPL in the past (though these days I usually choose more permissive licenses like Apache or MIT). The GPL itself is essentially a hack that rides on our current awful copyright law in order to creatively subvert it. If our copyright laws were more reasonable and more aimed toward benefiting the public commons, we may not even have a need for the GPL; it's even possible that big parts of it would be unenforceable in a more reasonable copyright regime.
Just a note on this:
> If you agree not to use the software for commercial purposes when you purchase it, you can't morally decide "my bytes my choice" and just to use it for commercial purposes anyway
While this may be true under current law, there's nothing inherent in the universe that makes it this way. We as a society have decided that, legally, some things are out of bounds when it comes to contractual obligations. As an extreme example, you can't contractually sign yourself into slavery. No court (in the US and quite a few other places, at least) would consider that contract valid. The idea that you can sign away your rights to use a piece of software commercially is not some absolute moral good. We could decide as a society that this sort of thing isn't ok, and enshrine it into law.