(Dianara repeatedly ate my words as I was typing them here. Some kind

of screen refresh that loses the comment form. I am reduced to typing words

into vim and pasting. This is relevant to a point below.)

I wonder if, had GNU targeted the Lisp Machine or some other more advanced

system, would the Four Freedoms have come out the same?

If nothing were compiled (scripting all the way down to and including the

kernel), then access to the source code would probably not need to have been

mentioned in freedom 1. It would be at most a footnote.

Lisp Machines apparently made it easy to access the source code behind any

part of the UI, and to dive down to lower-levels of code, and change

running code to see what happens. So perhaps freedom 1 would have tilted

more in that direction.

As I mentioned, Dianara has a bug that has made it difficult for me to post

this. I can't easily inspect Dianara as it's running and quickly instrument

it to verify my hypothesis about the cause of the bug. It would probably

take me hours to compile a debug build of Dianara and get to the bottom of

the bug.

At the same time I have a web browser with completely non-free javascript

on a website, and yet it's really easy there to inspect what code gets run

when I click on a button, or to find code that may reload the web page

while I'm typing in a form on it.