> I'm not massively in to "Free Software" or the "four essential freedoms", but I do think people should have the freedom to fix software they bought ("right to repair").
Doesn't the first part of your sentence contradict the second? The only way it would be possible to patch software yourself is if you had the source code.
(I suppose you could reverse engineer the binary, but that's not practical, and besides, you could do that today if you wanted to.)
The four freedoms go far beyond just the ability to fix stuff. It also includes the ability to redistribute copies and modified versions.
I think there are more options than just "open source it all" and "keep it all proprietary". You could, for example, only provide the source code (or parts of the source) under a NDA contract when requested and merge "community fixes" upstream, or something. I don't know what would work well in practice (not many businesses have experimented with it) but I'm fairly confident a model can be though of that works well yet isn't "open source" in the sense that we understand it today.
Doesn't the first part of your sentence contradict the second? The only way it would be possible to patch software yourself is if you had the source code.
(I suppose you could reverse engineer the binary, but that's not practical, and besides, you could do that today if you wanted to.)