
Letter to the FSF - Adrock
http://newartisans.com/2011/04/letter-to-the-fsf/
======
batgaijin
Stallman isn't thinking about you or anyone else who reads this forum. He is
thinking about the 4 billion disconnected individuals who haven't even entered
the net.

Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user.
That is not equivalence, and it is sad to continually see developers heed
simply because they know where their paycheck comes from.

There is more to this world than us enlightened ones.

~~~
astrodust
For things that should be free, let them be truly free. Do not wall off
software from adoption because the GPL prohibits certain kinds of use. Don't
discourage people from producing free software by making demands about how and
with whom they share their creations.

There is a certain kind of software that _needs_ to be free, that shouldn't
belong to anyone in particular. This is not all software, and arguably it is
not even the majority of it, but it is an important subset.

Stallman seems to treat free software as if it were something that was a
scarce resource that needs to be protected. This is absurd considering the
limitless number of copies of software that can be made.

The act of sharing software has benefits to the individual who is sharing.
This much has become obvious and will continue to be made clear to others.

If licenses like the GPL acted as a catalyst to promote this discovery then
they have surved their purpose. That is not to insist they must be refined,
become more restrictive, or further hardened against hypothetical aggressors.

~~~
einhverfr
Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.

~~~
saurik
I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might
"grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally
useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the
extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of
my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with,
as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I
license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to
understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and
in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in
others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later,
after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.

~~~
einhverfr
I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I
tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD
licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the
ground, that's changed.

Two major realizations have occurred to me:

1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow
pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or
Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD.

2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro
regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing
back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a
result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary
versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a _lot_ of their code back. They
don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the
project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code
and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things.

The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality
of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The
more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you
give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to
integrate what is left.

~~~
saurik
I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction
in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real
quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By
contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other
contributors..." <\- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL
_requires_... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing
at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because
they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want
to reserve the right to do so in the future.

------
einhverfr
I dunno about the letter. I use the GPL v2 for most of my work and Stallman is
a major reason I am opposed to moving to the GPL v3 (that and the license is
long enough to be difficult to understand, while the GPL v2's difficulties
come from simplicity).

Part of the thing though is that I am not convinced the GPL has the reach that
Stallman likes to pretend it does. At least in the US (and presumably even
fruits-of-labor countries) copyright is not supposed to be a way to monopolize
secondary markets for practical tools. See the concurrance in Lexmark v.
Static Control and also the opinion of the court in Sony v. Connectix. Note
that no court in the US has ever allowed secondary markets for practical tools
to be controlled through copyright of a work in the primary market, and I am
not aware of any country which has held otherwise.

In general, copyright is supposed to protect artistic contributions, and
protect and author from having his/her work distributed without compensation.
How that work is used in a practical way (i.e. other than as a work of art) is
beyond the scope of copyright law at least in the US, and presumably in other
places as well. Indeed, steps required to use a piece of software, even where
it involves literal copying and even distribution of literal copies, have been
held to be fair use under 17 USC 102(b). See Sony v. Connectix, Lexmark v.
Static Control, and Oracle v. Google.

So I think that copyright only gets you so far. The sort of control that
Stallman wants to see the GPL have can only be possible through software
patents and we know how he feels about that topic. The GPL cannot reach cases
where interoperability is sought and where the original work is not
distributed. Anything else is wishful thinking.

So I don't see the GPL as any great menace, but a lot of that is because I
don't think it reaches as far as Stallman likes to think (or at least pretend)
that it does.

IANAL, TINLA, and if you are looking for legal advice here you are a fool for
trying to get it on HN ;-)

------
aaronsw
Shorter johnw: I heart Ayn Rand.

In particular, I'm pretty sure Stallman (like most Americans) is in favor of
taking from the rich and giving to the poor, so trying to persuade him that
free software is a bad idea because it's like that seems pretty clueless.

------
jiggy2011
This is too long and will not change his mind.

