
Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software - rfreytag
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
======
bjourne
The point, for me at least, is to increase the total volume of freedom in the
world. Here is a radical thought: Western Civilization hasn't reached "freedom
peak". The freedom level can continue to rise or it can decrease. Peasants in
the Middle Ages probably thought they were free. We think we are free. How
silly do we think those peasants were? How silly will future generations think
_we_ are?

It depends. If everyone just shrugs their shoulders, then we can easily slide
back to the Middle Ages. Freedom is not monotonically rising all the time.
What I, who likes computers much more than people, can do to generate freedom
is write free software. It's not much but it provides value and proves that
valuable stuff can be produced without a profit motive and that salary slavery
isn't necessary to ensure that good software is programmed.

That's why I like the GPL. In a way that is saying "This is highly valuable
software, but you can have it for free, provided..." vs BSD "Do whatever you
want with this shit I just wrote for fun." Free software is great fun and I
contribute to it only because I _like_ writing code, but as a side effect of
that I'm also, well, improving the world one tiny step at a time.

~~~
dwc
So GPL'd software is highly valuable where BSD'd software is just hobbyist
stuff...because of the license?

Less loaded (and more accurate) one-liners might be...

GPL: you may use this code, provided you follow rules representing my views on
software freedom.

BSD: you may use this code however you see fit.

Which approach fits with your personal philosophy depends on you. But
certainly BSD does nothing to lessen the highly valuable software licensed
with it. OpenSSH, sudo, and many others, for instance.

~~~
subb
It weird to me that the free software license is more restrictive than other
licenses. GPL maintain the end user freedom, but not the freedom of the
programmer.

~~~
b0rsuk
That's a play on words.

I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts.
Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive
things. Countries and societies all around the world restrict or forbid them.

Freedom, when out of control, can result in bad outcomes.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland)
Poland disappeared off the map because nobility and clergy had too much
freedom. Most infamous was /liberum veto/ "This policy of parliamentary
procedure was based on the assumption of the political equality of every
"gentleman", with the corollary that unanimous consent was needed for all
measures. A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious
to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act
had already been approved, became enough to strike the act."

Unless you're a hardcore anarchist, you have to draw the line somewhere.

~~~
einhverfr
> I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts.

Nobody will disagree with that. The question is where to draw those lines.

> Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive
> things.

As Cicero pointed out (in "De Republica"), these things would prevent humans
from living together in cities.

I am a classicist. I look back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero far more than I
do Locke. As far as I see it, the goal of the economy is to serve the
household, not the other way around.

> A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his
> own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had
> already been approved, became enough to strike the act."

And yet Quakers have shown an ability to make a universal veto work. The key
thing though is what you pointed out: universal vetos weaken central
authorities and return the power to small regional entities where people can
more easily work together. This is a _good outcome._

The question really is how to define Freedom. Stallman tries to follow in
FDR's footsteps of four freedoms. But in both cases you have logic which then
requires centralization as a matter of policy, and then freedom in the service
of freedom becomes self-consuming.

Here's my radical idea: freedom requires limits, to be sure, but freedom is
defined by the space within the limits. I.e. freedom is a matter of
partitioning, physically or metaphorically, something in order to give people
a right to control their own space. The freedom which then matters is economic
freedom, and by this I mean the right to engage in economic production and
trade without micromanagement from outside. To put it another way, it's one
thing to have to do the dishes. It's another thing to be told not only to do
them but be micromanaged in how one must do them.

Evaluating software licenses from this perspective then gives one the sense
that those licenses that the FSF is willing to call Free Software Licenses do
not universally as a group deliver more freedom than proprietary software
licenses. The AGPL places many more restrictions on products and services
delivered with the software than does the license for the Microsoft Visual C++
runtime library when obtained as part of development tools.

So the question is: what can someone produce? What are the limits there? Who
is making those decisions? So I side with the BSD folks.

~~~
b0rsuk
In my opinion small regional communities can only exist in isolation. I don't
see how such communities could defend against an aggression by a strong state-
backed military. Putin is having a great time picking off countries one by
one. Maybe if someone comes up with an anarchist _religion_ , something that
strongly motivates people to seek out and destroy governments before they
grow.

I think it's like snipers in FPS games - the only thing that can REALLY stand
up to a sniper is another sniper.

------
einhverfr
I think Stallman misses the point that many of us who are at least latent
distributists see in free/open source software. Freedom can't be defined as a
freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman
imagines, but rather the freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors
without micromanagement from others.[1]

The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license
your works go under, and under what circumstances. If freedom to create things
is economically valuable (and I think it is), then one need not worry so much
about people misappropriating things because in the end they cannot out-
compete what is free and open. Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing
these days compared to the open source versions?

These days, my preferred license is the BSD license. I am uncomfortable with
the MIT license's sublicensing grant, and I am even more uncomfortable with
the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of
freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating. I am willing to
tolerate the GPL and in fact most of my works are licensed under that license
for legacy code reasons.

But I still prefer the BSD license. This license is very simple. I own my work
and give everyone else a right to use it. They own their own contributions and
an decide how to license those. Since freedom to create new solutions with the
software is economically valuable, there I can expect that the original BSD-
licensed versions will win out over the long run.

[1] [http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-
view...](http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view-on-
software-freedom.html)

~~~
Spooky23
Your preference for BSD is certainly valid, but it's valid because of your
objectives.

If you want a software package that you own to be openly collaborated, but
still controlled by you, the GPL is a great copyright construct to do that
with.

There isn't a right answer here. I think Stallman has an ideologically pure
argument that is appealing to me as a consumer, but not always ideal for my
business needs.

I disagree that BSD solutions will necessarily "win" in the long run. There's
no incentive to share.

~~~
midas007
Licenses are a toolbox, like the tech they cover.

Wanna stop basically everything commercial related? AGPL

Wanna stop tivozation? GPL 3

Wanna allow tivozation? GPL 2

Wanna allow general commercialization? 2-clause BSD

EDIT: if anyone remembers the OSS license feature matrix site that's new, plz
reply.

~~~
icebraining
_Wanna stop basically everything commercial related? AGPL_

The whole business of the company I work for, and of the large network of
peers around the world, is built around a piece of AGPL licensed software
called OpenERP[1].

In other words, my paycheck disagrees with you :)

[1] [https://www.openerp.com/](https://www.openerp.com/)

~~~
joesb
Just to poke a little fun at you, Most ERP softwares are not well-known for
being exactly understandable by average developer, and is known to be
consultant-based business so much that it is hardly possible to learn it
without paying for consultant.

It's just another way of being proprietary by obscurity.

------
vezzy-fnord
What's more is that terms "open source" and "closed source" by themselves
allow many companies (like GitHub) to sneakily evade the stigma of shelving
out proprietary software. After all, you can view the source, right? So it
_must_ be open source! And it technically, is, too. Even if not by the OSI
definition, it still fits the criteria, because having source access is only
one piece of the puzzle.

What's more is "closed source" sounds much less scary than "proprietary".

Now you might say that the same can be said for "free software". Not if you
explicitly denote it as "libre" or "free as in freedom", in which case its
meaning becomes unequivocal.

Terminology matters.

~~~
jasonlotito
> After all, you can view the source, right? So it must be open source! And it
> technically, is, too.

No. It's not. It's technically viewable source, or readable source, but it's
not open, which as you know, needs to meet certain criteria.

Those of us who have been around long enough know this old game. Microsoft has
tried this in the past. If it doesn't pass by OSI, it's not open source, and
that matters to some of us. It's also why being an "open source" company is
meaningless to many of us.

------
chroem
It seems like HN is mostly missing the point. Stallman's four essential
freedoms are intended to fix proprietary software vendors abusing their users.

For example, let's say there's some "open source" software that allows you to
read the code, but prevents you from distributing it. Well, what's stopping
them from slipping in a nasty backdoor in their binaries if you're not allowed
to compile your own clean version? I'm really shocked, and quite frankly
disgusted, that you all can be so critical of free software after all that has
come to light about the NSA.

~~~
einhverfr
> For example, let's say there's some "open source" software that allows you
> to read the code, but prevents you from distributing it.

I think btw that is a bigger restriction than allowing you to distribute the
binary but not read the code.

------
IgorPartola
Free Software is dead. Long Live Open Source Software. The reason for this is
simple: Free Software is simply too radical for most practical uses. The
majority of users don't care about the philosophical benefits of one over the
other and are never going to contribute back to the original project (think of
the millions of Android/Linux or Firefox users). On the other hand, OSS allows
plenty of practical benefits: you can view the source, fork it, often times
contribute to it. It's often done on good faith. Think of all the projects
released under the Apache or MIT licenses which are doing so great. Who cares
if someone somewhere is not contributing back: most people that matter do and
the license does not hinder them.

The GPL is an appropriate license for lots of projects, such as the Linux
kernel. Those are too important and too large a target to leave to good faith.
However, something like a JavaScript framework of the week does not benefit
from being GPL. Also, think of all those BSD distributions.

Having said that, open source your technology now. Not your secret sauce, but
most of your code can be OSS. No reason to hide the Rails app that runs your
site. It's not why you are making money, so open it up and let others take a
peek. The worst thing that's going to happen is that nobody will look. Chances
are, nobody will clone your exact product because you are likely delivering
value that's past just the code you are writing.

~~~
zanny
> Not your secret sauce

Open source your damn secret sauce so other people can improve and benefit
from it rather than hoarding it as your precious in a lockbox like Gollum.

~~~
IgorPartola
If you can do so without damage. I suspect that if Google opened up their
exact page ranking algorithm, the quality of the web overall would drop
dramatically for everyone. But for example, if they opened up their home page,
or Google Docs people could actually improve upon them with no downside to
Google.

~~~
chriswarbo
> I suspect that if Google opened up their exact page ranking algorithm, the
> quality of the web overall would drop dramatically for everyone.

That's only because Google is a single point of failure. They have excellent
engineers making their systems resilient, but relying too heavily on a
centralised system inevitably amplifies those bugs which do slip through.

If Google's code were Free Software, there would be many much smaller, much
less stable instances out there. There would be far more outages, but each one
would be very minor.

Of course, a decentralised Google would be excellent. There are projects out
there which try to do this.

------
cottonseed
It is interesting to read this through the eyes of the burgeoning Open Source
Hardware (OSH) community. There seems to be an Free Hardware Foundation in
Italy, but I have never seen it mentioned before, and rarely do I see
discussion of the sort of essential freedoms I see Stallman is talking about.
However, I often see people struggling with (and reverse engineering)
proprietary hardware, firmware and software. Hardware tools often come feature
locked and internals are intentionally obscured, down to sanding the labels
off chips. When the question of open tools comes up, the response is usually
something like this: "How much demand is there for, say, a 100 MHz open 'scope
that costs a bit more than a Rigol?" Taken from a recent discussion about
Free/Open Hardware:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375771)

Does the Free Hardware movement need a Stallman?

~~~
vanderZwan
Eh... you do realise Arduino comes from Italy, right? That's not a
coincedence.

I'm currently studying Interaction Design at Malmö Hogskola, and have had
David Cuartielles as a teacher. I have also seen Massimo Banzi give a workshop
on the Arduino in the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

So I can say from experience that there are Stallmans for open hardware out
there.

~~~
cottonseed
I think you misunderstand my comment. I know there are lots of advocates for
OSH. But I don't think there is someone like Stallman who is advocating for
free as in speech hardware the way Stallman does for software. I don't see the
"social and ethical values" of the kind of freedom that Stallman talks about
reflected in OSH discussions. However, I only see the English language part of
the conversation, so something different might be happening in Europe/Italy.

------
herge
It seems that the only reason why people would prefer BSD/MIT over the GPL is
to say "I want people to give me their code for free but I may want to sell it
in the future."

~~~
clarry
Or maybe they just want their code to be unquestionably _free_.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404914](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404914)

Besides, there's nothing wrong with selling software. And for what it's worth,
I can sell GPL software too, even though it's not free.

~~~
dublinben
Placing any license on code imposes restrictions. The only "unquestionably
free" license is public domain.

~~~
nycticorax
This is just incorrect. By default, you retain the copyright to things that
you write. Which means that others can't make copies without getting your
approval. And in many jurisdictions, it is not at all clear that you can
relinquish your copyright simply by declaring your work to be in the public
domain. So by default, there are legal restrictions on what others can do with
things you write.

It's called a "license" because it enumerates the things you are explicitly
_allowing_ others to do with something you hold the copyright to. Without a
license, the default "rules" of copyright apply. Licenses don't impose
restrictions, they remove them.

Liberal licenses (BSD, MIT, etc) allow you to do nearly everything you can do
with something in the public domain. Copyleft licenses (GPL, etc) allow you to
do somewhat less, with the notion being that this restriction of your freedom
increases the overall freedom of everyone.

------
EGreg
For the record I am more of an open source guy. I think tools are used by
people in all sorts of ways and I care about how good they are and that they
should gently encourage the right kind of culture. Free software is about
liberty as the foremost social value and derives everything from there. It
would be interesting to many laissez faire market advocates that almost all
the Free Software advocates are extremely leftist civil libertarians.

In fact the whole thing might not compute for anarcho capitalists because the
main enemy of Free Software -- which is restricted or unfree software -- is
produced and used, not by governments, but by corporations. You might realize
why they are so leftist and why they actually use the copyright laws to
ENFORCE software freedom (an interesting twist!) when you realize that their
main enemy is privately held companies who build large platforms on top of
proprietary codebases.

I am for open source for practical reasons, they are for free software for
philosophical reasons. And lookit: The PRIVATE COMPANY (which anarcho
capitalists so admire as the outcome of a completely laissez faire society) is
in fact the government over its little jurisdiction, which is the proprietary
installed code base that people have. Such as the Bloomberg terminal, or
Windows or the iPhone. In many industries, you have to pick one of several
companies and they all are run as feudalism. They grant certain favors to some
app developers and not others. You can't just deploy apps you write on them.

The exceptions are Linux and the Web, etc. Which have in fact become the most
widespread operating system and platform, respectively. Linux and other open
source software did it using licenses on their code that USED GOVERNMENT
OVERSIGHT THROUGH COPYRIGHT to prevent the software being used by companies to
lock people out. The Web did it through a culture of openness where every user
could View Code and browsers had to conform to standards of bodies like W3C
and WhatWG.

My point can be summarized as usual: people create groups, and if it's not
governments then it's companies. Someone will always be lording it over
others, creating barriers to unrestricted freedom. And the most we can do is
have systems to guide things away from terrible abuses of power.

~~~
EGreg
One of my friends (who is an anarcho capitalist) replied:

 _There 's nothing wrong with creating groups, as long as nobody forces me to
be a member. I'll read about open source vs free software, but I think you
know my view: I'm against IP because I'm against legal fictions, because they
violate natural property rights._

No one is forcing you to become a member of New York City or your particular
town or state. You can move.

What anarchists are really lamenting is the lack of available space where
people havent set up a group with a government. That just goes to show how it
emerges naturally out of other states, which can briefly be described as close
to anarchist. And sometimes those states arent so glamorous.

Anyway it's the same in software. It takes massive effort to build a system
that is completely free for everybody. That is what the Free Software movement
has done. But they are besieged at every turn by PRIVATE, proprietary
interests such as businesses who lick their lips and want the "freedom" to use
the software those guys built to RESTRICT the freedom of THEIR users. So the
Free Software Foundation and its allies have a great ally in the US government
and copyright laws! They use them specifically to banish infringers who would
use software licensed under GNU License for example without giving their users
freedoms.

Interesting? Government helping keep people more free. Thats what happens when
the perps are private companies and not governments.

And to address your point - it is just as hard to move away from Windows and
Mac, or from Android, iPhone and Blackberry all of them etc. as it is for you
to move from the United States. Sure it's possible. But first you need a
massive effort to build a natio-- err I mean a platform that is based on
principles of freedom. And along the way you will need the help of governments
to defend it from people easily coming in and ruining the whole thing because
they were "free" to take what you built for their own selfish interests.

The dynamics are almost exactly the same! But it's an interesting case study
because software battles are virtual, hurt less people, and softwrae moves
really fast. Yet you can actually see the problems that would happen with
anarchy without enforcement.

Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a
new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source
program.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat
> a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open
> source program.

You mean, like the GPLv3, which restricts the freedom to _choose_ such
software to business users?

~~~
EGreg
Right, which is why I am not a major fan of ideologies of any kind getting too
much power. I think there are trade-offs, in this case the freedom of
businesses vs the freedom of their users.

------
hacknat
There are a host of issues that one could take with Stallman's
proposals/ideas, but one that I think doesn't get much attention is the slight
falseness in some of his assumptions.

We give up our freedom to a plethora of things in the world all the time that
we all interact with (be it cars, planes, microwaves, televisions, etc). I
interact with tons of products that I know, in theory, could threaten me
because they are closed systems, but I use them anyway. I suspect RMS does the
same and I'm sure he and I try to be cautious and judicious of our use of
these things (many others are probably not).

For example, I use Gmail. I know that there is a possibility, however remote,
that my correspondence could be hacked or used against me in some way, because
of the distributed and closed source nature of the program I'm using. I don't
care though. I simply don't trust Gmail with correspondence that is sensitive
to my personal life and I get along happily.

How is Gmail impinging on my freedom if I am able to choose, taking a knowing
risk? I know RMS would respond that since I don't have access to the source
that I actually don't know the risks that I am taking, but I think this is a
straw man. Even if every product in the world was open source we would all
still be taking risks with them, because there is no way we could spend our
time reviewing all of the specific implications of every product.

~~~
HerraBRE
As long as you are happy with the terms GMail is offered under, and the
feature set of the software, you are right, in the short term it probably does
not impact your freedom in a way you are likely to notice. It may even enhance
your short-term freedom by letting you focus on other things.

However, the fact remains that if you dislike something about GMail (the ads,
the way it renders ASCII art, or maybe you wish it supported OpenPGP
encryption), you are powerless to do anything about it. This also means that
if GMail changes in some way you don't like (e.g. the recent UI changes), you
have no choice but to accept them. If one day they decide to forbid normal
attachments and force everything to go into Google Drive... well that's just
too bad.

Basically, your choices always boil down to "take it or leave it", where leave
it means migrating (or losing) your mail and learning to use a new app. This
is not a trivial undertaking, even for a skilled user.

When you further consider how many people are putting their eggs in the same
basket, these issues (especially the privacy concerns) become much more
worrying. GMail, through its market dominance, is actively holding back the
adoption of encryption and actively harming the privacy of entire nations.
This wouldn't be a concern if it were free software people ran in a
decentralized fashion.

Free Software comes with its own issues - running your own software and
maintaining it does incur a cost. But with Free Software you have the option
of doing things yourself or hiring someone to help you out. With non-free
software, you don't have that choice.

How important these issues are to you personally will of course vary. But that
doesn't mean Free Software supporters are wrong to believe these are problems
worth spending time and effort on fixing. Raising awareness is of course a
necessary part of that.

(disclaimer: I work on [https://www.mailpile.is/](https://www.mailpile.is/), a
Free Software project which aims to offer many of the features of GMail with
strong emphasis on privacy/security, so I feel pretty strongly about this.)

~~~
einhverfr
But this comes back to why I keep saying that freedom is economically
valuable. If you don't like something about Gmail, if you have all the
components, you can bring another service _to market._

This is what's missing in the discussion. The point of freedom is in
production, in bringing things to market. There are certain things (like DRM)
that Stallman does not want to be brought to market and so the FSF tries to
discourage them using the license.

But that's a dangerous power, left in the hands of a few organizations and
companies. I prefer to see this as something that should not be in the hands
of anyone, but a case where the freedom to bring products and services to
market is the primary goal of the movement. However, this only really exists
in Distributism, and of this, the BSD license is the best fit.

------
ilaksh
The name "Free Software" is bad. The explanation is confusing. The idea that
you can have a class of software that is Free but not GPL is confusing, and
I'm not sure what he means unless he is just saying you can use other copyleft
licenses.

The obvious practical reality in our society driven by money is that if your
product must include its source code then you may have some big problems
making money or maintaining whatever competitive edge you had.

Whatever your license says or the law says, if the source code is available
its a good chance some people are going to copy your software and distribute
it for less.

Also, as far as old-school copyleft components (such as GPL, not LGPL), if
including the component in my software means that I have to distribute the
full source of my application, that means that I go from having a product that
is only available by purchase to a product that someone can compile on their
computer for free.

The reality is that we live in a monetary society and people aren't always
honest. And insisting that source code be distributed with proprietary
software is not compatible with business.

Now, I believe that the current form of the structural aspects of society
related to business and the monetary system are ultimately incompatible with
the truthful holistic application of science (technology) and with ethics in
general. We need to fix that. Until we do, copyleft isn't practical for many
products.

~~~
EGreg
I once wrote Richard Stallman suggesting what I thought was a much more
helpful name, keeping all the good connotations but with less of the
ambiguity:

Liberating Software

But I never heard back.

~~~
theorique
Some people use the term "Libre" or "Free as in Speech" also.

~~~
EGreg
I know that. That's why I wanted to choose a two-word English phrase which
immediately conveyed the right thing without the downsides.

------
captainmuon
The distinction between Open Source and Free Software seems increasingly silly
to me (as a user and someone who has to program for his job, but is not a
developer, and is not terribly interested in licenses). Both are open source
(lowercase) as in, I can see the source openly. That's what's important for
me, personally _. Then there is the question of Copyleft or not, which is
partially orthogonal to that. Copyleft is this neat hack of the copyright
system where you can make people who use your code (and care about copyright)
share their code, too. I think the real question Stallman is addressing is
copyleft vs. non-copyleft.

_ ) In fact, I'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source",
that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive
license a la: "You may not use this for anything."

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_In fact, I 'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source",
that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive
license a la: "You may not use this for anything."_

That is proprietary software. Source code by itself is useless when you have
no rights to go with it. This is why "open source" is such a sly term.
Companies can very easily pull off shenanigans like in your hypothetical
scenario and then hide behind the banner of "open source". They would also
technically be correct, even if not abiding by the OSI. After all, it sure as
hell isn't closed source!

Free software, so long as you specify "libre" or "free as in freedom", is
unequivocal. Bullshit like freely viewable source without distribution rights
doesn't cut it.

Your views are misguided, and are even potentially harmful.

~~~
morganherlocker
There are plenty of benefits to being able to read the code without the
ability to distribute it. Two things come immediately to mind:

1\. Is the software secure? Are there gaping security holes riddled through
the source? Think about all the times you hear about people "working on
getting the project ready for open source". Often this is due to
vulnerabilities that are ticking time bombs waiting to go off as soon as the
security by obscurity clock runs out.

2\. There may be GPL code in the source that is being used in violation of the
license. I would not be at all surprised if a significant chunk of closed
proprietary software is using GPL code, but no one knows because they cannot
read the source.

Both of these points are moot if you simply avoid proprietary software
altogether RMS style, but only a tiny fraction of users are going to do that.
Of course, these benefits are also the reasons why this will never happen.

------
pbbakkum
While its intentions are noble, in my experience the GPL is Free as in "you
probably need a lawyer to ensure you're not violating it". Doubly so for AGPL.

The irony of RMS spreading his own vision of "Freedom" is that the GPL
restricts things which he doesn't agree with, which seems to violate the most
basic principle there. I've been involved with several organizations which try
to avoid GPL code, by policy, in favor of MIT/BSD because it raises too many
issues. Not saying GPL hasn't done good things (my understanding is that much
of Apple's compiler work is public bc they started with GPL code), but the
wind seems to be blowing towards less restrictive OSS licenses.

------
markhahn
Stallman is wrong that proprietary software hurts users; that's the essence of
his critique. It's sad that so much software has sailed under the GPL flag of
convenience, simply because it existed and could avoid license bikeshedding.
Most of the efforts embodied in Linux or even GCC are not motivated by RMS's
political spin.

What's really unfortunate about his noise is that it has consumed the air that
should be supporting more fundamental topics - especially the nature of
protocols (which must be free, documented and unencumbered in order to really
qualify as protocols.) The IETF really embodies the philosophy that has made
the net a success.

------
mixologic
Imagine a world where _all_ software adheres to the tenets of Free software.
Our freedoms would continue to be egregiously curtailed by website Terms of
Service Agreements at, Contracts with the service providers of hardware
devices, Firmware restrictions like UEFI safeboot, and legal straightjackets
like software patents. I dont understand how the philosophical underpinnings
of just the software are really all that effective in guaranteeing any sort of
freedom without _also_ having all the other freedoms we're already denied.

------
bdicasa
How does the free software movement live in a capitalistic society? I'd be all
for writing and contributing to free software if I could make a living off it.
But I need to make a living, and that likely isn't coming from writing free
software. I charge for my software because I want the freedom to choose what I
create, rather than just pounding out code for someone else to make a profit
from.

~~~
chriswarbo
> How does the free software movement live in a capitalistic society?

One obvious way is to sell Free Software. The market has raced to the bottom
recently, but a while ago a lot of GNU development was funded by Free Software
sales.

Compare this to proprietary software, which can't operate in a capitalistic
society. It relies on government interference in the software market to create
an artificial scarcity (ie. copyright).

~~~
dragonwriter
> Compare this to proprietary software, which can't operate in a capitalistic
> society.

Er, what?

> It relies on government interference in the software market to create an
> artificial scarcity (ie. copyright).

Capitalistic society relies on government involvement in the market to create
property rights; among the property rights that were features of the systems
for which the term "capitalism" was coined is copyright.

So, to say that proprietary software cannot exist because it relies on
government for the system of property rights that underlie it is a gross
misunderstanding of "capitalism".

------
lazylizard
Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute the
original SQLite code, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for
any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

------
gress
The problem is that code doesn't afford freedom. Money does. So to the extent
that a license inhibits users of a codebase from making money, it is anti-
freedom.

~~~
dllthomas
To the extent that the Underground Railroad inhibits would-be slave-owners
from making money, it's anti-freedom.

Note that I'm quite emphatically not saying these are exactly the same thing,
but pointing out by example that there are other factors that can clearly be
far more important.

~~~
gress
It's not clear at all what you are trying to say. If you think there are other
more important factors, why don't you just say what they are?

~~~
dllthomas
There are some obvious important factors - most importantly the ability to
extend my software (or pay others to do so) and to thereby ensure continued
interoperability.

~~~
gress
Why are these more important than the ability for developers to make money?

~~~
dllthomas
In general, because an increasing amount of our lives are dependent on
software and there are far more users than developers.

Note crucially that we're not talking about _all_ ability to make money (as we
would be with Non-Commercial clauses); we're talking about the difference
between the ability to earn money based on copyleft code (demonstrably non-
zero) versus non-copyleft code (probably more).

------
jestinjoy1
I got the point "Free" in Free Software. Whether it ends up in giving the
software Free since we can modify and redistribute Free Software?

------
sdegutis
I used to put a lot of stock into RMS's philosophy of How The World Works
Best™. Now I ask myself why I don't just treat it any differently than reading
some random blog on the internet. Yes, RMS has done great work in leading
emacs through the ages. That's pretty awesome. But that doesn't really give
him any credibility in the realm of philosophy. And such a social and human
topic as software licensing is pretty genuinely venturing into actual
philosophy.

~~~
splawn
Correct me if im wrong, but I don't think he just invented this mindset out of
nowhere. It was born from the hacker culture at MIT before industry completely
took over software production. Im not very hip on philosophy, what makes
someone a credible philosopher?

~~~
zenbowman
Absolutely, but that model relied on programmers being paid by MIT, who was in
turn paid by the US taxpayer. It was never going to pay for millions of
programmers salaries, it was designed for the elite few.

I think the past decade has shown that free, open source, and completely
proprietary software can all co-exist without negatively affecting consumer
choice.

~~~
icebraining
_Absolutely, but that model relied on programmers being paid by MIT, who was
in turn paid by the US taxpayer. It was never going to pay for millions of
programmers salaries, it was designed for the elite few._

My paycheck disagrees with the assertion that the model relies on programmers
being paid by MIT.

It's certainly less profitable than writing proprietary code, but I see no
reason why it can't pay for millions of programmers' salaries. And no, the
fact that it doesn't right now is not proof of that, because proprietary
software crowds out free software jobs. I'm talking about the hypothetical
situation of all software written being Free.

~~~
zenbowman
Sure, it could be an option, but for those of us who have no moral objection
to proprietary code, its not a compelling universe to live in.

People who write proprietary software generally take on harder problems before
the free software community (from AT&T to Google), and are quite generous with
their fortunes once they make them.

I'm not concerned when producers of good things make money, I'm happy when I
see that happening, as opposed to non-producers like financial vultures making
all the money while being destructive to society.

------
einhverfr
Question:

If I license my _software_ under the GNU Free Documentation License and
include invariate sections, is it still free?

------
sethish
This licensing terms of this article is not compatible with the GPL or the
Debian Free Software Guidelines.

~~~
dublinben
This article isn't computer code, it's an editorial.

------
Toenex
tl;dr Open Source is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for Free
Software.

------
yeukhon
To begin, my position on this matter has been clear for years: both free
software (as defined by Stallman) and non-free software (as defined by
Stallman) can co-exist. I believe in free market (not ideal free market).

\-->

 _For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social
problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software._

 _We in the free software movement don 't think of the open source camp as an
enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know
we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source
supporters._

These two quotes strike me. Why should we label proprietary software as enemy?

If we clone all proprietary developers to work on free software alternatives,
then we definitely have more options to choose from. The problem is not a
social problem -- it isn't that people, average like my parents, don't know
free software exists - but because there aren't enough to choose from. Like I
said, if you can clone all of the developers to work on free alternatives
every day, you will definitely have free alternatives. If you only have a
handful of people working part-time as a hobby to contribute to free software,
how can you compete with proprietary software?

I am not against free software. I like free software (as defined by R.S). I
like open source. I also think proprietary softwares have value. Note here on
HNs a lot of people run _X-as-a-service_. In the ideal world, if everyone
knows how to program, if everyone has access to a computer, if everyone has
time, we could have the old Internet back; imagine a world where everyone can
write, distribute and host their free _X-as-a-service_ for people to use?
That's why knowledge base like Wikipedia is important to us. I like this ideal
world, but at the moment this is not easy to achieve.

You don't need to teach me to use free software. If it is free and open
source, and reliable, I will use it. But if the interface is ugly, unusable,
crashes all the time, and if there is no reason for me to contribute back (say
an IRC client), I will dump that software and look for something else. I am a
programmer, but I am not going to contribute to every software I use. I don't
have the time. I don't have the necessary skill. I have more important things
to do like finishing my work, looking after my family, relax, cooking, working
on my hobby project, and getting enough sleep.

\-->

 _But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their
freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then
powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they
are harder to remove

<delete chars>

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary
software for some practical advantage._

This is a good time to re-mention MS Office vs LibreOffice/OpenOffice. I am
fine with LibreOffice's Word processor and PowerPoint program until I need to
do something complex. If I just need a quick PPT or a quick doc I can get away
with LibreOffice. But when I need something complex, polished, I like to use
MS Office. True I have been raised to use MS Office since I was a kid. It is
true MS is locking me in all the time, but it is simply because the features
in LibreOffice is still lagging behind. I will be happy to dump Office
completely if LibreOffice continue to improve.

\-->

 _Under pressure from the movie and record companies, software for individuals
to use is increasingly designed specifically to restrict them. This malicious
feature is known as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) (see
DefectiveByDesign.org) and is the antithesis in spirit of the freedom that
free software aims to provide. And not just in spirit: since the goal of DRM
is to trample your freedom, DRM developers try to make it hard, impossible, or
even illegal for you to change the software that implements the DRM._

I don't want to start a flame war on DRM. This is as dirty as complex as
politics. After reading the FAQ on
[http://www.defectivebydesign.org/faq#what](http://www.defectivebydesign.org/faq#what)
I will point out a few striking remarks:

 _If you purchase electronic copies of games from Steam, you can 't sell them
or share them with a friend after you're done playing them._

I don't see this as a violation of my freedom. If the license given to me is
restricted to my account, why is it okay for me to distribute it to my friends
and everyone in my friends' circles? The other examples may be violation of
freedom, I won't argue. What do you propose? Create a universal gaming
platform where you can download games and all you need to access a game is to
own an account. Say pay $29.99 and I can run a Steam game I didn't purchase
but acquire from my friend? If Steam has a feature to transfer game (say only
once) but locked to Steam platform, is that a violation of freedom?

 _Are Hollywood the one to blame? Not exclusively. This way, all their
customers remain dependent on them, and helps maintain their dominant position
in the market._

I think this is a direct attack on anyone who is trying to come up solutions.
If you are a solution technology company, your job is to create a solution.
Just as Google is an excellent search engine I feel attached to using it
because it provides what I want 8/10 times. As a customer of Google's search
engine, I am okay with Google keeping its dominant position by using the
search engine. When Google SE fails to deliver the right results I might use
Yahoo, Bing or even DDG.

\-->

I feel like a lot of the free software advocates seem to be against the
existence of proprietary software and any business depends on proprietary
software development. As I have said before, I think both can co-exist. Do I
want free software? Of course. I would like to own a free copy of Mac OSX and
able to modify from start to finish. But I don't think everyone should be told
to use free software.

~~~
zanny
> I believe in free market (not ideal free market).

Nothing about proprietary software reflects a free market. The entire
proprietary software industry can only exist through the existence and
practice of copyright law. Nothing about copyright law has anything to do with
the usual tenants of free markets - voluntary exchange, property rights, and
informed transactions. It is just made up rules with (maybe) good intentions
and catastrophic consequences.

> Why should we label proprietary software as enemy?

Because it violates Richard Stallmans, and anyone who agrees with him (so at
least the entire FSF and GNU project) ethics.

> I also think proprietary softwares have value.

The act of being proprietary adds no value to any software. It only serves to
take away potential value in the ability to trust, understand, reuse, and
modify it. The only exception is software that only functions through its
obfuscations, such as DRM, and that entire class of software is implicitly
anti-user and only functions to take away more freedom.

> but at the moment this is not easy to achieve.

The ease of accomplishing something should never be just cause to work for or
against it.

> because the features in LibreOffice is still lagging behind. I will be happy
> to dump Office completely if LibreOffice continue to improve.

You probably (assumptions here) have done no part to fund or participate in
the continued development of LibreOffice, while you have paid Microsoft for
their Office suite. You are directly incentively the continued usage and
development of proprietary software without doing anything for the free
alternatives. Even if you have contributed to LibreOffice in some way, you are
still sustaining the proprietary freedom depriving Microsoft suite through
both your purchase and usage of it.

> I don't see this as a violation of my freedom.

Free software has three tenants - the ability to study, modify, and share
software. Implicit to Steam is a violation of (at least) one of those
freedoms. You are free to not consider them freedoms in your ethical outlook.

> But I don't think everyone should be told to use free software.

It isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it is about removing the force
already imparted upon you by proprietary software vendors that restrict your
ability to modify or redistribute software. Richard Stallman (probably)
doesn't give a shit if you use emacs or a competitor, as long as both are
free, or at the _least_ that you understand that you are sacrificing your
freedoms to use convenient proprietary alternatives.

~~~
yeukhon
_It is just made up rules with (maybe) good intentions and catastrophic
consequences._

Not necessarily catastrophic though I can see this as an argument to defeat
patent trolls.

My main point is that in a market where can freely consume a freeware, free
software and fully proprietary software is a free market. A world with only
free software is still one sided.

 _The act of being proprietary adds no value to any software. It only serves
to take away potential value in the ability to trust, understand, reuse, and
modify it._

There isn't always a need to actually understand, reuse and modify a software
if the user only wants to use it. Proprietary software cannot be studied and
trusted fully -- that's true, but if there is no free alternative competitive
sacrificing is how we live in this world.

 _You probably (assumptions here) have done no part to fund or participate in
the continued development of LibreOffice, while you have paid Microsoft for
their Office suite. You are directly incentively the continued usage and
development of proprietary software without doing anything for the free
alternatives. Even if you have contributed to LibreOffice in some way, you are
still sustaining the proprietary freedom depriving Microsoft suite through
both your purchase and usage of it._

Using a software is already participating in the continued development of
LibreOffice.

If I could take a train to get to work in 15 minutes, why would I bike for 45
minutes to work every day? I may bike occasionally, but definitely not
everyday. If LibreOffice is convinent to do everything I need to do with MS
Office, I'd switch permanently. If not, they will both co-exist on my
computer.

How will removing MS Office do any good to free software if I don't actually
write code for LibreOffice in the first place?

Is there not enough people already writing code and plugins for LibreOffice
suite? Sounds like free software moment is pushing people to write free
software because they don't have enough developers who are willing to put time
writing code for free software.

 _Implicit to Steam is a violation of (at least) one of those freedoms. You
are free to not consider them freedoms in your ethical outlook._

That's why free software movement from R.S. is radical to me.

 _It isn 't about forcing anyone to do anything, it is about removing the
force already imparted upon you by proprietary software vendors that restrict
your ability to modify or redistribute software._

The force imparted upon me is due to the fact the free alternatives aren't
good enough or just don't exist. If there exists one that works really well,
like proprietary software, the force is not as strong as you think.

If we shall, free software is awesome, it has the ability to study and modify
the software in any way the user wants, now, how do I make a living off my
work?

~~~
zanny
> My main point is that in a market where can freely consume a freeware, free
> software and fully proprietary software is a free market. A world with only
> free software is still one sided.

And my argument is a world with only free software is just one without
copyright law. How about we add in a new kind of software - loanshark
software. You have to pay monthly and you get a random file from the source
code each month as per the EULA. We don't have much of that software around,
though, so I guess the market is lopsided and needs more balance?

It is all artificial, and yes, even the release-the-source part of the GPL is
artificial. But if we lived in a world without copyright, we wouldn't need the
release the source stipulations because you couldn't profit off artificial
scarcity of information anymore anyway, so not releasing the source would just
be considered a dick move. But platform lock in matters a lot less when you
have no way to profit by "having the platform" since you can't enforce
distribution restrictions.

> but if there is no free alternative competitive sacrificing is how we live
> in this world.

What software is there without free alternatives? I'd get started tomorrow on
any unique problem not addressed to some degree by a free software project. If
you are going to argue "the proprietary has more features and convenience than
the free", then of course it does, our current copyright regime enables the
profiteering off information denial, you can make _profit_ off of denying
freedoms. So businesses can bloom under it. It just means you are leeching
value out of artificial constructs and are redirecting effort and money
artificially.

> Is there not enough people already writing code and plugins for LibreOffice
> suite? Sounds like free software moment is pushing people to write free
> software because they don't have enough developers who are willing to put
> time writing code for free software.

There are _never_ enough people. We could have most of the human species
devoted to the development of free software and we wouldn't have enough. There
is always work to be done, especially if you are claiming MS office as having
features Libre doesn't - then yes, Libre is understaffed and needs either
funding or developer hours to make it better, and that is your (and my, and
everyone elses) responsibility if you believe in software freedom. If you
don't, and won't consider it, then the entire argument is moot since the whole
position of free software assumes a belief in it by providing its rational
argument for why it is optimal and why proprietary software is bad.

> That's why free software movement from R.S. is radical to me.

And your stance is radical to me, because I think respecting a users freedom
should be assumed, not extraneous.

> If we shall, free software is awesome, it has the ability to study and
> modify the software in any way the user wants, now, how do I make a living
> off my work?

You do the same thing you do anywhere else, you propose value and seek
compensation for your work. "I want to add bloom filters to GIMP, but will
need about 400 hours to do so, and at $50 an hour that is about $20000 of
work, so if I can raise that money I'll implement the feature".

The same thing applies to pretty much all other copyrighted works, but this is
beyond the scope of free software arguments and into the anti-copyright
movement, but it boils down to "charge for scarce resources, not for
artificially restricted infinite information".

------
ramonex
"all existing free software would qualify as open source" \- does Stallman
missed Freeware software? I hate this guy.

~~~
mpyne
Stallman has a rather precise definition of "Free" software, which does not
include freeware (i.e. "free as in beer") software.

~~~
vertex-four
It's not just Stallman insisting on it. "Free software" has been a well-
defined term for a long while now.

------
midas007
"Why Free Software missed the point of Open Source.":

doing WTF you like, commercial or not.

~~~
dllthomas
To be clear: Free Software does not object to commercial activity. Copyleft
requirements happen to get in the way of _some_ commercial activity, which the
FSF and related community finds objectionable for reasons unrelated to its
commercial nature. Stallman _opposes_ "noncommercial" requirements in
licenses, no FSF license has these, and such clauses are reason to call a
license "nonfree".

~~~
thatthatis
Gpl on commerce, in a nutshell:

Sell this software without ability to modify: tyrant

Use this software to create a closed REST API: no problem

~~~
dllthomas
The license doesn't prevent the latter, but the FSF doesn't approve. There's
also the AGPL, which would forbid the closed REST API.

None of that means there's no opportunity to make money. People might pay for
convenience (I don't have to set up and run my own server, even though I
technically could) or access to networks - if Facebook AGPL'ed their whole
stack, people using Facebook would keep using Facebook because their friends
are on Facebook.

~~~
thatthatis
So, where is the line where providing services with the software becomes
acceptable? An API is obviously a service provided with the software, but so
is consulting using a GPL statistical package. How, and where, can you draw
the line between those things?

~~~
chriswarbo
The customer is not the end-user of the GPL code; the consultant is. The
customer is an end-user of the consultant. That relationship will be governed
by a completely separate contract.

On a related note, the output of a GPL program is not GPLed. I can compile
non-GPLed code with GCC. Myths like this keep getting used as FUD.

Licenses with a network-use clause, like AGPL and CPAL, define access over a
network as distribution. This would cover an API, but would not cover going
via a consultant, since the consultant isn't software. If you want to argue
that people's minds are software, you may as well argue that our teachers hold
the copyright to our thoughts.

~~~
thatthatis
I'll have to look at those network use clauses. I've always found proprietary,
BSD, and AGPL to have coherent philosophies. The GPL, on the other hand, has
always felt to me to be much more of a mishmash of whatever Stallman likes or
dislikes.

~~~
dllthomas
I'm confused - it's the GPL that fails to make a distinction between the REST
API and the consultant. I'd thought you were criticizing that distinction as
being arbitrary.

~~~
thatthatis
Yes, that's what I think and what I thought I'd been saying. What of what I've
said indicates otherwise?

~~~
dllthomas
I see contradiction in:

1) The AGPL is philosophically well founded, the GPL is arbitrary.

2) The AGPL enforces an arbitrary distinction, the GPL does not.

~~~
thatthatis
I think I've found the confusion. I was still talking about the GPL in my
second comment. I see why that was confusing given that you'd explicitly added
the AGPL into the discussion, sorry.

I might have better stated it as "I agree the AGPL removes the tension, I
think the AGPL is philosophically coherent. But the FSF still primarily pushes
the GPL. [transclude prior comment]"

~~~
dllthomas
Hm, I still don't see how that resolves it.

You say _" How, and where, can you draw the line between those things?"_, when
the AGPL does precisely that and the GPL refuses to.

I'm not trying to criticize, here, I'm trying to understand...

~~~
thatthatis
I'm criticizing the GPL as inconsistent because it draws lines haphazardously.
That it is ok with the API but not with the distribution feels arbitrary and
inconsistent to me.

The AGPL is elegantly precise - anything you do to the code becomes public.

The bad is elegantly precise - anything you do is fine.

GPL is complicated and inelegant - some things are fine while their near
equivalent actions aren't.

Edited to clarify

~~~
dllthomas
"Anything you do becomes public" is an inaccurate description of the AGPL.
That consultant can keep things private.

