
Stallman Video: If You Want Freedom, Don’t Use Proprietary Software - jolie
http://mashable.com/2010/05/15/stallman-software-freedom/
======
jdietrich
I have wrestled with this quandry for years, regularly alternating between
Macs and Linux-based computers.

My personal choice is slightly more fine-grained - I use proprietary software,
but will not invest in it, so as to avoid lock-in. I won't use anything that
requires proprietary file formats. I use a proprietary text editor, but only
because it offers a familiar vi-mode interface. I do a brief mental audit
every few months - If I expect it to take more than a day to migrate to a
fully-open environment, I know I've ceded too much control to software
companies.

I think Stallman is a fundamentalist, but an important one. I think he prompts
debate and exemplifies practice in a way that is only possible because he
simply will not touch proprietary software. Seth Godin recently argued that
one of the most underrated properties of the internet is its ability to show
us the limits of what is possible and in that sense Stallman is vital. I see
him as a figure like Heston Blumenthal or Ray Jardine - there aren't many
people with a sous-vide setup in their kitchen or hiking the Appalachian Trail
with an eight pound pack, but their example broadens all our horizons.

~~~
jasonkester
Why wrestle with it even for a second?

If a piece of software is useful, use it. If it's useful enough to pay money
for, pay money for it. It's just not an area that requires ideology to enter
into your decision-making process in any way.

As you've noted, they've got a guy on the internet saying every possible thing
there is to say. Do yourself a favor and ignore pretty much all of them.

~~~
jdietrich
Because I have personal experience of being completely shafted by software
companies. In a past life I was a music technology geek. Recording engineers
spend huge amounts of time, effort and money on learning our preferred Digital
Audio Workstation software, which has come to replace almost every piece of
equipment in a modern recording studio. Think of it as the audio equivalent of
Photoshop, but with half a dozen competing alternatives. It's the kind of
software you go on training courses for, the kind that comes in a huge box to
make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, the kind that has multi-
thousand dollar plugins available. The market leader, DigiDesign Pro Tools,
only works with DigiDesign's proprietary hardware, which can easily run into
the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Two major upheavals shafted a lot of audio engineers.

One of the most popular DAW suites is a package called Logic. After nearly
twenty years of development, Emagic sold out to Apple and Apple decided to
abandon the PC version. Suddenly guys who had used the same piece of software
all day every day for a decade or more were faced with either buying at least
one top-end Mac, having to learn to use OS X and potentially a whole bunch of
other software, or abandon their preferred DAW and have to relearn how to do
their work in a different DAW. Either option would prove enormously expensive
for a lot of engineers, both in direct costs and lost work.

When Apple shifted over to Intel, there was a huge lag from many developers in
getting updates released. For engineers, this is a serious problem - having
the fastest hardware and the latest software is a significant competitive
advantage. A lot of people lost out on work, or had to buy PCs or new audio
hardware.

The experience of that world has led to my current position. Professionals in
all sorts of disciplines have huge personal investments in particular software
and are often completely betrayed by the developers. EULAs are a one-way
street and only the most rarified of enterprise software has any sort of
reciprocal commitment. What Stallman talks about isn't purely abstract.
Relying on proprietary software is dangerous, for very straightforward
practical reasons.

~~~
jasonkester
Wouldn't the software continue to work on PCs, or did Apple have a way to
remotely kill every copy? If not, why was it any more of an issue than if it
were open source and the developer abandoned it?

In other words, what happened to make the software that you were running for
10 years suddenly cease to be useful?

~~~
jdietrich
You're fine until you upgrade your hardware, or install a new plugin, or need
to import a new file type. You end up in the same predicament as people still
using IE6 - the software is as good or bad as it was when it was still being
supported, but the rest of the world has moved on around you. Beyond that, in
most industries there is constant competitive pressure to be using the latest,
most powerful tools. If you don't have an upgrade path, your setup falls
further and further behind your competitors. The recent fashion for overt
Autotune is a good example - in a relatively short space of time it has gone
from being a relatively unusual effect to being de rigeur in some genres. If
you can't keep up with those trends, you're going to lose work.

~~~
elblanco
The outstanding question though is that in this type of case, high-end domain
specific software, the pure open source model tends not to produce the ultra-
high end software. The reason, though it seems to mystify many open source
advocates, is that it takes lots of money to make a unique or novel _thing_ on
time spans of less than a decade...and the only way to recoup those costs is
by selling that thing at some price and keeping the IP closed. Multi-thousand
dollar plugins are one example.

In other words, going open source in this type of sense means that you _won't_
have the latest and greatest anyway. So your particular case example doesn't
change things.

~~~
stcredzero
Doesn't explain why the software couldn't revert to Open Source once that
company goes defunct. If I were running a large company, I would think about
asking for such terms.

~~~
stretchwithme
It happens all the time.

    
    
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code_escrow

------
CitizenKane
I've heard Stallman's arguments quite a bit and every time I hear them they
don't ring entirely true. Pratically speaking, the freedoms granted by free
software are primarily meaningful to developers. If you can't modify the
software (or have no concept of what source code is) these freedoms largely
become meaningless. By the same token, if the source code is absolutely
terrible the freedom to modify it is next to meaningless (I've had to deal
with this issue a fair amount myself).

There seem to be a couple of implicit arguments in this that I find
interesting. First, that others aren't to be trusted. Second, that software is
in no way an invention.

Regarding the first, I think that for most people they have to rely on the
developer of the software they use. If the developer decides to stop working
on it they can get screwed. With open source software they may be able to find
another developer, but then they are simply at the mercy of the other
developer. Their lack of freedom isn't shaped by whether the software is open
source or not, it's shaped by their lack of knowledge.

Regarding the second, it seems that the argument for free software is an
argument for free speech. This in essence means that software is exlusively a
work of creativity (an thus copyrightable) and is not a work of invention
(thus not patentable). I don't completely buy this argument. I think software
is unique in that it has aspects of both creativity and invention. On one end
of the spectrum _why would definitely epitomize the creative aspect of
software. On the other end, software paired with super computers and embedded
systems certainly come closer to machines.

Overall, I these are tricky things to deal with. I don't think that all
software should be out in the open, nor do I think that every piece of
software should be cloesd away. I think the free software community needs to
have a more nuanced view of the world and that having one will bear more
fruit.

~~~
yason
I'm a developer but I don't develop most of the programs that I use every day.
I don't even read the source code of these programs.

With regard to programs that I _don't_ develop, I'm very much a user who
enjoys that almost everything I use comes nicely in packages with Ubuntu.
Almost.

A few programs that I use need patches or modifications that aren't included
in stock Ubuntu.

Because I use free software the appropriate patches _do exist_ and are
available on which ever website their authors have published them. Or they
circulate around on the internet. So, the features I desire suddenly become
available via side-channel distribution. Often someone keeps prebuilt binaries
of the software available with the same patches compiled in. Or they're
available via alternate or backported APT repositories. In some cases, being a
developer myself, I download the patches and dpkg-buildpackage them into
binaries myself, but generally I not.

If I had used proprietary software:

\- No third party could write patches for it;

\- I would have to stick with whatever the author decides to release;

\- I couldn't run old binaries if my OS went through some big upgrade and the
author didn't bother to support a yet another binary;

\- I also wouldn't enjoy the vast repository of prepackaged and configured
software that comes with Ubuntu: unless the author was agreeing to take part
in an OS distribution, I would have to search, download, and install each
program separately.

Free software is much more than a single developer's ability to hack on other
people's code. Free software is a whole ecosystem that benefits each
participant. But since all software will come down to programming, that
software ecosystem comes down to individual developers' ability to hack.

~~~
mukyu
Just because you do not have the source code nor the right to distribute
copies of software (i.e. it is proprietary) does not exclude you from any of
the first three--it just makes it harder. Depending on where and when you live
it may or may not be legal (Galoob v. Nintendo and 17 U.S.C. § 117 says yes,
MDY v. Blizzard says no).

------
petercooper
It must have taken him a while to get to that conference, not having used any
planes or modern motorized transport that rely on proprietary software.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Do you think you could have posted this comment without using any Free
Software?

~~~
petercooper
I doubt it! But, unlike Stallman, I support progress in all its forms,
encumbered or not, and enjoy the advantages offered by free /and/ proprietary
software.

------
jsz0
The world has changed so much since Stallman started his crusade. I'm just
don't think what he's advocating is realistic which unfortunately makes most
of what he's saying irrelevant. You simply cannot avoid proprietary software
anymore. It's a nearly impossible standard for even OSS developers & users to
adhere to. Think about it. You can't drive an automobile. They all use
proprietary software. You probably can't even ride a bike because the traffic
signals are controlled by proprietary software. You can't own most major
appliances. You can own _any_ cellular phone regardless of the operating
system it runs. I guess my point is by advocating this extreme approach
Stallman is hurting the cause more than helping it at this point. A more
realistic approach has some chance of actually connecting with a broader
audience.

~~~
varjag
> You simply cannot avoid proprietary software anymore.

 _Anymore_? You really think it was easier in 1980s?

Over the years Stallman has singe-handedly affected the software ecosystem in
very tangible and important ways. Yes he may look like Osama preaching from a
cave in these videos, but make no mistakes, software landscape would've been
different and even more sad place if not him.

~~~
jsz0
I do think it was easier simply because we had far less technology in our
lives. Your choice of which operating system to put on your PC is ridiculously
easy today but for many people it only accounts for a small amount of the
software they buy, use or interact with in their daily lives.

------
jarin
"If you prefer convenience — well, best to stop complaining about your loss of
freedom and/or privacy."

Bingo.

~~~
johnswamps
But that's not what Stallman believes, that's what the author of the article
wrote. What makes a freedom a freedom (to me) is that you have the ability to
waive a freedom if you wish to do so -- otherwise it's an obligation. And
Stallman is of the opinion that you should never trade freedom (at least when
it comes to proprietary software) for convenience. I actually asked him about
this a few weeks back, if he thought there were situations where it's
reasonable to willingly and in full knowledge give up some freedom (the
question was in the context of software as a service). He interrupted me
before I finished and said that you should never do that, because even if
you're not giving up much freedom now, they'll be taking more and more of it
as times goes on. (I hope I'm not misrepresenting his views, but that is the
impression I got.)

I disagree. While perhaps it's wrong that many people give up freedom without
really knowing that they're doing so, I think it's reasonable to on occasion
to do it if you know the trade-off you're making.

------
tzs
If program X is Free Software, but non-Free program Y will accomplish a task I
wish to accomplish better and faster, I consider using X to be giving up
freedom. The extra time I spend accomplishing the task with X is time that I
am no longer free to use for more interesting pursuits.

If it were possible to make a list of everything I wish to do, and then
arrange to do those things in the most time-efficient manner possible, there
would still not be anywhere near enough time in my likely maximum lifespan to
accomplish more than a small fraction of them. I'm not going to further waste
my limited time using tools that aren't the best I can obtain for the task at
hand.

------
credo
From what I've seen, some businesses/organizations have been successfully
employed open-source based business plans. However, they don't seem to be
software-product-development companies.Here are the categories I see

1\. Software companies like Google: Google open-sourced Android, but Android
isn't their money-making business. They want to use Android to help their
primary business - search and advertising. They haven't open-sourced their
search code or their ads code.

2\. Consulting companies: These companies focus on generating money from
software consulting, not from creating software products. So promoting the
open-sourcing of software-products is good for them. The software/consulting
division of IBM is a good example of this category of companies

3\. Hardware companies like Sun: These companies make their money from selling
hardware. They stand to benefit if software is free/cheap and easily available
for their hardware.

4\. Non-profits: These organizations get money from wealthy
individuals/foundations and their software products/websites don't need to
generate revenue.

I'm curious to know of other open-source business models that have been used
to build a sustainable business.

~~~
rythie
RedHat made $653m last year, mostly by selling support.

~~~
elblanco
That's an interesting example. I wonder how much of the software stack is
profitable in this way? I'm willing to guess very little because most software
isn't so horridly complex.

If you need to pay for support services to use a web browser, a text editor,
or some other completely normal piece of consumer level software for example,
that would be the software's problem and only exemplifies the areas where open
source doesn't work as well as proprietary.

Companies make money from software because they devote lots of resources into
making software easy to use. Relying on support services to float every random
xyz piece of software will make for a very dead industry.

The funny thing is that I've never actually seen any viable business models
from the open source community about how to build a business around free
software (as in beer and freedom) that wasn't entirely couched in "support
services". This creates the unfortunate situation that if a company were to
create a consumer level piece of software that was easy to use (say, anything
by Apple), they would put themselves out of business. Their incentive then is
to simply make the software terrible to use so they can sell support services.

On top of this, the price of support services is often quite a bit higher than
the alternative of just buying software. A thousand dollars of custom
consulting will get you about a day's worth of labor hours. If I need to bring
in a guy for a week to setup some software, or purchase the $3000 easier to
use proprietary software, I'll go with the cheaper option. Even replacing that
software at some point in the future, due to lock-in or what have you, is
cheaper.

Paying a bunch of money so I can figure out how to use an OS to connect to the
internet so I can send an email or make a home movie is a waste of my time and
money. Ergo, support services only work when the cost of buying a proprietary
solution that works out of the box (or with minimal support) is greater than
the cost of the free software plus support services.

And yes, I recognize that I'm talking about beer here, but for end-users of
software, that tends to be the principle consideration. The truth is, most
people and companies that use software care very little if their freedoms are
being impinged by using MS-Office.

~~~
rythie
A few things:

Mostly what RedHat sell is server services and a lot of the original market
they competed with were similar services from IBM, Sun, SGI etc.

I don't think support services work for desktop software, particularly not for
non-business critical parts

I don't think Open Source is really about the cost for larger businesses. It's
about having something stable, reliable, predictable and ultimately knowing
that you can get it fixed if it breaks. Google, for example made $23.7bn last
year, their software stack, as I understand it, is completely either open
source or coded internally, so they can fix anything that goes wrong. Had they
been based on proprietary software, then they would be at the whims of some
company who doesn't want to fix their issue (think Microsoft for example).
Facebook have found the software they used was not able to work at the scale
and cost they wanted so were able to tailor it to their needs, they would have
found it difficult and expensive to do that with proprietary software.

Companies around free software often sell services because that's what people
want and they didn't often write most of the software themselves anyway.

Whilst Open source does get a bad rep. for being hard to use, I think it's
unjustified and if your people can't work it out then their not very good TBH.
Most startups are based entirely on open source software, so there is a
certain amount of proof that on the server, at least, it is easy enough to
use.

I think you under-estimate the cost of replacing software when large numbers
of people have become used to it's intricacies and not forgetting many staff
need training in order to use any software effectively. I've been involved in
a few big projects and the people time involved usually outweighs the software
by 10:1 even with proprietary solutions. Also bigger organisations are less
risk adverse so they tend to buy support contracts on everything.

Software is a commodity and the ones making a lot from it have mostly
engineered a artificial situation where it's difficult for anyone to compete
with them effectively. That is not good for you as customer and is a risky
strategy for them.

~~~
elblanco
I want to return to something I said because on review I realized it wasn't
really clear

 _"The funny thing is that I've never actually seen any viable business models
from the open source community about how to build a business around free
software (as in beer and freedom) that wasn't entirely couched in "support
services". "_

When I said "build a business around free software" I meant as the producers
or authors of the software.

The reason I make this distinction is that I think most of your examples
involves companies building a viable business around open source software as
_users_ of the software. I'm also implying a distinction between authors of
software vs. people who modify the source to do something they want -- and yes
I realize that's a bit of a stretched distinction w/r to open source. Often
times the authors _are_ the same people who use and contribute small bits of
modifications to the code.

What I mean is that, say Apache for example, comes from the Apache Foundation.
If I make some modification to the source to make it do some particular thing
I want, I'm modifying the software in the same way a car enthusiast may modify
their Honda to do something they want. (If, what I made is generically useful,
I can submit it back to the Apache Foundation and perhaps cross the line to
become and "author", but in most cases we're talking about people who mod
software in some way).

The last place I worked for does about $10bn a year. It's a technology company
with their hands in projects as diverse as autonomous undersea robots to text
processing systems. They've successfully built a business around a mix of
proprietary software solutions and some small percentage of open source
software. The default OS is some Microsoft Server OS, databases are almost
exclusively Oracle or SQL Server, Web servers are almost always IIS. They also
write a lot of their own software, typically in Java (even before it was
opened) and/or Perl but most of the software jobs involve writing code in some
highly proprietary development environment like those you find in finance, HR,
or some other types of systems. Java and Perl just happen to be go-to
languages because it's easy to find people who write in those. Python was
starting to show up a bit as well when I left that job.

They also get _ok_ mileage from really true open source software. Red Hat
finds its way onto some fractional percentage (along with Apache, JBOSS, and a
few other odds and ends -- including the aforementioned Perl). But in many
cases, they could do what they wanted with completely proprietary solutions.
Those systems were usually selected due to some client requirement, or because
the licensing costs are free (beer). I only ever ran into one true open source
advocate in the entire place, and he was usually laughed out of proposal work
because his "solutions" options would have extended the development effort by
a year and required hiring an entirely new staff of people raised on that
ecosystem rather than the preferred and proprietary MS/Oracle/Sun/Cisco
ecosystem. Finding qualified staff to work on the open source stuff was
frankly a continuous and quite major problem for us -- often times, because
those people counted as people with specialized skillsets vs. the average run-
of-the-mill trade school "tech guy" they simply cost more to hire. In other
words, we ran the numbers over and over again, and open source rarely made
sense for us.

I _do_ think that the reverse is also true though, for small startups open
source can make a lot of sense in both senses of the term "freedom". For the
bottom line, it's free, if you are doing something weird you _can_ , in
theory, mod the software to do something unique. It's not always easy, and
I've seen many cases where the target goal was too big for the staff and the
startup folded. Web startups are also interesting because for the most part,
the work they do with open source results in a completely proprietary web app
(something RMS has lamented on quite a bit recently).

Many big businesses likewise do great things with and for open source (IBM,
Sun and Apple come to immediate mind) in terms of funding the kinds of
expensive Open Source development efforts that would otherwise not exist
because building world class software by part-time hobbyists is extremely
difficult -- there's really only a very small handful of those projects, and
most of them have been funded recently by large corporations looking to
leverage the initial investment/development effort to make _their_ solution
work like they want.

But by and large, large organizations will move to whatever accomplishes their
goals for the least amount of $$$. Even startups. If a startup can use a
proprietary solution for $x thousands of dollars vs. modifying some existing
open project to scratch some itch for $y thousands of dollars, and x<y they'll
go with the solution that costs x. For example, how many startups use Windows
or OSX as their primary desktop OS vs. some flavor or Linux/BSD? Probably
most.

This guy gets a lot of what I'm saying here.

<http://lunduke.com/?p=1075>

It's a great analysis of the problems in the community flavored with a hard
dose of pragmatic realism. He _gets_ it that "just do it open source" doesn't
really make sense in many cases because the community is by and large made-up
of people who don't understand what it takes to make a business.

~~~
rythie
I don't think many of the people who create open source projects want to
create a business. It's just they wanted to solve a problem and then share
that solution with the world. Typically they get employed away by someone who
does want to create a business around it e.g. Linus Torvalds, Rasmus Lerdorf,
Alan Cox etc.

That said, there still is a need for support around this products, so people
create businesses around them an employ the people who wrote it.

I don't think creating a open source project solely to make a business out of
makes a lot of sense in most cases, because profits in the early days will be
low and it will take long time to scale that business.

Most businesses don't see the value of open source really and your story shows
that the company you worked for didn't either. That's not to say there are
aren't lots of companies that do realise the benefits. To use your example,
some businesses like the Honda how it is and others want to make a race car
and absolutely can benefit from modifying it. Google, Apple, Facebook and so
on have all greatly benefited from modifying the Honda.

------
ihodes
Makes sense to me. Regardless of if the software if free, you do have the
choice to use it.

I love the idea of free software, but in practice it's left a lot to be
desired for me. For others, more power to them if it works for them.

~~~
Groxx
Same. Proprietary software provides unique encouragement for something to be
created. In my experience, much of free-OSS has been significantly worse than
a cheap proprietary, if it exists at all.

"much", not "all" by any means. Some utterly, incomparably awesome stuff has
come out as OSS.

~~~
Groxx
To both / all replying to this: I'm not in _any_ way claiming proprietary
doesn't have crap. It's got _loads_ of crap. But I'd be willing to bet that a
_large_ amount of the _most used_ applications out there are proprietary, in
many cases because there is no comparable OSS equivalent.

And remember that _the_ deciding factor in many cases is user interface - the
average user _does not care_ if they can hack it. Many many many OSS projects
which _could_ be contenders have absolutely _abysmal_ UI and help documents.

~~~
tome
_I'd be willing to bet that a large amount of the most used applications out
there are proprietary, in many cases because there is no comparable OSS
equivalent._

Your argument would be significantly stronger if you actually gave examples
here.

~~~
Groxx
Photoshop - Gimp can't handle tablet input on any system I've got (lags
horribly behind input), and is generally slower and has a horrendous UI which
frequently puts windows half off-screen and sometimes cuts off text.

Maya / 3DS Max / Whatever - Are you _really_ going to claim Blender is any
good? Functional, sure, but that's about it.

Windows - Linux graphics drivers are often an absolute joke, so Windows really
_is_ just about the only real PC gaming option. And don't claim it's because
graphics cards are closed hardware - then why hasn't an open-hardware group
made anything competitive? Their only major success has been the Arduino (a
BIG success, but rather lonely).

OSX - Linux OSes, even Ubuntu, have _all_ had clunky UI and seriously lacking
normal-user help documentation. Last time I used Ubuntu, I had to resort to
the CLI inside of _30 minutes_ to correct a permissions error the UI could
only inform me of. Try telling most people how to do that.

Outlook / Mail.app - Thunderbird's the biggest contender, and has _many_
things right... but while the new UI is much nicer, I ran into _many_ display
bugs in less than an hour of use, one of which resulted in my deleting an
email I did not have selected (when I didn't hit delete).

MS Office suite / iWork suite - OpenOffice has a UI lagging behind even MS
Office, and in many of my uses has failed to have a working updater and lags
behind my typing frequently. And then there's the preferences window... most
people simply _cannot_ understand 90% of that, and will be turned off the
entire application by its mere existence.

Half Life / Quake / Unreal Tournament / PC games of any kind - ?

Console games of any kind - ?

McAfee / Norton / AVG - ? ClamAV? Brought my system to a crawl last time I
used it. Not that McAfee / Norton are much better there, but...

And in the other corner, we have:

Firefox / Chrome, Pidgin / Adium (though Pidgin has a bad install process and
a nasty UI for most people), Eclipse (though it's slow)... I know there are
more, but I'm having trouble coming up with them right now. Just woke up.

I had generally thought the major ones were self-explanatory, and this is
rather long, hence its initial omission.

------
cooldude127
The problem is that often (not always), proprietary software is just better
than any free equivalent. I will gladly sacrifice some freedom to gain
quality.

~~~
stretchwithme
and you're not even sacrificing freedom. all you're really doing is paying
someone to do some work for you.

~~~
tome
You're sacrificing freedom if the workers you pay don't give you free access
to the source code you pay them to write.

~~~
stretchwithme
I don't have to know how something is done for it to be worth paying to have
it done.

I'm not sure freedom is what one gives up in this situation. It seems more
like giving up control. And one has to do that in life just to be able to
delegate tasks to others.

Is it really freedom being given up or freedom obtained by freeing up one's
time to do things you value more than examining the code for the
microprocessor that makes your clock radio work?

And its freedom that makes it possible for one person to offer the work of
their minds to others without having to disclose everything about how it is
that they are capable of doing it.

We are free to make such a deal and then later if we choose another
alternative. There is no loss of freedom at any point, just the exercise of
one's freedom.

------
motters
I doubt that proprietary software will ever really go away, but I think that
its importance will diminish over time as the heap of free software grows ever
larger.

Over time the issue of freedom in the digital domain has become increasingly
important. Today perhaps more than ever there are an array of forces who are
trying to snatch away people's control over their own computing and put it
into the hands of highly centralised technocrats, usually by dangling the
carrot of convenience. The personal computer is in danger of no longer being
personal.

------
stretchwithme
isn't this just another way of saying that nobody should ever pay for others
to write code?

