
The culture war at the heart of open source - steveklabnik
https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-culture-war-at-the-heart-of-open-source
======
pixelmonkey
The real amnesia about “open source” history is that, at the time of the
formation of the OSI, developers and companies were _afraid_ of Free Software,
Copyleft, and GNU. Making free/libre/community code palatable — even merely
for re-use — was an uphill battle. Nowadays, use of open source is so
pervasive that you get a strange look in developer circles when you use the
word “proprietary”. And we are worrying now about paying for
committer/maintainer time given how important OSS modules are, especially
standard and popular programming libraries and database technologies.

That is _quite_ the inversion. Let’s take an example: search. Elastic has gone
public while employing an army of Elasticsearch and Lucene committers, and
while selling SaaS and cloud services around Elasticsearch and related
projects, thus paying for those committers, creating a massive
ecosystem/community, and revenue for themselves (plus return for their
investors). A win like that would have been unimaginable in the pre-OSI era.
Companies wouldn’t adopt Elasticsearch, wouldn’t put real data in it, and
certainly wouldn’t pay some company to run it for them.

Instead, that era saw companies like Verity, FAST, Autonomy, and similar
proprietary search engines. Can you even name a proprietary on-premise
deployable search engine today? Even if you can, it’s probably powered by
Lucene, Solr, Elasticsearch under the hood. That’s how much the entire
universe has shifted.

~~~
int_19h
Many companies are still afraid of copyleft. When you see what actually gets
used in corporate environments and shipped in commercial products, it's almost
exclusively MIT/BSDL/AL, some LGPL, and very little GPL.

~~~
simonh
"Used in corporate environments" and "Shipped" are two completely different
thing. You will find GPL software all over the place in the enterprise because
there is no risk.

You won't often see GPL software in shipped commercial products, because when
you ship stuff you might need to include proprietary components you don't want
to have to open up. It still does happen from time to time though.

~~~
int_19h
I have personally worked on a GPL component that's a crucial part of a shipped
Microsoft product, so I'm well aware that it happens. But compared to non-
copyleft licenses, it's a drop in the bucket, even with the industry-wide
embrace of Linux. And if Linux couldn't blaze that path for other stuff, I'm
not sure what can.

------
mindslight
The point of "open source" was pragmatism over strict ideology, but then the
ensuing vulnerability was exploited by DRM/SaaS.

The sheer amount of "open source" today is because it is a great marketing
term for what is effectively proprietary software or feedstock for proprietary
software. It's not popular culture due to its empowering users, or even the
pragmatism of say being easier to debug, but because it is the specific
technology that Surveillance Valley businesses are built upon!

Furthermore, dumped-over-the-wall projects like Android would be better
referred to as "Shared Source" (with its association) - the Free branches are
seemingly unable to actually keep up with the master!

I think the _answer_ to the conundrum is still "Free Software", but IMHO the
FSF needs a strong makeover. On fundamentals, Stallman was and continues to be
very much _correct_. But he seems to have become _less applicable_ due to not
necessarily choosing the right battles or making the right compromises.

Here
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436615](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19436615))
is a thread I wrote a few days ago expanding in the specific context of
firmware blobs.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Furthermore, dumped-over-the-wall projects like Android would be better
> referred to as "Shared Source" (with its association) - the Free branches
> are seemingly unable to actually keep up with the master!_

I think I'd called this "spectator source". You can watch for free, but don't
expect you'll really get much time on the field.

~~~
AsyncAwait
I think 'source available' is already an established term, i.e. the source is
there to view, but that's about it.

------
Stranger43
What we are seeing is not as much a war inside the community but an assault
from a set of corporations that want to harvest their ownership of a name
associated with a successful opensource project into making them the next
Microsoft as they have to repay their investors/owners with super-normal
profits a functional free market cannot actual provide.

All of the recent issues have started with someone trying to reinvent
Microsoft shared source idea where the focus is on code transparency not the
right to modify and fork.

It's a common pattern of substituting the real movement with a cargo cult
copy, where the original goals is replaced by a set of consumable you have to
buy, that have killed far more important movements then the opensource one in
the past where orithe attack does not come openly but as astroturfing
campaigns crafted to subvert real criticism and create the impression that the
purveyors of cargo cult movement is trying to save the movement where as the
goal is usually to carve a way for them to generate the cash their
investors/creditors demand if not to become filthy rich.

The opensource schism between osi and fsf was more about letting opensource
escape the leadership by committee culture of academia and find a way for it
to ride the corporate beasts as a symbiotic parasite through forking and re-
merging. Where as the current manufactured crisis stems from the need of a
bunch if startups to turn the relationship around and control the opensource
project they back like a rider controls a horse which means preventing forks
and independent commercial contributors.

The Linux project where nobody uses the mainline kernel tree directly in
production is a good example of the OSI model, here we have a bunch of
companies forced to provide code upstream in order to provide a Linux product
downstream to their customers in a relationship where there is not a "Linux
inc" monopolizing the revenue stream generated from the end users but where
all of the commercial contributors gets the revenue from their individual
customers.

What the likes of elastic or mongo that have been the center of controversy
recently want is to become that single entity monopolizing the entire revenue
stream of the opensource project they sponsor, which was also what oracle
tried to become for MySQL and OpenOffice, as this is not an new conflict.

~~~
na85
One point I think the article missed was the advent of the web, which has
rendered a lot of these debates moot - when everything is X-as-a-Service then
the only thing running on my machine is some bloated javascript written by
someone who thinks they're an engineer because they graduated a boot camp. I
mention this because ultimately, and this is the point I think is missing from
the article, whether $serverside_framework is libre or proprietary makes no
difference - the company is going to get rich selling my personal data either
way. That is to say, to a lot of people for whom computing is synonymous with
the web, the distinction between free software/open-source software and
proprietary is blurred because less and less code runs on our devices now.

The stale, tired lecture that Stallman's been giving for the last 15 years
about ethics isn't persuasive any more because the really odious code isn't
running on my machine. Whether facebook's codebase respects their engineering
team's collective freedoms or not simply has no bearing on my experience as a
user. I'm getting exploited either way.

~~~
Jedd
You are conflating two very distinct problems.

But Eben Moglen and rms have been warning about both problems since before you
evidently noticed the second one.

------
jchw
(I'd like to note that most of these thoughts that follow are not directly
tied to the article or aimed at Steve Klabnik; the article is good but it
doesn't seem to make an assertion about what's right or wrong.)

I still hold strong that this "war" is getting silly. This whole thing seems
so antithetical.

Open source is being chosen by developers and startups because it has
technical benefits, it's appealing, it attracts attention, etc. The reason why
it is all of those things is exactly because of what open source _is_. If you
control the monetization strictly, it's not open source, and it loses the
appeal. Simply having source _available_ isn't appealing to me. Contributing
to a project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.

In my personal opinion, SaaS is not exploitation. Being able to do this is the
point. The difference today is that there are people releasing software as
open source under licenses that permit others to monetize their software...
and then are shocked when they actually do it. Last time I made this argument,
I mentioned Linux, and being the quintessential open source project it's a
super good example of how open source can be collectively beneficial. I stand
by this, and I would presume Linus is not bothered by the massive monetization
of Linux. Since that's the point.

If someone wants to build proprietary software, please do. The open source
community can survive without another NoSQL database, I'm sure, and nobody
will blame you. Few will do this, though, because many want to eat their cake
and have it too. Whatever. In any case, please don't attempt to conflate "open
source" with "shared source" in the meantime. I've said it before and I will
say it again: You aren't saving open source. You are saving your profit model.
And nobody blames you for that. I say this as a continued user of Caddy,
Redis, etc.

Disclaimer: I'm an employee of Google, these are my personal opinions and not
those of my employer.

P.S.: Steve, I'm really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to
clarify your thoughts on that?

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks! You're right that I'm not attempting to in the post, so no worries.

> If you control the monetization strictly, it's not open source, and it loses
> the appeal.

Hmm, open source and free software both say nothing about money. Could you
elaborate a bit?

> Simply having source available isn't appealing to me. Contributing to a
> project like that is just free labor. I see few mutual benefits.

I think you'll like my next post. :)

> P.S.: Steve, I'm really curious about that Gender bit. Are you going to
> clarify your thoughts on that?

What I _will_ say is that the speculation of this as being about "brogrammers"
is incorrect. I don't want to super get into it, because my thoughts aren't
fully formed, and this is a hot-button topic. What I will say is that, in the
last 20 years, our discipline has grown, and women are returning to it. If you
take the large public figures in both movements, like RMS and esr, both have
attitudes and beliefs that are... not great, on topics like sex, gender, and
other social issues. In general, the social stuff around these movements is
very masculine, and often socially regressive. This makes it hard for women to
care about these movements. Obviously, these are mostly broad generalizations,
and there have been some women who are involved here. I know several women who
are very passionate about both Open Source and Free Software. But I've also
spoken to many who say "never", and the numbers speak for themselves.

~~~
jchw
>Hmm, open source and free software both say nothing about money. Could you
elaborate a bit?

To me, the fact that they say nothing is the important part, and it's why the
whole thing works. At first I thought it was weird that GPL didn't limit
commercial use, and now I think it was absolutely essential that it didn't.

>... If you take the large public figures in both movements, like RMS and esr,
both have attitudes and beliefs that are... not great, on topics like sex,
gender, and other social issues. ...

Interesting. Well, I don't personally see the connection just yet but I'll
keep an open mind. It seems like there probably is something to be said.

~~~
steveklabnik
> To me, the fact that they say nothing is the important part, and it's why
> the whole thing works.

Ah, gotcha. :) Thanks.

------
zzzcpan
Business friendliness is not an ideological choice. Maybe a careless choice or
a calculated one. But I don't think anyone has strong beliefs in it. Hence,
the OSI side is fighting with an agenda. FSF, on the other hand, is
ideologically strong, people hold genuine beliefs and fight for those beliefs.
Well, not lately. As it turns out, FSF is not ideologically strong enough to
take on modern issues and is ok for companies to wrap and build around free
software to offer it as services, but never release any of the supporting
code, forcing users into a proprietary lock-in, because they cannot run
similar services without all of that extra code. So, here we are, in a need
for stronger ideology. And even though this is also agenda driven of smaller
companies, startups trying to protect themselves from bigger companies, there
is still a lot to believe in.

~~~
jacques_chester
I don't think that's a fair statement of the FSF's position.

From the horse's mouth:

> _Early drafts of GPLv3 allowed licensors to add an Affero-like requirement
> to publish source in section 7. However, some companies that develop and
> rely upon free software consider this requirement to be too burdensome. They
> want to avoid code with this requirement, and expressed concern about the
> administrative costs of checking code for this additional requirement. By
> publishing the GNU Affero GPLv3 as a separate license, with provisions in it
> and GPLv3 to allow code under these licenses to link to each other, we
> accomplish all of our original goals while making it easier to determine
> which code has the source publication requirement._

[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
faq.html#SeparateAffero](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
faq.html#SeparateAffero)

The "administrative burden" is not academic, by the way. Where I work we spend
a lot of time and money checking that we are compliant with every license
pulled in directly or indirectly into our products.

~~~
kemitchell
Administrative burden isn't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL, either.
GPLv2/3-style copyleft gets forgone all the time on pure process grounds. It's
nontrivial to identify which _permissive_ licenses apply to some bag of
artifacts an engineer dug up online.

FSF faced fork threats when it floated AGPL-GPL merger in GPLv3.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _Administrative burden isn 't academic, but it's not peculiar to AGPL,
> either._

I didn't mean to imply that. The AGPL however greatly expands the scope of
folks to whom the burden applies. Some companies can basically just look for
AGPL to exclude because they don't distribute anything.

Others (like us) must check _everything_.

------
m463
One thing RMS has said is that Free Software (GPL) places no restrictions on
how anyone _USES_ the software. The rights reside with the actual users.

The GPL does restrict how you _REDISTRIBUTE_ it. If you modify the software,
you must distribute the modifications when you redistribute it.

Businesses that just use the software are fine with GPL.

But businesses that want to redistribute GPL software cannot fork and close
it.

But they're businesses and have revenue, so they can pay others to use their
software, or just use MIT/BSD licensed code that allows fork and close.

------
mattnewport
I think the FSF philosophy has proved remarkably prescient. For a long time I
didn't really get it and it seemed excessively rigid and unrealistic. So many
of the dangers that I now see in the path of technology were anticipated in
the founding principles and four freedoms however. I've definitely come round
if not yet a card carrying convert.

~~~
bitwize
There's a whole subreddit called /r/StallmanWasRight so you're hardly alone.

------
smush
This argues for a third counterpart to FSF-style "Free Software" and OSI-style
"Open Source Software" terms.

Apparently, FSF is too preachy and OSI is too business-y and thus following
"those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" style, a new, third
movement of producing software that is free to copy, free to modify, etc. will
naturally arise on its own.

There are allusions to brogrammers who know nothing more about OSI than 'It's
on GitHub!!', I'm not sure how charitable that is but I can say for several
years that no matter how many wiki walks I've taken down the history of Linux,
GNU et al which is probably where some of those brogrammers fell as well. IDK
the difference, does it really matter, might as well stop looking into it any
further than that.

The schism and lack of unity between church of FSF and church of OSI has
probably had a net detracting effect on getting software to be more
permissible, even if the absolute effect has been way more FS/OS software than
would be expected otherwis.

I could be totally wrong, I didn't show up for computing until the Win 95
days.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks for reading!

> a new, third movement of producing software that is free to copy, free to
> modify, etc. will naturally arise on its own.

I think this is a bit too teleological. I'm not confident that such a thing
_will_ happen. I think that the environment is ripe for something to happen,
but I don't know what that is. That's exactly because of

> IDK the difference, does it really matter, might as well stop looking into
> it any further than that.

I don't think that most people's conception of open source matches the FSF/OSI
definitions. Does it really matter? I don't think it does for most people. I
do think there's a values mis-match there though, and that means there's the
possibility for a new thing that's a match. I think there are significant
obstacles to that project, though. That's for the next post. I hope that I
actually write it though, I've been trying to for over two years...

~~~
smush
I agree with both of your points.

I will add that if the difference between the FSF and OSI definitions of OSI
don't matter...perhaps they should merge and join forces? Get the (not that it
sounds great to say it this way) least common denominator between the two
definitions, unify the Orgs, and present a unified front to prospective
learners. There's propriety software and FOSS, the former word is defined in
the dictionary, the latter word/acronym is defined at
freesoftwareisopensource.stallman , rthar than the "it's over here at the FSF
websites, on your right, past the "Linux should be called GNU/Linux arguments"
aisle."

~~~
jasode
_> if the difference between the FSF and OSI definitions of OSI don't
matter...perhaps they should merge and join forces?_

I don't see how merging would be possible because FSF and OSI have
_incompatible_ philosophical differences to sharing/distributing software.

E.g. OSI is compatible with _permissive_ licenses such as MIT License and BSD
License. That's totally against what FSF and Stallman is about and their GPL
license reflects that philosophy.

~~~
dragonwriter
> OSI is compatible with permissive licenses such as MIT License and BSD
> License. That's totally against what FSF and Stallman is about

Essentially all of the permissive OSI-blessed “open source” licenses are also
FSF-blessed “free software licenses”; they are not “totally against what the
FSF and Stallman is all about.”

~~~
jasode
_> Essentially all of the permissive OSI-blessed “open source” licenses are
also FSF-blessed “free software licenses”; they are not “totally against what
the FSF and Stallman is all about.”_

To both dragonwriter and steveklabnik,

Saying "totally against" was too strong. Let me try to clarify.

Yes, the GNU license list has _" The following licenses qualify as free
software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL."_[1]

To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with _underlying
philosophy_ of FSF and Stallman. That just says _using_ those licenses as part
of GPL projects is _acceptable_. However, they don't really fulfill Stallman's
_strategy and objectives_.

An example of what I mean by BSD & MIT not aligning with Stallman's objectives
would be past comments about him missing the chance to include Chris Lattner's
LLVM/clang project in GCC.[2]

Presumably, Stallman would have not let llvm/clang become permissive-BSD
license like Lattner did. He would prefer llvm/clang's valuable capabilities
to be licensed as copyleft-GPL just like GCC. (More commentary on that style
of thinking.[3]) To him, the permissive licenses _" helps the enemies create
proprietary software"_ (paraphrasing previous Stallman comments).

That's why I believe FSF and OSI have fundamental incompatibilities. The MIT &
BSD licenses being on the GNU "approved" list doesn't really solve that.

EDIT to add reply to: _> The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom
software should be provide. _

I disagree because it seems that Stallman has taken great pains to explain why
they are _not aligned on the freedoms_ that software should provide. There is
some _overlap_ between FSF and OSI but that's different from alignment.

[1] from: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-
list.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html)

[2] [https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-02/msg00...](https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-
devel/2015-02/msg00594.html)

[3] [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-
lgpl.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html)

~~~
dragonwriter
> To me, that isn't really about BSD & MIT being compatible with underlying
> philosophy of FSF and Stallman.

Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not
compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be
compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's a
slightly different issue.

The FSF and OSI are broadly aligned on what freedom software should be
provide. They differ on how problematic they view software that does not do
that, and (largely as a consequence of the preceding disagreement) on how to
best move toward a view where the benefits of software providing the freedom
they agree on is broadly enjoyed.

~~~
pessimizer
> Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software license (whether or not
> compatible with th GPL) is compatible with the FSF philosophy—It may not be
> compatible with the FSF strategy, because the FSF has a strategy, but that's
> a slightly different issue.

I don't think this is accurate. Anything the FSF recognizes as a Free Software
license can be relicensed under the GPL because nothing in it contradicts the
GPL. BSD, MIT, Apache, etc. licenses don't put any restrictions on how you can
relicense the software, therefore they can be relicensed under the GPL.

The philosophy if the FSF is that you should have access to the code of the
software you run, and that all software should be GPL. It helpfully offers a
list of software that can be used as a base for GPL'd software.

In this case, "compatability" should actually be read as in "IBM-compatable"
not as "simpatico" or "synonymous."

------
mwfunk
I think there are 3 wars that overlap but not fully.

(1) Pragmatic debates about the usefulness of copyleft vs. BSD/X11/MIT/etc. in
various situations (and for various goals), (2) a (tribal, and mostly
imaginary?) "business vs. hackers" narrative, and (3) RMS vs. everyone else.

OSI itself doesn't figure prominently in how I think of open source. I realize
Open Source^tm is something that OSI legally defines, but going all the way
back to the endless Usenet arguments in the '90s, the "open source vs. free
software" conflict was never really about OSI vs. the FSF (IMO). It was more
about accepting a multitude of licenses as acceptable alternatives, vs.
adherence to the strictest and most complicated one (plus accepting Richard
Matthew Stallman as your personal lord and savior).

It also felt like "open source" meant promoting a bunch of things as a common
good, but "free software" meant promoting something very specific as good, and
calling out a bunch of other things as evil. It's like working for a charity
vs. being in someone's army. I wonder how much this contributes to which side
is more appealing to someone, based on their values and personality.

Maybe this has become way more convoluted since the '90s, but I always
considered open source to be a superset of free software. All GPL'd software
is open source, but not all open source software is GPL'd. It's less of an "x
vs. y" conflict, and more of a "(x, y, or z) vs. x" conflict, with a bunch of
cultural and personal baggage tacked on to it.

~~~
caf
I was around for those arguments in the 90s as well, and that's not at all my
take on it.

The FSF was always very clear that the BSD-type licenses (at least once the
minor issue of the "advertising clause" was dealt with) were Free Software
licenses in their opinion. The Debian Free Software Guidelines always covered
a wide variety of permissive "open source" licenses, and in fact the DFSG was
used as the basis of the OSI's Open Source definition.

So I've never seen Open Source as a superset of Free Software - or vice-versa.
Rather, they have always been almost or even exactly the same set. It's not,
and never has been, about alternative taxa - instead, the difference was
always more one of marketing.

It's not a question of _What_ \- it's a question of _Why_. The Why of Free
Software is _" So that people are free to share and modify the software they
use"_, and the Why of Open Source is _" Because this method of development
creates better software."_.

If a new movement does crystallise, it will be because neither of these _Whys_
satisfy the new constituency, and their new answer to _Why Permissively
License Your Software?_ will be their rallying point.

------
platz
This is why the GPLv2 doesn't only require the source code itself. You have to
be able to _effectively_ make use of that software freedom.

It doesn't matter so much if you had software freedom, if all you had was the
freedom to study, which is only one of the four freedoms.

You need the freedom to modify, and freedom to install modified versions, and
the GPL guarantees that.

Question: How many IoT devices out there are running GPL'd firmware, providing
source code, but no method to actually modify the device (or the current
method is unmaintained and broken)?

Answer: A lot!

If you can't request sources and _build & install_ them, it's a GPL violation.

Rebuilding and reinstalling linux on IoT devices is a necessary step towards
privacy and security on those devices.

~~~
ryukafalz
>This is why the GPLv2 doesn't only require the source code itself. You have
to be able to effectively make use of that software freedom.

GPLv3 is intended to be better at this than GPLv2, specifically the anti-
tivoization bits: [https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-
gplv3.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.en.html)

------
AceJohnny2
I know I've grown old when this history and the nuance of the open source
concepts need to be spelled out for a new audience.

Just some self-reflection. Thank you very much Steve for doing so in your
usual engaging style.

~~~
steveklabnik
Thanks so much!

------
otikik
I once met a lead who called Google "a bunch of hippies", because some part of
their software was Open Source.

His company had ~10 employees.

We decided we were not a good fit.

------
yakshaving_jgt
> I’m not sure exactly how it happened. I think the lazy answer is
> “GitHub!!!!”. I do think GitHub played a role, but I think the answer is
> more complex than that. I personally think that gender plays a huge role.
> But that’s a different essay. Regardless of why it happened, something did
> happen.

"GitHub!!!!" may be a lazy answer, but why isn't "gender!!!!" an equally lazy
answer?

~~~
steveklabnik
1\. Gender is an extremely complex topic, "github made more devs" is not.

2\. I didn't say that "gender!!!" was an answer; I said that the answer is
complex, and that things like gender play one role in it.

3\. I didn't give _any_ answer here, explicitly, so it cannot be a lazy
answer.

------
zach43
i could imagine a third camp between Free Software and Open Source following
something like the Qt dual-licensing model:

1\. You are free to use this software for non-commercial use.

2\. If you'd like to use this software for commercial use, you must either
actively contribute to this project, or provide a donation to the project
maintainers at Patreon / Paypal / Liberapay, etc.

~~~
fineIllregister
Qt can be used commercially for free. It's LGPL whether you pay or not.

Users only need to pay for a license if they want to distribute statically
linked software with Qt, if it is licensed in a way that is LGPL incompatible.

~~~
rrdharan
> Qt can be used commercially for free. It's LGPL whether you pay or not.

This is true now, but was not always the case.

~~~
empyrical
The parent comment implied that it was still the case however, which is
misleading; it has been available under GPL rather than the non-commercial
"QPL" since 2000, and under the less-restrictive LGPL since 2009.

Qt is also interesting in that there is also an agreement in place with the
KDE Foundation that ensures that the Qt Company will always offer the core
parts of Qt under a "proper" open source license. If they choose to switch to
one of these non-commercial licenses again, then KDE is entitled to release
the source under a BSD license if they want

[https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php](https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php)

------
extreme_orang
Worth looking at these books in relation to this topic

Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source: The Politics of
Open Source
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0745324142/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0745324142/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_Ub4MCbBF31XWS)

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Experimental Futures)
[https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0822342642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0822342642/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_tc4MCbRPWHNJZ)

------
mcguire
" _I’m not sure what that movement will look like, and I’ll explore why in
another post. To give you a teaser: the problem is in the way that both Free
Software and Open Source are formulated. The rot is in the roots, and I’m not
yet sure what will replace it._ "

Looking forward to it.

In the meantime, consider a couple of kernels: Linux and sixth (or seventh
edition) Unix. Unix wasn't released under a free or open license, but the
effects were similar to an open source license: you could give away your
changes if the recepient had an ATT license.

The results were SunOS, Solaris, and other monstrosities like AIX, HP-UX,
Irix, and a dozen others, all different enough to prevent compatibility and
ensure lockin. This lasted until the Unix environment collapsed under it's own
weight.

On the other hand, there's only one Linux, under the GPL. There are forks, but
few have real momentum. Major improvements are absorbed into the mainline
kernels.

Likewise, in the C and C++ compiler space, gcc (its internal bit rot not
withstanding) ate all of the other options.

You don't see the difference in most open source, possibly due to the momentum
of Apache and Mozilla. Or possibly because most software has a short half-
life. But see Amazon and Google's cloud support offerings.

Licenses express ideology. Choose your roots carefully.

~~~
pjmlp
As additional note, gcc only picked up steam when Sun decided to start the
trend of selling UNIX developer tools as an additional package.

~~~
mcguire
I'm not sure of the chronology there; didn't gcc _start_ when Sun started
separately bundling development tools?

~~~
pjmlp
No, it preceededs Sun's decision by a couple of years.

[http://shape-of-code.coding-
guidelines.com/2017/03/22/happy-...](http://shape-of-code.coding-
guidelines.com/2017/03/22/happy-30th-birthday-to-gcc/)

[http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050525231654621](http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050525231654621)

------
m0llusk
Another view is that this has to do with how projects are managed. It is
common to provide access to sources. Accepting submissions of changes to add
features or fix bugs depends on who considers them to be improvements and why.
If you want to really own a problem and cannot get the managers of the project
to accept your changes then you need to fork. This issue exists with both free
and open source but ownership is more directly asserted with open source.

Saying this is money does not seem to mesh with the world we live in where
RedHat provides services with free copylefted software valued at billions of
dollars. Free copylefted software is big money now for better or worse.

------
nycticorax
I could have used some examples of "the war" in progress. Personally, this war
has not really impinged on me. I'm not claiming it's _not_ happening, but it
would be good to have some evidence that it _is_ happening. Or that the war
has gotten hotter recently.

Also, I have to say that I think it's a mistake to view "open source" as
solely motivated by commerce. One big practical difference between FSF and OSI
is how accepting they are of permissive licenses like BSD and MIT. Basically,
OSI likes them and FSF doesn't. (Or at least FSF prefers copyleft licenses
like GPL.)

It's true that permissive licenses are more commerce-friendly, but one could
also argue that they are more freedom-friendly as well. After all, with a
permissive license, you can add your own proprietary extensions to a codebase
and then sell the resulting executable without sharing the source for the
extensions. With copyleft licenses, you are restricted from doing this. Thus
permissive is arguably more free-as-in-freedom.

Of course, copyleft advocates argue that copyleft licenses are more free in a
larger sense, in that they guarantee that the _code_ stays free. And, you
know, maybe they're right. But I think it's something that reasonable people
can disagree about. Whereas a lot of copyleft advocates seem to think that
permissive licenses are a sign of moral weakness.

I would say the permissive licenses are "free" in a libertarian sense, and the
copyleft licenses are "free" in maybe an anarcho-syndicalist sense.

It seems like a lot of people are convinced that copyleft licenses are more
ethical than permissive licenses. I'm afraid I just don't agree with this.

~~~
orangeshark
The preference for permissive licenses vs copyleft license depends on where
you value the freedom. As a developer who wants to write software, you might
prefer permissive licenses because you have the freedom to do whatever you
want with the software like including it in your propreitary software. As a
user who ultimately runs the software, you might prefer the copyleft license
because you get those same freedoms as the developer. I would admit that
whether a user uses software that uses a permissive or copyleft license, it is
pretty much the same.

------
cheezymoogle
History doesn't repeat, but it certainly rhymes, so the saying goes.

To anyone acquainted with the history of Christianity (or religion more
generally) and the history of libre software, the parallels are simply
fascinating.

From the Book of St. IGNUcius, 12:1-12:

 _Then began rms to speak to the people this parable; A certain person created
a program for perself, and sent its code to other programmers, and went into a
far country for a long time. When per returned, per sent an email to the
programmers, now selling the software as a service, that they should forward
any code that they had improved, so that other programmers might benefit from
it: but the programmers ignored the email, and refused to acknowledge the
debt._

 _And again per sent another email: and they ignored this one also, and
maligned per on other mailing lists, calling per greedy and envious for
prestige, and still refused to acknowledge the debt. And again per sent a
third: and this one, too, they ignored._

 _Then said the creator of the program, What shall I do? I will send the code
of my latest extension to the program under a copyleft license; it may be they
will understand the obligation of using libre software and the reciprocal
sharing of code when they read the license and modify the code._

 _But when the programmers saw the new code, they reasoned among themselves,
saying, this is a vast improvement on the original: come, let us obfuscate
this code and delete the license, that we may continue to sell the software
without giving back._

 _So they added the code to their the program and deleted the license. What
therefore shall the original programmer do unto them?_

 _Per shall come with lawyers and sue these programmers, and shall then give
the source code to others._

 _And when they heard it, they said, Google forbid._

 _And he beheld them, and said, What is this then that is written, The license
which the engineers rejected, the same has become the backbone?_

 _Whosoever shall fall upon that license shall be broken; but on whomsoever it
shall fall, it will grind him to powder._

 _And Silicon Valley and their coders the same hour sought to lay hands on
him; and they feared the people: for they perceived that he had spoken this
parable against them._

------
type0
> I think we’ll end up with a new movement. For the same reasons that “open
> source” came up with a new name, I think the movement that will arise from
> today’s developers will also need a new name.

The name is _source available_ and you don't need to have a movement for that.
I don't see any schims here, essentially it is a more transparent version of
freemium where you also can see the code and that's all decades old.

~~~
stcredzero
_The name is source available and you don 't need to have a movement for that.
I don't see any schims here, essentially it is a more transparent version of
freemium where you also can see the code and that's all decades old._

Source transparency? Maybe we can popularize the idea that it's considered an
altruistic act for tech media companies to escrow their source with academic
organizations? This would help academics and museums preserve the exact media
experience of each generation.

From the article: _Somewhere along the way, Open Source ran into a problem
that many movements face: the members of the movement no longer understood the
ideology that created the movement in the first place._

Why shouldn't the values change? If people share source for
prestige/recognition, to benefit from "more eyeballs" and to share the
maintenance expense of shared infrastructure/libraries -- what's wrong with
that? Society still benefits. The world isn't the same place where Stallman
first thought of GNU. Why should the exact same ideology apply? What's wrong
with some evolution?

~~~
int_19h
"How could you treat a culture as separate from its connections? How could you
draw a circle around it and say, “This, this is the culture, and so it will
remain?” A culture wasn’t a final product, like a cup of coffee in alabaster,
or a sordid climax in an execution alley. People didn’t _have_ culture, they
_did_ culture. In fact, culture was like a mill: it accepted knowledge and
people, and it changed them in certain ways, and it even redesigned itself in
the process. Change was intrinsic to culture."

------
spenrose
Kudos to Klabnik for quoting from original documents. As he notes, Free
Software is a complex phenomenon, and I respectfully submit that he doesn't do
justice to the seeds-of-its-own-demise nature of its founding. My account,
based largely on Sam Williams' outstanding Free as in Freedom:

[http://www.sampenrose.net/tools/](http://www.sampenrose.net/tools/)

------
kbenson
Not through yet, but small suggestion:

> I’m not here to argue if the FSF has accomplished this goal

You reference the FSF here, but introduce it with its full name in the next
paragraph. I assume that's because you moved stuff around slightly in editing.
It's a small thing, but it's slightly weird seeing it used and then introduced
afterwards.

~~~
steveklabnik
Whoops, thanks! Will fix.

------
peterwwillis
Lots of words and phrases have their meanings change over time. That's not
culture war, that's just... culture.

~~~
steveklabnik
Sure. The war is over which particular possible future meaning will happen,
not over the concept of change.

------
carapace
I'm a Free Software fanatic. I've often thought of getting a shirt that just
says "STALLMAN IS CORRECT" in big block letters, so people know where I'm
coming from. (As an aside, FWIW, the Open Source movement looks, to someone
like me, like a largely-successful campaign to undermine the ideology that
inspires RMS. But that's beside the point I want to make.)

To me, the current economic systems (left, right, center) are all sub-optimal.
I assumed automation would obviate most human labor and usher in a kind of
Golden Age (cf. Bucky Fuller, et. al.) Instead, we have pocket computers that
serve as strip malls and surveillance devices. (I'm in SF, where we have
people living in tents in the shadow of shoddy "luxury" condos. This is hella
dystopian y'all.)

To someone like me, if you're programming a computer and NOT working towards a
post-historical techno-utopia then you're kinda part of the problem.

We have split the atom: no one should go hungry anymore.

Blah blah blah, RepRaps, blah blah, universal basic income, blah...

~~~
basementcat
> I'm in SF, where we have people living in tents in the shadow of shoddy
> "luxury" condos. This is hella dystopian y'all.

Why is it dystopian? Some moral and economic systems value individual
distinctiveness. What better way to express this distinctiveness than one's
choice of living arrangement?

~~~
harrumph
>Some moral and economic systems value individual distinctiveness. What better
way to express this distinctiveness than one's choice of living arrangement?

Did you just equate suffering from typhus, hepatitis, bacterial infections and
other diseases directly tied to homelessness with a "choice of living
arrangement"?

Did you do this while being aware that homelessness is a "choice" that
historically begins with an acute lack of capital that forces an event called
_eviction_?

~~~
basementcat
It is absolutely a choice, both on the individual and community level. Some
individuals (after consulting their trusted subject domain experts) even
choose to give their children the opportunity to suffer from Meningitis and
other serious illnesses.

Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity
of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free
housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to
accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents
alongside sidewalks.

~~~
harrumph
>It is absolutely a choice, both on the individual and community level.

Eviction, the gateway to homelessness, is in no way a choice. Inability to
accumulate, pay or borrow capital is so seldom a choice, the word is
effectively meaningless in the context.

>Until a society arrives at a consensus in which a sufficiently large quantity
of individuals with access to sufficient resources are obligated to offer free
housing and other benefits to everyone, that society has implicitly chosen to
accept the existence of a population of individuals who live in tents
alongside sidewalks.

That is true, but it has to be said it totally contradicts your first point,
because sufficient and sweeping redistribution of housing and housing capital
is the answer to nothing but the coercive suffering felt by those who lack
capital, not the answer to some alleged "choice" taken by the sufferers.

------
femto113
I remember in the early days of JPG some people claiming that despite the size
advantage GIF's image quality was inherently better and should be preferred.
One JPG fan wrote something that really stuck with me: "I don't know which is
'better', but I know I'd rather have 10 of these than 2 of those". Software
developers are, as a rule, lazy. We pick "free as in beer" software because it
means we don't have to figure out how to get accounts payable to approve it.
We pick MIT licensed software so we don't have to figure out how to get the
lawyers to approve GPL. And we publish stuff on GitHub with random new
licenses because it's so easy to do. In the end I would rather have 10 such
projects to cull code and ideas from than 2 that had carefully articulated
ideologies that provided clear motivation for each clause in their license.

------
orangeshark
Thinking more about the issues, it really seems this only affects a subset of
software, specifically server software. A SaaS company won't be able to turn
and sell some desktop software as a service. We sort of seen this in the past
with hosting companies selling services with apache, php, and various other
software together, but I guess the maintainers of these projects were not
competiting in this area so it never mattered.

I also find it odd that one of the reasons to use the term open source was
because of the ambiguity with the meaning of free. Even with this reason, the
majority of open source software is free/gratis.

I agree with the problem we are facing now, we are just not educating many
developers on free and open source software. It is probably something we need
to improve on.

------
billfruit
I do think there is a left vs right type of conflict between FSF and OSI. Esp
Eric Raymond is appears firmly to be a partisan right winger, remember the
very political things he tried to get included into the Jargon File some years
ago.

~~~
steveklabnik
I agree with you, and it partially informs where I'm going with this. I think
the FSF is liberalism, and the OSI is libertarianism, more than a left vs
right thing, exactly.

------
mapgrep
Has Hacker News ever considered a policy against undated articles?

I have no idea when this was written. It uses the word "today" four times and
is written in the present tense but is it referring to events as of a day ago,
a month ago, a year ago, a decade ago?

Please put dates on your articles. Otherwise they read as spam, cynically
positioned as "evergreen."

~~~
steveklabnik
The date is literally the first text in the article, though it is a very light
gray. Hovering over it or the title makes it black.

This is Svbtle's decision, not mine.

~~~
duado
What an idiotic hosting platform.

~~~
steveklabnik
I really like it, personally. It has some flaws like anything else, but
overall it works well.

------
droptablemain
How did this guy manage to write an entire article on GNU, the FSF, and
ultimately open-source, without once mentioning Richard Stallman's name?

~~~
steveklabnik
Because:

1\. I tried to write the article without mentioning anyone's name.

2\. I didn't like it as much as when I quoted from particular sources, so I
started putting names in.

3\. Personally, I am more sympathetic to RMS and more biased against esr. I
really, really struggled to actually link to esr in this piece, but in the
end, decided it was right. But I just didn't think about Stallman. My desire
to work against my bias ended up just biasing my work.

Writing is hard.

~~~
droptablemain
Fair enough.

