

Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy. - bkudria
http://dotcommie.net/feed/index.php?id=160

======
manish
The main point of ESR seems to be that it is economically bad for companies to
close the source of their product, which is not very true considering apple
has very good success rate with both MAC and iPhone. He has not give examples
of his "study" about companies which lost because of closing the source of
some open source software. If lawyers and corporate bosses are afraid of GPL,
let them be. How can you justify removing of GPL just because lawyers and
corporate bosses who never contributed anything to free community are afraid
of it?

~~~
tome
Quite. And the observation that the rise free software movement has been
strongly associated with copyleft licences suggests that what ESR has no basis
in reality.

------
phugoid
I don't really understand esr. I can't reconcile the elevated discourse of The
Cathedral & the Bazaar and The Art of UNIX Programming with the constant self-
praise and trolling in his blog and elsewhere. He's just too smart to be that
way.

My instinct is to disagree with anyone who speaks in those tones, until I take
time to really dissect what he said (and then disagree on better principles!).

~~~
1gor
It was fascinating to learn about your personal preferences for a tone of a
discourse and I'll patiently wait until you decide to dissect the argument.

Meanwhile, ESR's point is an excellent one.

MIT license has proven to help a project to achieve commercial critical mass,
and GPL is becoming an anachronism. Most of recent open source software that
managed to build up market- and mind-share quickly was put out under MIT
license.

GPL-like licenses are becoming an off-putting factor nowadays simply because
you expect to be offered a 'double-licensing' option somewhere down the line.
Why would people invest in a project when they are only allowed to play with
it, but never to use in a commercial environment? (Until you pay for a
commercial license that is).

RMS has been proven right. Software wants to be free, so it does not need
chains attached to it, even when they are meant for its own protection.

~~~
phugoid
If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't
profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own
product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said
company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open
project will maintain dominance.

So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will
naturally prevail anyway.

But what about the advantage Microsoft gained from basically grabbing a BSD-
licensed TCP stack for WinNT? Apparently they recoded most of that stuff since
then, but it was probably a great help at the time. All you need to defeat
esr's argument is one or two cases where it was proven wrong.

In my opinion, the GPL is not just a legal document but a cultural artifact.
When you see a GPL notice, you can feel warm fuzzy feelings of sharing certain
beliefs with the authors about freedom and sharing. You can feel the peace
that comes with source code.

To paraphrase you, why should I invest my own free time in a project that
could be subverted from bringing freedom to its users?

Market- and mind-share are not everyone's measure of success. And I'm not
prepared to have you redefine software freedom in the name of RMS today,
alright? :)

~~~
shader
I don't think that the project can be 'subverted' from bringing freedom to
users. A fork of it might be made "un-free", as in your Microsoft example. But
Microsoft did a lot of their own work, and the original project is still
around - completely free.

~~~
neilk
That's a good point, but I think RMS' insight was that software exists in an
ecosystem. No program is an island.

Let's say I develop a very useful system under a free software model. Work
that undercuts the monopoly of the unfree software producers, who fight you
tooth and nail for years. They lose, but then they do the standard countermove
-- taking the work and doing an Embrace & Extend. They provide a system which
is _subtly incompatible_ to all their users, which aims to capture all the
benefits of your new idea while wresting control of its future development.

This is the situation that RMS was fighting in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't just
Microsoft; most users of any computing platform were in thrall to one dominant
company or the other, be it Sun or IBM or what have you, who pulled similar
tricks.

Linus Torvalds has said over and over that GPLing Linux was the smartest move
he ever made. It created a situation where rival companies could trust each
other, since each contribution would always go towards growing the Linux
ecosystem for everyone. No one company would ever capture all the benefits for
themselves. This has worked so well that Linus continues to use GPL for his
newer projects like git.

Personally, I trust Linus more than ESR when it comes to understanding
software. Linus is a true pragmatist with real experience running major
software projects that are disruptive to the existing order.

ESR portrays himself as both a great programmer and a pragmatist, but the
evidence is largely confined to his own writings. I leave it up to others to
decide if fetchmail is on the same level as git or emacs. And if you look at
his other writings, he's explicitly political. He is the sort of libertarian
who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with
responsibilities to other citizens. (As the featured speaker at a gathering of
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name.) I
say this not to imply he has some evil agenda - he's trying to describe the
world how he sees it, and he regards appeals to "responsibility" as an Atlas-
Shruggy tyranny of the mediocre. However, much like Ayn Rand, he overstates
the case when he alludes to his own work as being definitive, or even
academically significant. I don't know of any empirical studies that back up
his political ideas, and in this excerpt at least he is not citing any.

~~~
anamax
> He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom
> should come with responsibilities to other citizens.

That's not true. He merely believes that they have a different set of
responsibilities than you'd like.

> As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social
> Responsibility, he ridiculed their name.

CPSR have a politics-laden definition of "Social Responsibility" which he
doesn't agree with. Is their meaning sacred or is one allowed to criticize and
even ridicule?

~~~
neilk
Well, here's the speech in question.

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html>

It may not be the last word ESR has to say on rights and responsibilities, but
I think I accurately conveyed his views. I'm not even arguing that they are
_wrong_ , although I think they are. My point was perhaps unclear, but I think
ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an
ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. He sees that as a road to
tyranny or stagnation, consistent with Ayn Rand and her intellectual
descendants.

The GPL is about building a web of such responsibilities, explicitly to force
closed-source firms to abandon their tactics and become part of a community. I
get the sense that ESR finds such tactics distasteful because of his political
beliefs. Which is fine! He's not alone in that.

The problem is that he's still claiming the GPL has held us all back by
alluding to economic studies, which I'm not sure even exist. The GPL seems to
have done really well by every empirical measure I know of, and it shows no
signs of strangling capitalism or anything.

~~~
anamax
> My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem
> with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and
> obligations.

Whether or not your point is unclear or incorrect, it's pretty much irrelevant
to whether ESR is correct about GPL.

Reminder: good people aren't necessarily correct on a given point and bad
people aren't necessarily wrong on a given point. In fact, good/bad is pretty
much uncorrelated with correct/wrong.

------
thisrod
I don't think courts need to enforce contracts anymore. If someone doesn't
live up to their word, others will find out and refuse to trust the bastard.
Dishonesty is a losing strategy in the long run, and no one is likely to try
it.

Furthermore, customers get scared off by contracts that they don't understand,
because they could be held to some obnoxious clause that's hidden in there.
Enforcing contracts is inefficient, and we should stop doing it.

Is there more to ESR's argument than that?

~~~
bmelton
The reputation aspect doesn't really hold water, as a person's reputation
doesn't travel that far, even in this global economy.

It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins
his career, but he's a high profile individual that many people know on sight.

If I started ripping people off, there's nothing to say I couldn't easily
mitigate any negative PR by changing names (or on the internet, just changing
handles). In more local endeavors, I could make a mint, ruin my name, and just
move to another state (or if pressed, another country.)

Contract law still bears an important role in accountability, IMHO.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins
his career..._

Yeah, about $65 billion too late.

It's not even a question about reputation _scaling_ \-- which (as you say) it
does not do, which it hasn't _ever_ done, since even in 10,000 BC you could
travel to a place beyond the range of your reputation. (Maybe the Internet
will change that. The jury is still out on whether it can, as well as on
whether the negative consequences of that are too great and we'll have to take
steps to ensure that the Internet _can't_ destroy your reputation worldwide.
Reputation isn't all smiles and balloons. You can destroy innocent lives with
reputation. Happens all the time.)

Reputation just doesn't _work_ in all sorts of situations. Madoff is a prime
example, but anyone who uses Twitter, reads _The Four Hour Workweek_ or spends
twenty minutes watching TV commercials can find thousands of additional
examples. Reputation is easily faked. It is easily bought. It is too readily
extrapolated from one narrow field of endeavor to another. It is biased toward
members of your family, and toward people who resemble members of your family.
It relies on past results to predict future results, and thereby mispredicts
events that occur on a longer time scale than the acquisition of a reputation.
It works by implicitly assuming its own effectiveness and breaks down in edge
cases. ("Why would Mr. Jones feed me Kool-Aid laced with poison? Just think
what that would do to his reputation!")

Most importantly, reputation is just a _predictive_ tool. When it fails, it
leaves you with no recourse: That is not its job. I can use my accountant's
reputation to predict whether he will steal my money. But if he does steal my
money, reputation is now useless as a tool for getting my money back. That's
what a contract is for. The primary purpose of a contract isn't promoting
trust; it promotes trust because its primary purpose is to _give me recourse_
after trust breaks down. I can try to take my money _back_ from my account --
and if that doesn't work I can attempt to take it out of his insurance
company, his auditors, or even people he has previously paid (look up
_clawback_ in the dictionary -- my accountant just explained it to me).

~~~
shader
Also, even court enforcement of contracts has its limits - you just go outside
the borders of a country, and they can't (easily) make you fulfill your
contract.

That said, I am all for court enforcement of contracts. In fact, I wish that
the courts would respect, if not enforce, far more contracts than they do.

------
tptacek
Well, it worked. Despite the fact that his argument has no merit and even less
relevance (a _license debate_ , in 2009?), here we are: talking about Eric S.
Raymond, someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository
in ages.

This line of argument has been part of Raymond's strategy for years. When last
we saw it, he was arguing that vendors should be allowed to embed binary blobs
into the running Linux kernel, because it didn't really matter if we could
read driver code --- Linux just needed good device support, so people would
accept it.

We get it, Raymond. Nobody's paying attention to you. Here, we'll all fix that
now. Feel better?

~~~
gonzopancho
> someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository in
> ages.

well, to be fair, he throws code into gpsd at times. not that gpsd is a great
codebase.

------
TJensen
One of the things he mentions is that all GPL does is provide a mechanism to
allow companies to also charge for the code. I disagree with that. I worked at
a start-up that wanted to open source its code. Without the GPL, there would
be no way it could do that, as a larger competitor could pick up the code base
and out-market the company.

The GPL is what made it possible for that company to consider open sourcing
its product. I'm sure there are other small companies like that as well. It
seems like removing the GPL would only be beneficial to large companies (and,
to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the GPL, but I see its value).

------
graemep
Another non-story. A repeat of what ESR has been saying for some time now,
with the standard rebuttals.

------
trjordan
I take issue with his argument that the free market punishes those who take
code close sourced. The fundamental problem with open-source development is
that it's always designed by committee. In most cases, this produces cleaner,
faster, more robust code, but it's not true in every case. Open-source code
has this tendency to get the basics right before improving the user
experience, but if the standards and basics are fuzzy, the product never gets
polished. Take OpenOffice - by trying to both copy MS and improve MS, it's no
wonder the entire thing is a big bloated mess.

Some others have mentioned Apple as a counter-example, and I think they're
dead on. By allowing BSD to be close-source forked, the market provided the
economic incentive to allow Apple to run with it. They could then close a lot
of the difficulties in an OS (arbitrary hardware setups, unwillingness to
couple strongly to applications, etc.), and they've made an incredible product
out of it. Philosophically, open-source would never make anything like OS X,
because of the amount of vertical integration.

There isn't always incentive to move a project back to closed-source, and it's
hard to argue that it's a long term strategy, but you can't say that the
market universally crushes projects that aren't open-source.

~~~
eru
OpenOffice was already borked before it was opened.

Abiword seems to work just fine in contrast.

------
leftcoaster
I don't find his argument particularly convincing. He's assuming that the
market can see that something that was open is now closed. And while that
might be true for an end user application, it's not at all true for libraries
and frameworks that are folded into closed applications.

I'm the author of an LGPL-ed library. It sees a modest amount of use and my
goal in choosing that license is that any changes made to that library be
shared back with the rest of the community. It's not GPL-ed, so you don't have
to share your application code, but if you change my library, you do have to
share your changes/improvements. If you don't want to share, then don't use my
library. Simple, right?

Well, every few months I get a note from someone who has noticed an
application that doesn't meet this simple test. And I have to send them a
dunning notice about the license violation. How many applications are there
that I don't get notes about? And absent a license, does anyone seriously
think that the mass market would give up "desirable application X" because its
creators were bad actors vis-a-vis some embedded library?

------
10ren
This was the basis of the "open source" split from "free software".

His examples are interesting, but of course don't apply to projects that were
closed in the first place (adobe/google/microsoft/oracle/ibm - anyone making
serious money from selling software). And for closed source projects, dropping
the GPL would also change the game as a whole in other ways, perhaps
unexpected.

~~~
bitdiddle
Exactly, I remember these arguments then, the bottom line is the open source
"movement" was all about promoting the superior development model. RMS, Eben
Moglen, and others warned against this. I also recall thinking this was just
some folks looking to monetize their GNU/Linux work.

The arguments about scale are interesting. For an IBM the GPL is just fine,
they have the size to compete against anyone with value added services on top
of Linux. For smaller, open source projects I've seen them prefer apache 2.0,
I speculate because it encourages commercial growth. When you're IBM someone
has to grow pretty big to pose a threat. For their other closed products they
continue to enjoy great revenues. They can put the resources into keeping them
best of breed.

At the end of the day I believe the GPL best serves the rights of individual
programmers and a moral argument can be made that software, just like
mathematics, should be free. Notice that mathematics is also largely a
collaborative effort, it's very seldom done well by isolated individuals.

~~~
astine
IBM uses the GPL as a weapon. Linux growth hurts Microsoft and provides them a
platform push their own products without Microsoft's involvement.

Ordinarily however, IBM considers it's greatest asset it IP, and they see
'GPLing' their software as a threat to their IP. They are actually rather
ambivalent towards the FOSS ideology.

------
softbuilder
It's only heresy if you bought into the religion in the first place.

------
ZeroGravitas
Assume you accept his argument that the open source process is such an
advantage and that the market is efficient enough to punish companies who use
open source code but don't reciprocate. Why then isn't the market efficient
enough to punish those companies who have an irrational fear of the GPL (and
therefore refuse to take advantage of the majority of open source code)?

This appears to be his only stated problem with the GPL, and I thought the GPL
is anti-business meme would have died long ago given the continued success of
Linux.

------
petercooper
The Ruby and Rails communities realized this years ago. Almost all open source
in those communities is MIT or BSD licensed. You can usually spot a newbie or
license zealot by the use of GPL.

~~~
jeremyw
Here, here. I've always committed original code to the public domain and have
been glad to see greater use of less restrictive licenses. Whatever havoc
near-term miscreants create, sharealike is not easily thwarted; transparency
and trust have proven brawny allies.

------
lallysingh
Ignoring the economic argument, I'm happy to see that there's mass-market-ish
consideration of opening up the licenses.

BSD is more inline with original hacker culture (IMHO, obviously). The GPL
forces you to believe what I believe to use my code. Dropping it to get rid of
viral fears is a very good idea. The more use the code has, the better off we
all are -- there are enough other good reasons than force for people to share
changes and contributions.

------
tutwabee
What is the difference between Raymond's proposed non-restrictive open source
software licensing plan and unleashing software into the public domain? It
seems like the authors of such software would have absolutely no control over
their software under these licenses, effectively forfeiting their intellectual
property rights.

~~~
gtufano
Well, if you release in public domain you lose any right, AFAIK. Someone could
step over, take your code and have intellectual property over it. You don't
forfeit your property of the code with BSD licensing. IANAL, of course.

~~~
lutorm
Someone can't make public domain software unpublic. They can take it and do
what they please, but they can't change the terms of use for others.

AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain
(unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just
"assume ownership" of it.

~~~
anamax
> AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain
> (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can
> just "assume ownership" of it.

They can't assume ownership of exactly what the US govt released, but they can
create a derived work and own that.

~~~
lutorm
True, but that's fine. It doesn't affect you in any negative way.

------
biohacker42
Exactly how did ESR get to be so prominent in the community? <\- what ever
that means.

~~~
alecco
Some famous rants like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The irony is most big
bazaar projects switched to a cathedral model, in particular the Linux kernel.
(I'm not against or in favor of this.)

The Slashdot crowd used to hype-love him.

~~~
randallsquared
It seemed as if the Slashdot crowd, et al, held him personally responsible for
the dot com crash, coming as it did shortly after he talked about how weird it
was to be rich (of course he lost it due to dropping stock prices, I think).

------
alecco

      > Effectively putting them under proprietary control, proprietary licensing and
      > then tried to make a business model out of that. They generally fail.
    

It sucks if you see people being charged for your free code by some scumbag
freeloader and the users end up with an inferior program. People with that
mentality don't mind spam-vertising to push their scams.

I used to be pro-BSD/MIT licenses, now I'm pro GPL again.

------
chanux
>I don't think we need licenses like the GPL -ESR

GPL is the glue that binds the community. Without that everything will fall
apart. And ERS wanna go that way. So bad. I'm really disappointed of his view.

------
pmarin
It is not heresy, it is common sense.

~~~
rbanffy
Actually, it's self-serving stupidity.

------
mroman
I think ESR has an excellent point, and interpret his saying that to mean that
it is not mandatory to release under the GPL if it hinders what you are doing,
because actual market conditions have proven that the closed source model
can't compete in many ways, thus it is not as large a threat as it can be
perceived to be.

