
Why Doesn't Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero? (2008) - prajjwal
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/why-doesnt-anyone-give-a-crap-about-freedom-zero.html
======
icebraining
I hope the irony of asking about the _Free Software_ "Freedom Zero" and then
only talking about Open Source was not lost on Atwood.

People don't care about Freedom Zero for the same reason why Open Source took
over Free Software. Because the vast majority developers and businesses
embrace it only for their only self-interest, by reducing development time and
costs. They don't give a single fuck about user freedom, as it's well shown by
the number of companies who release open source backend tools but keep their
customer-facing applications proprietary.

In fact, this is no secret: the whole _point_ of creating Open Source as an
alternative to Free Software was to keep the code sharing parts while shedding
the ethical positions of the GNU philosophy, such as Freedom Zero, which were
unpleasant to the money makers in the industry.

~~~
widdershins
By the same token 99.9% of consumers don't care about the legalities and
'freedoms' that Atwood talks about - only what they can do with their
computers and the ease with which they can do it.

~~~
icebraining
"what they can do with their computers" is the whole point of freedom zero.

~~~
msbarnett
No, "what a hypothetical user _could_ do, _potentially_ , given unlimited
skill in the computing domain" is the whole point of freedom zero.

All everyday users give a shit about is what they actually _can do easily_ ,
given their shallow understanding of computing devices, to get the shit they
need doing done.

This rarely taxes or even approaches the limit of commercial, closed software,
so they perforce give zero shits about hypothetical freedoms that for all
intents and purposes do not exist for them given their time and skill
constraints.

~~~
betterunix
You think the average computer user rarely approaches the limits imposed by
proprietary software? You must have never met someone who:

* Wanted to rip a video DVD

* Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another

* Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in

* Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television

These are _all_ software problems, _all_ imposed by artificial restrictions,
and _all_ violations of Freedom 0. You seem to think Freedom 0 is about
technical competence; yet weak technical skills are what proprietary software
vendors _take advantage of_ when they impose these sorts of restrictions.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions,
> and all violations of Freedom 0._

Those problems _can not_ be separated out and analyzed independently like
this.

> _Wanted to rip a video DVD_

> _Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another_

Without those two limitations _you wouldn 't have_ either DVDs and iPods, as
the economics of these technologies wouldn't made sense for companies which
created them.

> _Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in_

This sound like an accidental technical limitation.

> _Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television_

This is, again, the limit that allows you to have those movies in the first
place.

I'm all for the open source and Freedom 0, but please don't forget that it's
not about Freedom 0 being violated or not. It's about it being violated or
_not having anything at all_.

~~~
Dylan16807
You seriously think that DVDs wouldn't exist if they couldn't have their
little ROT-13? Well I don't think this is going to be a very fruitful
conversation.

Oh but while you're here how about you explain the popularity of DRM-free mp3
downloads :)

~~~
mavhc
That's why after DVDs encryption was cracked they stopped making DVDs

~~~
Jach
I thought that was because better formats came out... With no improvement on
the 'encryption' end as far as I can tell, because I can find bluray rips for
any movie that's come out on bluray.

~~~
nknighthb
He was being sarcastic. CSS (the pathetic 40-bit "encryption" used on DVDs)
was cracked in 1999. Blu-ray wasn't commonplace until 8-10 years later.

Blu-ray's AACS actually is much better than CSS ever was, and as far as I know
it hasn't been attacked in either a brute-force or break-the-algorithm sense.
But like all other DRM, there are inherent flaws it can't work around. You
need only extract a player key and you can freely decrypt the data.

------
Roboprog
I don't quite understand Jeff's point in the article. Is Windows really that
much more open than OSX?

I got my (first) Next^H^H^H^H Mac about a year ago. I don't want to stop
running Linux yet, but the Mac works much better than any Windows machine I
have ever been forced to endure. While the Mac might not have open hardware,
it at least lets me load a wide variety of open software onto it: Libre
Office, Groovy, Go-lang, Ruby, etc. (Windows does also, but the BSD
personality on the Mac makes the experience more frictionless)

I do care about freedom, but the platform which often simply does not _work_
well enough to be playable is no freedom at all.

I should probably add that my first programming job was back in '85 working on
(dead language) under MS-DOS, so I have a long history of abuse at the hands
of Microsoft. I'll agree that the Apple II, and also the C64, were nice little
machines to tinker with, though.

~~~
venomsnake
You cannot control or change the OS according to Jeff. Which means that you
are as free as the OS allows you and not as free as the hardware allows you.

I do agree that OS that allows you to run self signed code and unsigned code
and have root access is almost on the top of the freedom ladder.

~~~
nknighthb
You have exactly as much technical control over Mac OS X as you do over
Windows. You can execute arbitrary code and modify any system file you wish,
even the kernel.

I'm not clear why people don't know this. Do non-Mac users really think OS X
has to be "jailbroken" like an iPhone?

~~~
venomsnake
But can you change the OS without bootcamp? Arbitrary bootloaders etc?

~~~
nknighthb
What? Yes. Of course. Again, I don't get this. Where is the idea that Macs are
locked down coming from? Who told you this is a problem?

Edit: By the way, in 1996, Apple released MkLinux.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux)

This was even _before_ they stopped using non-standard components in their
computers.

How anyone could ever have thought Apple was blocking installation of
alternative operating systems is beyond me.

------
cwp
Because nobody can exercise it anyway. Freedom 0 is really just a corollary of
freedom 1, "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it
does your computing as you wish." If you can't change a program, you can't run
it for any purpose, you can only run it for the purpose intended by the
original author.

Freedom 1 is pretty hard to exercise too. For any given bit of technology,
there are very few people outside of the original authors that are capable of
changing it in meaningful and useful ways, and even they will need to put in a
lot of effort do so.

It may be apocryphal, but the Apple II discussed in the article is said to be
the last computer designed entirely by one person. Modern computers are just
too complex for any one person to entirely understand. We can only answer
questions, fix bugs and add features in a narrow speciality. In order to use a
computer system we have to rely on other people to handle issues outside our
areas of competence. Those people might be part of communities that help each
other for free, or might work for companies that provide support to their
customers.

So freedom 0 is a bit like the freedom to go to the moon. Having it is better
than not, but most people don't benefit from it.

~~~
rmc
Not totally true. If I, as a programmer, can excercise Freedom 1 to write a
new programme, then I can give it to you, and you can excersice Freedom 0 to
run it on your device. If the Overlords™ don't want that type of programme to
run on your device, there's nothing they can do about it.

~~~
ctdonath
Xcode is free. Write/download source code, click Run. Where isn't Freedom 0?

------
mwfunk
Plenty of people care about Freedom Zero. Millions or tens of millions or even
hundreds of millions. That's great; that's their prerogative. Jeff seems to be
really saying "why doesn't _everyone_ care about Freedom Zero?", and that's a
very different and much more interesting question.

Unfortunately for him (but not for humanity as a whole), the answer is that
everyone has their own Freedom Zero that they care about, and one of them
might be, "I want to use the hardware and software that I want to use, that
works for me, rather than be restricted to what Jeff Atwood personally
approves of and claims to do so for moral and ethical reasons that I don't
necessarily agree with."

I'm not saying he's wrong. It's just much more interesting to live in a world
where tons of different philosophies perpetually collide and mutate and
influence each other, rather than one in which we've collectively decided that
there's one and only one way to do something, and there's no room for debate
or people just doing whatever the heck they want to do provided they don't
hurt anyone else.

------
chipotle_coyote
Variants of this come up from time to time, and that alone rather undercuts
the question in the article title -- if _no one_ gave a crap about "Freedom
Zero," then people wouldn't keep asking the question.

My biggest problem with Atwood's specific argument is that claiming that Macs
are "dongles" for OS X is that it's essentially an argument that _platform
incompatibilities_ violate Freedom Zero, which is, with all respect to Atwood,
a little nutty. I owned a TRS-80 in the late 1980s, and I'm pretty sure that
my inability to run Apple II software on it could not be accurately blamed on
hardware-based copy protection. The Mac is not a dongle for OS X any more than
OS X is a dongle for Cocoa software. Or are we seriously going to argue that
it's harmful for consumers if we can't run all applications on all platforms,
and that the differentiation should only be a matter of aesthetics? (Which,
all platforms followed Freedom Zero, would be easily changeable anyway,
right?)

The thing I'd really like to see more focus on is _data freedom._ Maybe what
I'm using to read ebooks, play music, watch videos, create word processing
documents and spreadsheets, write code, and edit photos in is open source,
maybe it isn't -- but switching to something _else_ to do those things in
shouldn't require me to lose fidelity/functionality in a conversion process,
let alone require me to either re-buy something due to DRM (or crack the DRM).
Yes, if I had the freedom _and the ability_ to modify every application on
every platform, I would theoretically have complete data freedom -- but I
should be able to have that even if I'm using 100% closed source software.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's not just architectural differences; Apple goes _out of their way_ to make
OS X break on the hardware they don't sell. This is a definite violation of
freedom zero.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
My understanding was that it's less malevolence on Apple's part than Macs not
being _quite_ like PCs architecturally, particularly with respect to firmware
-- but it's somewhat orthogonal to both my (strained) analogy and my point. :)

I like _both_ OS X and Apple hardware. But we're living in the future,
compared to back when I first got into computing, and data is a _lot_ more
easily transportable between platforms. If at some point I decide that I don't
like that combination enough to pay the price differential between a new Mac
laptop and a comparable PC laptop[1], switching platforms will suck a little,
but it won't be a nightmare. I simply don't agree with the assertion that my
freedom is cruelly curtailed if I can't run OS X on a cheaper Acer laptop.

[1]: Please nobody tell me that I'm paying three times as much for "exactly
the same thing," or conversely argue that Macs are cheaper than PCs if you
only look at it the right way. No, I'm not. No, they're not.

------
dylangs1030
I love this post intellectually, but I believe it has a fairly simple answer -
convenience and design. @patio11 also discussed these on his blog[1], which
I'll get into:

Most people (users/customers) don't give a crap about freedom zero because
most people _aren 't hackers._ Most people want things to "just work." Most
people don't want to tinker and screw around hunched in front of a lit screen
for a few hours just to set up their drivers in a specific way.

On the other side, most employees don't care about perpetuating freedom zero
or that philosophy because it's not as rewarding. I mean, yeah, it feels good
to have open source projects and contribute to the community. But let's be
honest, it doesn't pay the bills as well as working at, say, Microsoft does.
Proprietary software attracts the more highly skilled engineers ( _usually_ \-
obviously some people are possessed of such personal conviction in software
freedom that they will give up high salaries for their hacker community, but
this is not the norm).

Here's a few examples to illustrate my point:

My mother is barely computer literate. If I presented her with Banshee instead
of iTunes, she'd freak out. It would either gray out, become non-responsive,
and subsequently close on her while syncing, or she wouldn't have all the
features that a coordinated group of engineers in a multinational company
built and designed for mass production.

As a programmer, I'm the same way. I want things to just work. Just because I
know how to do things most other people don't using a computer doesn't
automatically mean I'm invested in the free software movement. I dual-boot
linux on my Mac, but I only use it for technical reasons. I don't honestly
believe it's applicable or relevant to most people's uses of a computer. It
doesn't "just work" _a lot of the time_ \- enough for it to be annoying.
There's a "feel good" euphoria that occurs in an intellectually superior sort
of way when you install linux, but it quickly drops off when it's a hassle
just to get YouTube videos to play properly.

Secondly, and _just as importantly_ \- design. Do rhythmbox or banshee have as
_sexy_ a design as iTunes? Could they, with the resources they have? No, and
no. Sure, they have accomplished something impressive, and in some respects,
they have higher utility than iTunes. But overall, it's not an attractive
interface. As Dave Wiskus would say, it isn't _relevant_ and it doesn't
_match_ \- a program needs to look like it _belongs_ in the system it's
designed under in order for it to be liked by a user many times. This doesn't
just mean that software has to look like Windows or Mac, but that it has to
_understand_ the user and take out cumbersome decisions while preserving
features in a way that is _similarly intuitive to the system it resides in_ \-
that's very hard. It's also why UI and UX designers are as well paid as
programmers.

We see this with apps all the time. When an app doesn't look like it matches
the sleekness of iPhone's design i.e. it's clunky or looks "themed" with no
custom overhead, it has a verifiable impact on the marketability of the app.
The same applies to software. patio11's Bingo Card Creator competes with open
source by being _better_ because he has higher motivation. It's _easier_ to
obtain proprietary software (read: not cheaper, easier) because there's no
hierarchy of betas and alphas and complicated names. There's a simple
"download" or "install" button. The design has full teams of people behind it,
knowing which hundred things to take out for which one thing to keep. Open
source can't afford that.

This is why freedom zero isn't popular. I love free software, and I have a
good advantage over "normal" (non-technical) users in utilizing it, but it's
just not practical if you desire convenience _and_ utility.

[1]: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-
comp...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-compete-with-
open-source-software/)

~~~
icebraining
_Most people (users /customers) don't give a crap about freedom zero because
most people aren't hackers. Most people want things to "just work." Most
people don't want to tinker and screw around hunched in front of a lit screen
for a few hours just to set up their drivers in a specific way._

Oh, please, not this outdated crap. As long as you don't choose a particularly
hostile machine, nowadays GNU Linux distros don't require almost any manual
driver installation, and even restricted drivers can be installed with a
couple of clicks.

Linux just doesn't offer anything that most users can appreciate. How hard it
is to install or run doesn't even enter the picture.

 _My mother is barely computer literate. If I presented her with Banshee
instead of iTunes, she 'd freak out. It would either gray out, become non-
responsive, and subsequently close on her while syncing, or she wouldn't have
all the features that a coordinated group of engineers in a multinational
company built and designed for mass production._

Clearly you haven't used the Windows version of that marvel of technology. It
features all of that plus randomly not detecting the iPod, being bloated as
hell and slow as molasses.

I agree that Free Software is not as convenient as proprietary software,
though, and I frankly have no interest in convincing any of my relatives to
use Linux instead of Windows.

~~~
dylangs1030
I'm glad you agree with my conclusion.

What you said about drivers is defensible; it was just the first thought that
popped into my head. Nowadays linux has progressed enough to bypass that
_usually_ \- but what about being required to use the terminal just to
install?

Most users don't know what _sudo_ , _wget_ , _make_ , or _apt-get_ commands
are, just to start. Most users don't know what _commands_ are, in fact. They
don't care about root access or custom options. They need and expect a
graphical wizard to walk them through the core basics of their programs, and
even then they shouldn't try to perform anything other than the checked box
"basic installation". Perhaps that's a better example?

Now, you can blame this on third party developers not packaging their
applications as handily as they do for Mac or Windows, forcing people to
gather and compile sources themselves. But this doesn't change the bottom-line
- linux is _not_ convenient (which we agree on).

And I have used iTunes on Windows, and I found it wasn't bloated. It seems to
be more or less on par with my Mac to be honest, though frankly I haven't used
it for that platform except to help other people in the past year.

~~~
jiggy2011
To be fair, if you use a friendly distro like Ubuntu you don't have to touch
the command line unless you want to or you're trying to do something
reasonably advanced.

Ironically I also find that I can often get things to work much more easily
too.

Tried to setup a printer the other day under Windows 7 and went through a
process of faffing around with HP drivers, updates and weird dialog boxes.

Under Ubuntu I told it to print and it basically said "on this printer?" , I
said "yes" and it printed.

Also trying to share files between 2 computers on a LAN is an order of
magnitude easier.

The bigger problem is that lack of strong options for certain types of
software (e.g Music editing, Graphics editing, Games) under Linux and also
support for some types of hardware. Though these would be quickly rectified if
it had marketshare.

~~~
dylangs1030
The problem with marketshare is that it's a cycle. Getting marketshare
requires those kinds of features (generally), which requires paying your
engineers a better salary (again, generally, there are exceptions). But that
won't happen without a marketshare to bankroll better engineers. And at that
point, you might as well be proprietary.

~~~
jiggy2011
Not sure what salaries Canonical pay , but I assume that they are competitive
enough. I have heard that the perks are good, work from home etc. So I doubt
that they have a problem attracting good talent, I would wager that their
average level of developer skill is significantly higher than the average
devshop.

Of course they are a smaller company (than say Apple), so may not have the
resources to build every single program people want. OTOH third party vendors
can certainly fill this gap, but then you hit the chicken and egg problem that
third party vendors don't want to develop for it (at least desktop software)
because marketshare is low.

Web based and cross platform software alleviates this problem significantly
though.

Of course it depends if you are Richard Stallman and must use 100% GPL
software for everything, or whether you are happy with certain compromises. I
would say that having your core OS as 100% open source software even if you
run proprietary apps on top is a significant step forward.

~~~
icebraining
rms doesn't have to use 100% GPL software, he's fine with MIT, Apache, BSD,
etc ;)

------
theltrj
The whole argument is a non sequitur. The products and companies the author is
hoping people defer too, are not prevalent in mainstream society yet. Ubuntu
and Arch Linux do not have stores in the mall. Sparkfun is not making arduino
based mp3 players and phones down by the food court.

I think this highlights an interesting point, but we aren't there yet as a
culture, globally.

------
rossjudson
I've always been interested in maintaining the ability to perform general
computation. To me, that's being able to run any program I construct on my
hardware. I don't demand that the program be able to interact with other
systems, but I do demand that I be able to execute the instructions I want.

That generalizes freedom 0 to the set of programs the user constructs.

If a general-purpose program has to pass an authentication protocol before
it's allowed to run, the surrounding environment is an attack on the
construction of free speech by more efficient means.

Or something like that.

------
rmrfrmrf
There's always been this sort of philosophical disconnect in the programming
world.

"We love Windows and Linux because they don't lock down their environments
like Apple does!"

"We love Android because its ecosystem isn't locked down like iOS's!"

Yet, on the other hand:

"We hate products that are designed by committee!"

"We love Rails because it forces convention over configuration!"

~~~
icebraining
It's almost like there are different people with different opinions.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Don't be ridiculous!

