(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.)
This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views. In general, RMS has stood for the effort of trying to find common cause around specific issues and principles among people who might radically disagree about other things (another example was the League for Programming Freedom, a single-issue campaign against software patents that actively aspired to include people who disagree with RMS about free software!).
It's true that the big-tent concept could fail as a tactical matter if it turns out that the success of one cause really is indispensable to the success of another, which is a big part of what this article is claiming. But I wish the article had engaged a bit more with the fact that RMS does not appear to agree with this analysis and has consistently wanted people with non-leftist views to join the free software movement, including enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and private property. In other words, it's not an oversight or an accident. (To be clear about this, the classic formulation of RMS's free software philosophy calls for not regarding software as private property -- for example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" -- but stakes out no position on regarding, say, financial instruments, airplanes, factories, companies, plots of land, or apartment buildings as private property. Hence many more people could agree with it.)
Indeed, as an independent consultant I'm far more inclined to use LGPL/AGPL/GPL licences for work that I think I could sell commercially precisely because I see those licenses and private property/capitalism as very compatible. Quite simply, I'm happy if you either pay me money or code for the right to use my code; the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka advertising to the minority who will give something back.
Meanwhile I often joke that the highly permissive BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are for commies.
I've seen a lot of companies using GPL/AGPL for exactly the same purpose - to prevent other commercial companies from reusing their code. It is especially common in areas where added-value customizations are valuable - i.e., if you have GPL (or, usually, dual-licensed commercial/GPL) core for, say, document handling system, you can market it as open-source, take contributions, and build add-on business on it, but if a competitor comes out and wants to use your core, they now have to publish source for all their add-ons, so you can have them for free. That puts you at the advantageous position. It's not the unique practice, I've seen many companies doing this. Not sure that's what FSF meant to happen, but that's what is happening.
I would have thought the FSF/Stallman would be perfectly fine with this. Their main objective is to maximise the freedom of users by advocating for software that can be inspected, modified, shared etc. As far as I know, they are not opposed to someone making a private income off this kind of software.
However, it's probably true to say that a number of possible methods of extracting an income would be closed off to you under these conditions. They're closed off not because the copyright(left) is anti private income, but because they're probably user oppressive practices (ones that would be very quickly ripped out of the codebase e.g. sending user private information back to home-base for subsequent sale to advertisers etc.)
That's my layman's understanding of the situation anyhow (happy to be corrected if wrong).
Thing is, a very common model along these lines is to dual-license under copyleft for free, and proprietary commercial license for those who don't like copyleft "virality" (e.g. the way Qt used to do it until switching to LGPL).
This works great; but the proprietary part is completely antithetical to the whole "free software" concept.
I've been thinking about the dual-licensing approach. Strategically, one could argue that it still aligns with FSF goals. My logic is roughly:
(objective) We want people to use software that doesn't oppress them -> People naturally want to use the 'best' software -> Copyleft licences ensure the 'best' software is non-oppressive (via open source, freedom to modify etc.) as derivative improvements can be merged back into the mainline.
The key part is that the 'non-oppressive' software is 'the best' (or at least of decent quality) so that people will naturally use it and society as a whole will remain un-oppressed. Mightn't one extend this logic and say: Although we don't get the benefit of useful modifications being mainlined for closed-source, secondarily licensed derivatives, more money for the project means more resources/devs -> ultimately means improved mainline software?
I mean, I'm unsure if I agree with that argument, but it seems at least plausible.
I think it's a perfectly plausible argument. The problem is that it is a pragmatic argument. It is possible to be pragmatic in pursuit of one's ideals - indeed, I would argue that this approach is the one that usually works best (or at all) - but FSF, and Stallman personally, seem to frown upon short-term pragmatic deviations from ideological purity.
> if you have GPL (or, usually, dual-licensed commercial/GPL) core for, say, document handling system, you can market it as open-source, take contributions, and build add-on business on it, but if a competitor comes out and wants to use your core, they now have to publish source for all their add-ons, so you can have them for free.
This is a bit tricky to pull off unless you get a copyright assignment or a license permitting relicensing from all contributors, or your GPL licensed core has a large exception carved out of it (say, for proprietary plugins).
You can use the code without regard to GPL, since you own the copyright. Of course, contributions usually require copyright assignment in this model, via CLA of some kind.
> Meanwhile I often joke that the highly permissive BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are for commies.
On the contrary.
Let us use Politicalcompass [1] as spectrum. Gist of it: x = left v. right economics, y = libertarian vs authoritarian.
Now, communism (not Trotsky; the communism as we have seen in countries in the 20th century) is left on x, but high on y because its highly authoritarian.
BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are more permissive than GPL, and its obvious GPL is more authoritarian in this way. But because the GPL enforces the code to (mostly) stay the way it is, it is more left-wing than BSD/MIT/etc.
"the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka advertising to the minority who will give something back."
A lot of users also provide free support, bug reports, and beta testing.
I think they're working out how they're going to justify what they're going to do with his movement after he's no longer in charge of it. In the last year about three different times I have seen people making the same argument, that free software needs to be understood as part of a broader left wing ideology. It's bullshit and I hope those people lose hard.
I've been contributing to open-source software projects for more a decade now. I've never seen any connection with left-wing ideology, and no incompatibility with any ideology I can think of. I've seen all kinds of people participating, from communists to objectivists. I think that's why it worked so well. If something can seriously hurt the idea, it's trying to make an narrow political-ideological cause out of it. You may gain some partisan support and budgets on that, but the losses in goodwill would be enormous.
This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views. In general, RMS has stood for the effort of trying to find common cause around specific issues and principles among people who might radically disagree about other things (another example was the League for Programming Freedom, a single-issue campaign against software patents that actively aspired to include people who disagree with RMS about free software!).
It's true that the big-tent concept could fail as a tactical matter if it turns out that the success of one cause really is indispensable to the success of another, which is a big part of what this article is claiming. But I wish the article had engaged a bit more with the fact that RMS does not appear to agree with this analysis and has consistently wanted people with non-leftist views to join the free software movement, including enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and private property. In other words, it's not an oversight or an accident. (To be clear about this, the classic formulation of RMS's free software philosophy calls for not regarding software as private property -- for example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" -- but stakes out no position on regarding, say, financial instruments, airplanes, factories, companies, plots of land, or apartment buildings as private property. Hence many more people could agree with it.)