Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

by fouc • 7 years ago

277 365 7 years ago

gnu.org

dang2• 7 years ago

Threads from

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9711346

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7435720

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2239288

cat_plus_plus2• 7 years ago

That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for thousands of dollars. So even if having to deal with a difficult old man makes you feel a little less inclusive, it's not too crazy to give him some breaks. The kids who ran him out of town only know how to destroy, not how to create anything comparable to what he did.

malvosenior6• 7 years ago

I don’t think that’s fair to those who had a problem with RMS. Him arguing about peodophilia on a mailing list does nothing at all to help his ideas spread. It takes quite a lot away in fact. What was the purpose of his argument? To defend his friend Minsky? Again, that does nothing to promote free software, it only adds unneeded and negative baggage. That’s bad leadership and bad for RMS’ message.

Yes he had great ideas. They were so great that they exist beyond the man who created them and now benefit from him not being involved.

jnwatson• 7 years ago

So just because he happens to be the president of an organization means he can’t defend his colleague on an unrelated private message board?

The chilling effect of such a policy essentially means that all advocacy groups must be led by slick marketing politicians, always on-point and on-brand, even if off camera.

zaphirplane3• 7 years ago

you are wording the sentences to create a vague wrong impression Of what transpired

Be specific about what he said that you find abhorrent

This topic is uncomfortable and a lot of people stay out of it or strongly self censor. he didn’t.

new_realist• 7 years ago

OSS predates Stallman, and will outlast him. His contributions are overstated, as is the benefit of Free Software, generally, as compared to more permissive licenses.

flippinburgers• 7 years ago

Free Software is transparent science. I don't see how you could argue that the benefit is overstated. Ideas are built on one another and that is precisely how advancements are made. What he pushes for is extremely important.

msla2• 7 years ago

His contributions are overstated, as is the benefit of Free Software, generally, as compared to more permissive licenses.

That's certainly what companies which made their fortunes out of taking software out of the commons and turning it into products want people to think. Enough programmers don't want to be turned into unpaid employees that copyleft licenses have substantial uptake.

Also:

OSS predates Stallman, and will outlast him.

... refusing to see a distinction between OSS and Free Software? Neat rhetorical trick.

mistrial9• 7 years ago

I met with Stallman once, in a room of two dozen people, around Stanford in 1987 or so .. I can tell you the "OSS" or whatnot you are referring to, existed in a very different world then. Stallman had a twenty minute talk, which was a strict and tightly worded explanation of the significance and reasoning behind his proposals. It was very much the utter opposite of a two line throw-away judge-and-jury declaration of conclusion, as seen above.

garmaine2• 7 years ago

The term “open source software” was invented by Christine Peterson in 1998 (edit: thanks!) to distinguish from GPL-style free software.

Open source (inclusive of both) never really had any traction outside a few limited domains until the GNU project.

ekianjo3• 7 years ago

OSS predates Stallman

If you are talking about the term OSS, then you are completely wrong. It came long after "Free Software" was coined and was named differently to mark a different movement.

ariabuckles5• 7 years ago

It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting breaks for 30 years.

That he has also done some very good things isn't a good argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.

sprafa• 7 years ago

Didn’t know about this. Where can I read more about his behaviour around women?

zaphirplane3• 7 years ago

That just can’t be true, a lot , I’ll go as far as say absolute majority of paid and hobby OSS developers have no interaction with RMS

Even projects under the gnu.org umbrella probably don’t interact that much with RMS, let alone have discouraging interaction.

I have no dog in this fight but have a bias for factual discussions

4bpp12• 7 years ago

Do you believe he has alienated more women from FOSS than he has inspired people to contribute to it? Considering the frankly extremely low percentage of female contributors, it seems that he would have had to personally (considering that all of the creepy behaviours listed seem to be limited to his meatspace circles) alienate multiple women for every one woman who did wind up working on in free software, which seems unrealistic simply on the basis that most people in FOSS never met Stallman. (On the same basis, I would actually be inclined to believe that he has probably inspired more women specifically than he has alienated, too.)

Note also that all of the anecdotes of actual bad behaviour that seem to come up are from about two decades ago, and we seem to be supposed to conclude that the pattern never stopped on the basis of that and a pathologically misquoted and misrepresented email he sent on the Epstein/Minsky case. Considering that the real email is at most slightly tone-deaf, the most likely model of reality to me seems to be that he has fixed that behaviour well over a decade ago, but a number of activists had resolved to never let it go until they found some way to completely destroy any status and reputation he has.

knocte2• 7 years ago

I agree with you about all the past bad behaviour, but the e-mail about Minsky was a bad choice to be the "last straw". It was an email calling for accusation-inflation prevention, which the media portrayed as completely the opposite (and this way of manipulation information from the media should be criminal, in my opinion).

luckydata• 7 years ago

Agreed, the message is worth spreading and fighting for, the man can go, he's too toxic.

lostjohnny16• 7 years ago

RMS alienated so many women

[citation needed]

cat_plus_plus2• 7 years ago

What kind of women and does anyone else find it sexist to assume that men will always be the offenders and women the offendees? Programming involves deconstructing complex problems into basic steps while ignoring full real world nuances in order to derive a reasonable abstraction. Like... deconstructing allegations against Minsky into basic aspect (instructed to have sex vs actually had sex, aware of lack of consent or not, aware of age or not, 16 can consent in jurisdiction X year Y or not). Successful programmers trend not super socially aware and often on autism spectrum. So maybe women genuinely interesting in programming would be like Ada Lovelace, a compulsive gambler with messy love life who dreamed of building a computer to beat poker? How long would she last in 2019 MIT?

And if you get alienated from a career path because of one bad professor, go and find something else that you want so badly that you are willing to tough it out. Otherwise you will always blame your professional success limits on people not supporting you enough, or cracking an off-color joke or two or microaggressions. Do you honestly expect to never have to deal with a problem boss/coworkers/customer in a super-competitive private sector job? Don't tell me nurses and schoolteachers never have to deal with someone like RMS or worse. And sure, some degree of bad behavior should have proportional consequences, but do we hear about how women get alienated from these professions en masse?

htns• 7 years ago

Yeah, I wouldn't put anything under a "GPL or any later version" for the time being.

harry8• 7 years ago

Writing anyone or any organisation a blank cheque is problematic. Even if they are perfection personified now, will they be in the future? Will it be run by none of the same people? Will they have an entirely different agenda to the one you agree with?

If you can't know these things with sufficient certainty, definitely pick your license. Then only change it deliberately for your own purposes with your own goals and ideals driving it.

Devils advocate: maybe gpl will never have a later version you could possibly disagree with as it's too important to too many people just like you.

knolax2• 7 years ago

I saw a tweet on Mastodon that claimed Git was a "major barrier for people of color" or some other nonsense. Meritocracy is dying here.

pzone• 7 years ago

That kind of talk always seems downright racist to me.

hinkley• 7 years ago

Until the latest stink I wasn't even aware that RMS still had a platform. I haven't heard from him in probably 15 years.

That may be a good thing. FSF isn't about Richard Stallman.

And some of the "kids" that ran him out of town know to keep plants at their desks because it turns out he's kind of a creep around young women, and also afraid of plants. None of that information has anything to do with mailing lists. There is always some reason that gets people to deal with a problem and that reason is often objectively kinda shitty. People overlook it because the problem is finally being addressed.

One of the things that's going on in the current political climate is that it's no longer enough to be a great developer but a horrible human being. Development in the 90's was punctuated by some truly titanic man-children that everyone had to 'put up with' because they were just so good at the rest of their job.

Gates seems to have grown up (I'm curious what Ballmer has been up to). Jobs, god bless him, died of his own stubbornness. They keep Ellison out of the spotlight, as they seem to have done with Stallman. Until he retires that leaves Torvalds (who I hope outlasts Ellison).

I am sure there were points in my life where I could be painted with that brush, and I can say with a bit of authority that we don't need that kind of behavior. And if behavior is tolerated at the top then it's effectively tolerated everywhere.

concordDance8• 7 years ago

There is always some reason that gets people to deal with a problem and that reason is often objectively kinda shitty

The problem is that that reason is the one people think is the reason the problem got dealt with.

It has a nasty chilling effect.

craigsmansion8• 7 years ago

and also afraid of plants

from someone who actually worked with him:

"p.s.: In the closet-sized "office" Bushnell, McGrath, and I shared for a time we did have some spider plants as part of a running silly joke. They did not actually scare RMS away OF COURSE"

https://archive.is/7qepC

sn41• 7 years ago

In the years to come, I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done. Now chemists and biologists have started talking about making data openly available and so forth. It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice.

I think as a society, we need to calm down a bit. We should not blacklist people merely based on opinions. We are one step away from thoughtcrime, and need to step back.

Frondo• 7 years ago

The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades.

This was the one that disturbed me the most:

"Going to an RMS talk in the early 90s and meeting with him in person was among the worst of my experienced - I was fifteen, still obviously underage, and skipping gym class to hear him speak at a professional conference (that I'd snuck into). He actually pointed to me in the back and proclaimed, into the mic, "A GIRL!" causing the audience to turn and look. Mortifying. Then he proceeded to gesture toward me every time he referred to "EMACS Virgins." (I cannot believe that he is still doing the same talk 10+ years later.) I was young and terrified of calling out someone that I'd previously idolized."

Did he commit a crime? No. Should we overlook it, and should he remain in a leadership position at a prestigious organization? I can't imagine so; what kind of message does that send?

Anecdote from: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Experiences

quickthrower22• 7 years ago

Wow. Terrible. Hope she wasn't put off computer science / IT by that.

zapzupnz2• 7 years ago

The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior, not just once but repeatedly, over the course of decades

Indeed. A lot of people leaping to his defence have only a very surface-level understanding of his past record and think the accusations are something new or recent.

Nobody expects the people who change the world to be perfect, but it really doesn't do to defend people based purely on their reputation. It's unjust to let influential people off the hook just because they're influential.

Please note: I'm not pronouncing any opinion on whether his condemnation and dismissal are justified.

michannne4• 7 years ago

If I had a de-platformed individual every time they made a comment someone took offense to, I'd end up with an animal farm. Definitely, his comments should not be overlooked, but intellectually benching someone because of what they've said is not how you handle these types of situations.

Furthermore, his leadership qualities depend only on his ability to lead a group towards a goal, which he was doing swell at.

Stratoscope• 7 years ago

Same thing ten years ago. I had lunch with a young lady who was maintainer of a popular GNU project, and much of the conversation revolved around the creepy advances RMS had made toward her.

She was older than the 15 year old you quoted, and I think she knew how to take care of herself. But obviously his behavior had caused her quite a bit of discomfort.

4bpp12• 7 years ago

It's notable that all of these anecdotes are from back in the '90s and before; since I assume Stallman's accusers dug around very hard for material and this is the best they could find, it stands to reason that he probably has long since improved in that regard. Moreover, the same cluster of people among others has seriously been arguing (https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...) that a mattress in the office of someone whose every public profile involves a mention of how he slept in the office for years to develop GNU is unambiguous sexual innuendo (quote: "He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it."). I am not sure how trustworthy their accounts can be considered to begin with.

lostjohnny16• 7 years ago

The complaints about stallman aren't a matter of thoughtcrime, they're a matter of entirely inappropriate behavior

Who are you exactly to think you can decide what is - without doubt - "entirely inappropriate behaviour"?

are you in charge of the thought police?

grawprog3• 7 years ago

One of the things that really soured me to working as a biologist was being told the data we collected would not be allowed to be made freely available, as we originally proposed and was accepted in our grant proposal. Instead it would be locked away in a government database, available for a fee despite the data being collected using tax dollars, after we'd been working for over a year and a half on the project and had gone throught two funding cycles, on threat of our grant money being withdrawn.

It was after we found an endangered species in an active mine site. It sucked. We'd built an open database easily accessible online, we used open street maps to display the data and had built a bunch of custom layers, we were also working with another group that wanted to add the data to their open database. In the end though none of that happened and the work that was put into making it was wasted and everything was given to the government and locked away.

harshreality• 7 years ago

What the hell? What mine and what endangered species?

Why the hell is my government hiding this data?

gHosts• 7 years ago

This is why we need initiatives like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data

prepend• 7 years ago

That sounds really frustrating. Fortunately many countries now have open data legislation. For example, in the US, since 2013 by executive order (M-13-13) and this year (Evidencemaking in Policy/Open Data Act), federally funded projects must eventually release their data to the public or include a plan explaining why national security or privacy reasons prevent it. I think it’s getting better.

atoav2• 7 years ago

To me open data feels a lot like global warming: individual action is great and needed, but what we really need is to enshrine it in law and make it the default. Make public data usable, while protecting private data or like they say in Germany: Öffentliche Daten nützen, private Daten schützen.

Same should be true for publicly funded code: should be open source and accessible by default and anything else should require special reasoning.

dTal4• 7 years ago

Wait, so if research is government funded, said government can just... suppress results? That's horrifyingly corrupt. That right there is a scandal.

In that position, I would be tempted to take a stand and release the data as originally planned, while blowing the lid off the whole corruption. Write in big letters on the website "THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T WANT YOU TO SEE THIS". If you're worried about your career... why? What is the point of your career as a scientist if you won't take a stand like that?

eesmith10• 7 years ago

Free software isn't about making data openly available.

Stallman, at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html , argues that free software developers should "charge as much as they wish or can, ... if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money."

If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money for it, which is not what most chemists and biologists think of in discussion of data openness.

FWIW, the discussion in science started independently of free software. Here's an example from structural biology. Previous to the 1980s, it was common for crystallographers to withhold structure data from a publication, and perhaps only publish an image showing the C-alpha backbone. This was because they wanted to be able to publish additional papers from the same data set, without competition. By 1987[1], there was a push to require coordinate submission into the PDB as requirement for publication. Most journals adopted this new policy in 1989, and funding agencies started to do so as well[2].

While the GNU project started earlier (1983), there is no connection between free software and the open data availability requirements for publication and funding in structural biology.

[1] https://search.proquest.com/openview/0a93cbb72da63b2899793bf...

[2] https://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/2008/01/00/sc5004/index.h...

Open Source also isn't about making data openly available. Both are only applicable to those who acquire software. It just happens to be that most free and open source developers also make their software available at no cost.

inimino8• 7 years ago

Free software isn't about making data openly available.

You must be allowed to redistribute the software, and you must be allowed to get, modify, and redistribute the code. Binaries and code are data.

Maybe what you mean is that the biologists' and x-ray crystallographers' journals developed their push for data access independently of the free software movement, but it's a stretch to say that access to the data that a programmer creates and access to the data that a biologist creates have nothing in common.

cma2• 7 years ago

If I'm understanding right, those journals still kept it copyrighted, without copy-left provisions. It's more like the notion of open source, where the source may be viewable but isn't necessarily available for redistribution.

While Stallman says you can charge as much as you can, his terms say that once someone buys it they can immediately undercut you, and he admits that limits the amount you could charge sustainably.

WalterBright• 7 years ago

There are a lot of things free on archive.org. Some people download categories, burn them on DVDs, and sell them for a few dollars. I find that worth the money rather than laboriously downloading things one by one, and bought a few.

djrobstep• 7 years ago

Perhaps the real problem is that we build personality cults around ideas.

lostjohnny16• 7 years ago

Or that we fight the person to destroy or weaken the idea.

tjpnz• 7 years ago

It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice.

The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. At the very least we would be having conversations about software in terms of non-free and free versus proprietary and open source.

tzs2• 7 years ago

The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure.

If he had been a lot more pragmatic, he probably could have put the whole free software thing on hold for 20 years, and been one of the early microcomputer billionaires either alongside Jobs and Gates, or even instead of one (or both!) of them.

Then go back to free software--except now it would be backed by the several tens of billions of dollars of the Stallman Foundation, which would generate enough annual investment income forever to easily afford to award tens of thousands of $100k grants for free software development each year.

A decade of that, and there would be GPL replacements for pretty much everything.

marijn2• 7 years ago

He wasn't blacklisted for committing thought crime. The dumb Epstein email triggered a reevaluation of his consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior against current community standards, which resulted in a large part of the community deciding they didn't want anything to do with him anymore. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.

Smithalicious5• 7 years ago

Amazing how whenever someone does something controversial and gets forced out soon afterwards, it's never the thing they said, but "consistent creepy and inappropriate behavior" based on 10 year old anecdotes that suddenly appear out of nowhere... I'd think that if someone was "consistently" creepy and inappropriate, there would be a pretty good public record for that, but what do I know?

EDIT: Let me give a bit more of a nuanced position, because reading my post back, it looks like I'm saying that Stallman never did anything inappropriate before this.

Of course, I recognize that Stallman is fucking weird. I'm not saying that parrot-fucking, foot-fungus-eating St. IGNUcius never did anything inappropriate before; we'd be here for a long time if we were to make a list of all the times Stallman failed to read the mood.

However, I strongly believe that Stallman is not a creep. He holds some odd views and is pretty autistic, and so he occasionally makes inappropriate advances. Add to that that Stallman has been a very prolific person for decades and you won't relaly have trouble coming up with a list of anecdotes that, when framed a certain way, make him look bad.

I've read quite a few of these anecdotes by now. Some of them look fairly innocent to me. Some of them are clear social blunders. None of them look seriously harmful or in bad faith to me. Even taking all of them together, believing that all of them are remembered 100% correctly and played out as portrayed without any additional context, I don't think the appropirate reaction is to remove Stallman from his position(s).

What ticks me off so much about all this is the way the media deals with it. Stallman is portrayed as some kind of sexist, some kind of patriarch keeping women out of tech. It's ridiculous; Stallman is quite possibly the most inclusionary person I can think of. Stallman has had an immense, direct contribution to making tech more open for everyone.

I can understand the criticism of Stallman. I don't even think he necessarily makes for a good figurehead for Free Software; he has poor social skills, unhelpfully rigid and strong positions, and I feel like he often conflates free software issues with other social issues he cares about. He makes for a better philosopher than a political leader.

In this case, he's being thrown under the bus to score social points. People in tech are very itchy to do whatever they can to seem more inclusive, and condemning Epstein and his ilk is a noble goal (that also makes you look good). Stallman's statements that sparked this controversy were naive and he failed to read the mood, but they were not unacceptable things to believe or say. He did not deserve to have his words twisted, get kicked out of his own organisation based on the strawman, and then have people say that he was always bad, anyways.

hdfbdtbcdg16• 7 years ago

There is another large part of the community that wants no part in the community as a result of events like this. I guess we will end up with two communities one focused on software the other focused on social justice (wokeware). It looks like the social justice community will get the code and trademarks. Fortunately thanks to RMS the code is available to fork.

I guess things aren't organised yet but I and others I have spoken to IRL have already stopped interacting with certain projects.

I was wondering if some of the community's thought leaders might jump ship - but I guess they will be purged anyway so that should help!

EDIT: Would any downvoters care to comment on why they think this won't happen? Do they think we will continue to participate against our will...

michaelmrose• 7 years ago

By which you mean a bunch of Twitter nobodies and one somebody who happens to speak for the gnome project.

Mikhail_Edoshin• 7 years ago

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from social consequences.

I often see this phrase and it looks like a fallacy to me. Does anyone question its validity? Social consequences are a severe thing, in practice they mean losing a job or position, boycotting, etc. In ancient Greece to expel a person was a very strong punishment. Nowadays the associated hardbacks are milder perhaps, but still are pretty severe.

If speech is so potent a weapon that to protect against it we have to use extreme social defenses like expulsion, why not to use the same weapon against the perpetrators? Why not to speak in return? Stallman says something, you say something. Take that, Richard Stallman!

I would say that the only appropriate social consequence of free speech could be other free speech.

Also, a distinct characteristic of a true community is that it's inclusive. It can expel its members, but this has to be a very rare event, only when that person's action are actually destroying the community. "Creepy and inappropriate behavior" that went along for many years is hardly that. It's a mere personality quirk. [Addition] And I'd say that this expulsion endangers the community much more than whatever Stallman was inappropriately doing all these years.

concordDance8• 7 years ago

A handful of anecdotes over two decades does not make for "consistent creepy and inappropriate behaviour".

I also think those deciding they didn't want anything to do with him are a tiny minority if you exclude those who have never met him (and even then, probably still a small minority).

cbanek2• 7 years ago

I believe free software will be recognised as one of the paradigmatic changes in how science itself is done.

I think we're already there. I'm an astronomer, and we (and many others) are already building platforms with software like Jupyter, dask, holoviews, etc.

While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming). For example, nVidia supporting dask, or Bloomberg supporting Jupyter.

It's the idea that was important, and less so the person IMHO. RMS had a lot of ideas, some good, and some bad. But like evolution, people take the good and run with them, and leave the bad. And we rarely remember who started the whole thing, since having the idea is generally such a small part of actually making it a reality.

"We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world."

- V for Vendetta

varjag• 7 years ago

While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software.

I had to re-read this to be sure it's not sarcasm. RMS has some of the largest footprints in software among the living people. How can one hold an opinion about his contribution and not be aware of that?

GoblinSlayer6• 7 years ago

He wanted progress to happen in the field of freedom. Jupyter, dask, holoviews are free as in beer, and that's why there's little progress if not degradation in freedom.

TeMPOraL2• 7 years ago

It's the idea that was important, and less so the person IMHO. RMS had a lot of ideas, some good, and some bad. But like evolution, people take the good and run with them, and leave the bad. And we rarely remember who started the whole thing, since having the idea is generally such a small part of actually making it a reality.

While true, there's a difference between forgetting a person, and making that person forgotten. The latter seem to be happening now.

While RMS may have started with a great idea, I'm not sure he's super influential in actually making progress and writing software. If anything, the idea that companies will sponsor open source software has (and I'm not sure many saw that one coming).

So a garden finally bloomed (though RMS would probably think some of these companies are weeds). It would however be unfair to say that the people that built and maintained this garden (which is an artificial hydroponic garden in the middle of a volcano) for decades weren't "influencial". The Free Software movement benefited from having someone with clear and unyielding vision. Actually, scratch that. The Free Software movement benefited from RMS the way you benefited from having a biological mother - it wouldn't be born otherwise.

That some companies will sponsor Open Source wasn't that unexpected. That some of the players that now do would (Microsoft?!), that was more surprising.

zouhair• 7 years ago

I don't think Free Software would have arrived where they are now if it wasn't for the RMS and his specific personality.

Him, being how he is, is what made on of the big part of the success of Free Software.

rajacombinator• 7 years ago

Thoughtcrime came and went years ago. We are now entering the precrime era.

DoreenMichele• 7 years ago

The free software movement campaigns for freedom for the users of computing; it is a movement for freedom and justice. By contrast, the open source idea values mainly practical advantage and does not campaign for principles.

If you read through more of the article, it becomes clear that the difference in viewpoint has actual real world impact on the type of licensing practices that result.

Promoting a particular principle or ethos matters because it is like the DNA of the idea. Different DNA gets you completely different results.

scarejunba• 7 years ago

There's also the beauty in the point of Free Software: it's for freedom. This means it's okay that others profit. It's about you having power. That means you have the power to profit too. All you gotta share is the code for what you distribute.

I like free software not because no one is making money. I like people making money. I like it because I can change it.

That's important and everyone who gets upset simply because people profit is not necessarily on the same side as me. I don't want communist shared ownership of all things. I want the power to modify and run my software. That's all. It is actually like free speech. I want it for those who aren't like me and those are who like me.

quickthrower22• 7 years ago

What I could never get my head around when reading about free software is how can people, especially individuals or small companies make money making free software. Sure you can sell it but then the buyer is free to sell it for half the price.

One way is if the software is a marketing tool for selling something else. Then people sharing or using it is good for marketing the other service.

Another way is if the product is useless to the customer base in source form so they need to buy the compiled version, and aren’t technical enough to do it themselves.

But in general making software to sell needs a propitery license if you want to make money.

garmaine2• 7 years ago

Red Hat...

madacoo6• 7 years ago

https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

This software uses a license that seems to solve both the problem of ensuring the user has control over the software and also allowing the author to sell and distribute binaries without worrying (too much) about others undermining his control over the market.

It appears to work quite well in this case. Although I do not know how much he actually makes from software sales, it appears to be non-negligible based on its popularity within a niche community and the fact most users would rather pay $15 than learn the skills necessary to compile from source.

flukus• 7 years ago

Think about it in terms of the misv (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ISV) business model instead of more mass market stuff. Your customers are paying you to install it, upgrade it, create backups, etc. They have no idea what to do with the source code and even if someone creates a setup wizard they have no idea how to setup all the other stuff they need. OSS provides a way for them to pool the development cost, customers and business avoid the bus factor and customers potentially get competition. Customers pay to have problems solved.

Of course these days this business model is being overtaken by SaaS and the bus takes out the developer and their data.

diffeomorphism5• 7 years ago

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iiordanov....

GPL licensed, basically identical to the "non-pro" version, $5. I don't know how well that works out for them, but I think it is a model worth supporting.

eesmith10• 7 years ago

The "Anti 996 Licence" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system and https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU/blob/master/LICENSE ) has caused me to re-think what it means to say that a license is "for freedom."

For example, a software license could support freedom to unionize. The GPL does not.

I've decided to strictly use "software freedom", in order to avoid confusion with the much broader topic of "freedom".

(BTW, many 'source available' licenses support your right to modify and run your software, if that's really all you want. Free software also includes the right to redistribute the software, including with modifications and in commercial sales, and without needing additional permissions from the original copyright owners.)

millstone2• 7 years ago

Everything you wrote is true about open source software as well, except for the "all you gotta share..." sentence. So do you like free software more than open source? And if so why?

moron4hire• 7 years ago

To start, let me say that I believe in Free (libre) Software, as it is defined by the Software Freedoms. People should have the right to run the software they have, as they themselves see fit. That said, there is a lot wrong with open source and free software right now.

First, and I think foremost, is that we’ve done ourselves a huge disservice in training users into believing that software should be gratis. Through the surveillance-driven ad economy for services, to FOSS adherents who insist they won’t pay for software, to smartphone app stores making it impossible to differentiate between products (and also, making it impossible to make a good product). Few people are willing to pay for software anymore (especially developers for development tools). This leaves software development to the privileged few who can afford to work for free, either because they work at a company that sees software as a loss-leader for some ad-economy service, or because they are financially independent. I cannot imagine how one might be able to replicate the 80s and 90s market where you could do hard work, make a great, common product like a word processor or an email client, and consumers would rejoice instead of snarl, “what do you mean you want money for this?” This consolidates power in the hands of Google, Microsoft, or worse, Oracle.

Second, we have grown complacent and too accepting of crap. A lot of gratis software has very little polish (unless it’s being pushed by FAANG). People don’t want to pay for software because they rightly expect to have to try a dozen different packages before they find one that marginally works. Not getting paid means developers don’t have time to put into polish, nor any non-vanity signal to work on anything but neat features. With that, I think comes the ability for any actor of means to easily displace any smaller actor in the market. When a buyout happens, they don’t do it to acquire the technology anymore, they do it to acquire the users. We’ve raced ourselves to the bottom, so the only products we can afford to make are easily replicable by a 10x larger team. Or they don’t even have to replicate it, they just have to dump into marketing the kind of money that would setup any individual one of us for a nice, healthy, “fuck you” lifestyle.

Third, because we haven’t fought “free software does not mean gratis”, companies demand software be permissively licensed or they won’t touch it. So they get to take your work and never pay you and it’s legal. You could GPL license instead and just get ignored, still not getting paid. You get to prove out the market for them, and then they copy your features, release under MIT, and don’t give a shit that they aren’t making money on it, because the only software they make money on is the ad seller console.

I think we need to do several things:

1) grow a spine and a conscience, finally admit that there is no such thing as technology divorced from politics (it8s made for people, by people. Without people, it’s masturbation at best), and refuse to work for Google and Facebook, selling out our fellow citizens for a few bags of silver.

2) stop publicly publishing source code. The GPL doesn’t say you have to leave your source lying around in the open. It says you have to give it to your users. That’s fine. Users need lovin’ too, they just gotta pay first.

3) start taking a little more pride in our craft than, “I made a thing”. Software isn’t done until it is documented. It isn’t done until it’s usable without having to install Node and Python, just to run the setup. It isn’t done until it’s compliant with ADA and 508. With pride comes an expectation of remuneration.

4) stop “bucket of crabs”ing our fellow developers. If you don’t like something about a project, that is fine. But don’t call into question their fundamental right to exist. Too often I’ve seen projects cut down because they were “reinventing the wheel” or “just a solo dev”. Reinvention is important, or we wouldn’t have electric cars or faster computers or really anything. And solo devs wouldn’t be solo if you took them seriously and at least tried to put as much effort into supporting them as you put into cutting down their work.

Realistically, I know this isn’t enough. But it can at least be a start. We can’t keep going on like this.

paulstovell• 7 years ago

This. The biggest contributors to open source, and the most popular open source project maintainers, are now the mega corporations, who’ve figured out how to weaponise it (either to commoditise other competing software/services, or as PR for hiring developers).

michannne4• 7 years ago

It seems this thread and others like it has fueled a controversial honeypot, as some users are mass-downvoting comments that are perfectly in line with the content posted, simply because they stand for or against ousting Stallman, and others are doing the opposite -- mass upvoting comments that align with their predisposed view of the situation.

I'd like to take sometime however to reiterate that freedom applies to all views. The ability of a user to use software regardless of their personal beliefs or background, what they want to use it for, or against. The choice of usage is completely and wholly up to the user, they may modify it to their heart's content, and the community can use those modifications freely for their purposes. Restricting viewpoints you don't align with is completely antithetical to the purpose of having free-as-in-speech software, and it is truly a shame, regardless of how you interpret the situation, that the poster-boy for these ideals has fallen from his position due to alternate views.

malvosenior6• 7 years ago

As you can see in this thread and everywhere else it’s been recently discussed, Stallnan’s actions have detracted from his message. Now we talk about pedophilia because that’s what RMS introduced to an environment that should be discussing free software. He failed his own message by doing that. No one else is to blame.

linuxftw4• 7 years ago

Stallnan’s actions have detracted from his message. Now we talk about pedophilia because that’s what RMS introduced to an environment that should be discussing free software

Do you have an original source, or are you just parroting what you heard in the media?

concordDance8• 7 years ago

The pedophilia thing was over a decade ago. The age of consent thing was more recent but that's a separate issue.

4bpp12• 7 years ago

But consider the possibility that this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause (even if it comes at the expense of HN as a forum): the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company. If you come into a HN thread believing X and then see that every post stating X got downvoted into oblivion, maybe you will think twice before mentioning that you believe X next time you are considering to do so in any setting, real-life or online, that you have a persistent identity of any value in. The next undecided person in that setting might never hear the case for X and come to believe not-X to be as uncontroversial as gravity, and before long it will actually come to be.

madacoo6• 7 years ago

this might be perfectly rational behaviour for people who care about some side of the cause

I dispute this is rational. Creating echo chambers polarises and intensifies opposing viewpoints. The rational thing to do would be to engage in polite and meaningful discussion with people with whom you disagree. This would diffuse extreme opinions and allow people time to consider whether or not their position is justified. Rather than reacting in a knee-jerk defensive manner that serves to protect identity by strengthening belief, they are then given space to examine beliefs in order to strengthen identity.

michannne4• 7 years ago

Personally, I wouldn't identify an echo chamber as perfectly rational

ramshorns• 7 years ago

This is a fascinating take on the purpose of discourse. I'm not sure if I agree but I'm upvoting it because it made me think.

the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

Kind of! That's been the measure of progress as a society; several beliefs that were once fringe have become almost mandatory in polite company.

But we're still not talking about the linked article which is about a distinction between freedom and openness.

waterhouse• 7 years ago

the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

Well, to quote our host: No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

I don't think people talking about Bigfoot are usually subject to ostracization, unless they're really overbearing about it (keep changing the subject back to Bigfoot, start insulting or yelling at those who disagree, etc.). And I think not-Bigfoot is basically in the victory condition. I think the victory condition is "universally accepted" and it doesn't necessarily imply "negation cannot be expressed in polite company".

But you might be right that "its negation can not be expressed in polite company" is one of the steps along the way for some beliefs. I hope that's not true (because it might justify what I consider abhorrent behavior), but it might be.

That said, I recall seeing a study that said that extreme protest tactics were counterproductive in advancing an ideology. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314949726_Extreme_P... is probably the one I'm thinking of. I hope the principle extends, or can be extended, to "nasty behavior to suppress ideological opponents is counterproductive". It seems at least possible. Lots of argumentation consists of saying that one's opponents are nasty, which at least is evidence that many people have the potential to react strongly to (perceived) nasty behavior...

concordDance8• 7 years ago

the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

What about the belief that any belief should be expressable in polite company, including the negatiom of this belief?

cousin_it• 7 years ago

the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company

That's the victory condition for a mind virus. I hope that my beliefs (like the belief in free speech) aren't mind viruses and don't have that as a victory condition.

doubleunplussed3• 7 years ago

the victory condition for any belief is to be so universally accepted that its negation can not be expressed in polite company.

This is a little bit terrifying to me. For me victory would be that the opposing view merely doesn't gain any traction when expressed, not that it can't be expressed - presumably due to social consequences. Any view that "wins" in this way doesn't deserve its victory - how do you know it's actually a good idea? Bad and good ideas alike can win in this way. Only good ideas are stable in the presence of the constant ability to question them.

watwut• 7 years ago

Isnt that how all discussions about free software evolved since ever?

marknadal• 7 years ago

RMS misses the point of Open Source.

jheriko• 7 years ago

I still struggle to appreciate the merits of the (L)GPL's definition of free...

MIT license all the way. It doesn't make me pay through the nose to be 'free' by following some arbitrary rules from elsewhere to fit into something I can only realistically see as a 'club'.

knocte2• 7 years ago

That's because you're seeing the results of the license from the perspective of the developer, not the user.

millstone2• 7 years ago

For a user who is not a software developer, what is the practical difference between GPL and MIT? Is there one?

ngcc_hk• 7 years ago

With just free software concept, it goes nowhere. Once have open source inclusive of free software, it explodes.

You need innovation even in licensing. One man is just one human. Humanity is much larger then one man abd one sex.

Walk on.

mindcrime• 7 years ago

I don't think Open Source "misses the point" of Free Software at all. I think both the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are making different - albeit highly related - points. And the same goes for some of the other "Open X" movements" like the "Open Data" movement, "Open Science", "Open Culture", and so on. There's an inherent commonality at a certain level of abstraction, but each of these "things" is still independent in a sense.

That said, I think it would be better to focus on where these various initiatives are aligned, and focus on how to work together to maximize the strengths of these various communities, as opposed to focusing on where they differ, and engaging in petty bickering.

Of course there will be hard-liners who will reject this, and I can understand and appreciate a measure of that. I'm a bit of the same way when it comes to my radical anarcho-capitalist / libertarian political beliefs. I'm open to a certain measure of collaboration with others in the name of "any progress is better than no progress" and "don't let the perfect be the enemy of good enough", but there are principles that I'm unwilling to compromise on.

kyancey• 7 years ago

Every time I read stuff like this, I think it's the free software people who miss the point of open source.

jimmaswell4• 7 years ago

Free software misses the point of open source. Open source wants to make the world a better place without strings attached, while free software just wants to push some bizzare ideology.

adtac• 7 years ago

Not bizarre in absolutely any way. The free software movement is a real thing that lobbies for you and me. Unlike silicon valley products, GPL and its siblings actually made the world a better place and to not recognise it is to be ungrateful. Even if making all software free is a dystopia, it's a good dystopia to strive towards.

jimmaswell4• 7 years ago

I could have gone my whole life without politically charged GPL utilities like gcc but Uber and AirBnB have been very useful to me.

arnoooooo• 7 years ago

Except nothing is "without strings attached" in life. To me "making the world a better place" is precisely about recognizing that everything is interdependent and setting up the right "strings", not about pretending we can live without them.

jimmaswell4• 7 years ago

The strategy doesn't even seem to really work. GPL stuff is generally just avoided and rewritten. So all you accomplished licensing with GPL was wasting worldwide developer time out of spite. Who knows if that wasted dev time might have cured cancer or something.

diffeomorphism5• 7 years ago

Democracy misses the point of anarchy. Anarchy wants freedom without strings attached, while democracy puts limits.

Technically true, but "you don't get to take away other's freedom" to me seems an entirely sensible restriction and not at all "bizarre".

jimmaswell4• 7 years ago

"If you use my free stock photo you have to give away your whole portfolio for free too" sounds unreasonable to me.

08-15• 7 years ago

I own my computer and I want to own the software running on it. What's "bizarre" about that "ideology"?

jokoon• 7 years ago

I would really be interested in an explanation of why driver issues persist on linux, or at least why there were so many issues.

Do vendors have financial preference to work with microsoft to write and maintain those drivers? I'm talking about things like touchpads, wifi... I can understand that if there's no demand, it makes no point for them, but even after all this time?

Not to mention nvidia. What makes nvidia be so complacent towards linux? It has been almost 15 years now. Are there agreements between microsoft and nvidia?

The arguments of Stallman make sense, but to me they don't explain the state of linux drivers, which made the linux desktop so difficult.

msiyer• 7 years ago

the problem we are discussing in this thread can be rephrased as - do i own my thoughts?

only when we have an answer to this question can we properly progress as a society. else, we will keep expending resources to keep these debates alive.

2rsf• 7 years ago

Yesterday I have listened to the Hebrew version of this podcast, interesting and relevant:

https://www.cmpod.net/all-transcripts/history-open-source-fr...

rimliu• 7 years ago

FSF misses the point entirely. It operates on the assumptions of the long-gone world where every software uses was also a programmer. It used to be that way, but it will never be that way again. Nor should it.

ghaff2• 7 years ago

Interestingly, one of the latest contretemps on Twitter etc. Lis the desire by some for open source licenses that restrict usage by purpose or organization. For example, ICE, military, law enforcement, etc.

A much longer discussion obviously but an example where user freedoms more or less are counter to developers being able to restrict what their software gets used for once it’s been released as open source.

Avamander5• 7 years ago

To be fair, if free software can restrict it's redistribution in closed devices, why not in cases where the use restricts user freedoms one step more indirectly?

ghaff2• 7 years ago

Also to be fair, that was a pretty controversial clause in GPLv3 and ended up getting largely de-fanged before the license was finalized. It’s not obvious to me that workable usage restrictions should automatically be off the table however.

lbj3• 7 years ago

What I fundamentally dislike about RMS' philosophy and the licenses its inspired, is that it values a developers time as nothing. As if the world has some fundamental right to everything that rolls out of my head.

Avamander5• 7 years ago

How does it value that time as nothing?

lbj3• 7 years ago

If you invent a great piece of software, you need to be paid for the time you put into making it. If your only play is a license deal or such, open source will kill your business. Or turn it into something that RMS agrees with. But it wont be "your" business.

Myrmornis2• 7 years ago

we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes

With open source but not "free" (sensu Stallman) software, one is free to run it and study it and change it, right? Since one has read permissions on the code. So the only difference is in distribution rights? So his sentence is misleading regarding the extent of the differences?

olalonde3• 7 years ago

So the only difference is in distribution rights? So his sentence is misleading regarding the extent of the differences?

Yes, it's misleading. There's no practical difference between the two in terms of licensing.

What this boils down to is that not all open source developers subscribe to the free software philosophy (e.g. believe that proprietary software is evil). Therefore, rms doesn't like the term.

Myrmornis2• 7 years ago

There's no practical difference between the two in terms of licensing.

Isn't it the case that (a) there could be / are open source projects with extremely restrictive licensing which totally prevents all distribution. I.e. a "copyright": you can still read and run the software and modify it for yourself, as long as you don't distribute it, and (b) such a project could never be "free" sensu Stallman?

orangeshark2• 7 years ago

Free software and open source software cover basically the same software. The main difference is that these communities value different parts of the software. Free Software supporters value the freedom aspects of the software, while Open Source Software supporters value the development practices to create powerful and reliable software. If you listen to these supporters on the benefits of releasing your software as Free and Open Source, you will hear completely different reasons why.

lostjohnny16• 7 years ago

There a TL;DR; on the bottom.

I'm very sympathetic with people (over)reacting to what Stallman said and did.

I'm from a family where my parents and most of my uncles worked in healthcare.

Specifically my dad worked in oncology and my mom in infectiuos diseases.

I've seen patient's relatives panic because of some blood (after a very dangerous surgery) or complaining to the management because some other patient had sever pain and they could not stand them crying.

People are tribal, they usually act as a tribe, if not educated differently or introduced to things they do not know.

Of course I don't have to explain than when some of my friends needed to go to an hospital I was always regarded as the unemphatetic for saying things like "some blood is normal at this stage" or "the pain is gonna go away soon, don't worry" or "well, they amputated that man's leg, I bet I would be crying too. You can't complain about that" (this one really happened to me, when I had surgery to remove the saphenous vein, one of my parents friend came over to visit and asked me "why your parents keep you here with that man crying all the time?", I must specify that in Italy healthcare is mainly public, it was even more 25 years ago, you don't find the private hotel like rooms, and it worked much better than today, but that's another story).

SJWs are the same: they only think about their group, their needs, their right words, without stopping to think for a moment that Stallman started 40 years ago and that for 40 years he resisted, you don't just throw him under the bus because he said something you don't like because you were never exposed to that kind of thinking.

But Stallman would have defended their right to speak their minds if the role were reversed.

And that's why I'm sympathetic with them because they don't even understand the damage they made to themselves.

TL;DR;

We should work together engaging in what makes us similar more than what makes us different.

That's what Stallman did.

Exactly 80 years ago Sigmund Freud died.

The narcissism of small differences (German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen) is the thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation. The term was coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917, based on the earlier work of British anthropologist Ernest Crawley. In language differing only slightly from current psychoanalytic terminology, Crawley declared that each individual is separated from others by a taboo of personal isolation, a narcissism of minor differences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

blobs2• 7 years ago

'as free speech, not as free beer', to explain what is actually meant with 'free software' doesn't cut it for me.

Why not just call it open source and pick the license you prefer? With all respect for Richard Stallman, the label 'free software' is a really poor word choice IMAO.

TeMPOraL2• 7 years ago

Precisely because of what RMS keeps saying - the thing is about software freedom, not software price.

Software freedoms and Free Software came first. "Open Source" came later, as a "free just as in beer" spin-off.

blobs2• 7 years ago

It's not that I don't understand it, it's just very confusing for anyone hearing that for the first time. Is it freeware? No, it's like free speech not free beer. Come on, we can do better.

tomxor• 7 years ago

“Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas.

Even though i support FOSS over OSS, I've always found this particular argument a bit uselessly pedantic. Both of these term are almost always used casually not legally, when we want to do that (i.e when releasing software) we must use the highly specific language of a particular license anyway... which leaves only the following argument:

establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom.

For non-enterprise uses, how much OSS is not also FOSS? most people assume they are equal because the free part is implied, so do we really need to teach it? most software vendors understand this because they know the majority of people will just use it for free if the source is available regardless of whether it is explicitly given as free. It's too hard to enforce payment in any area except for enterprise... When this market force already exists, does it really help to create a social force to differentiate FOSS from OSS? I'm not sure, I think you just end up pissing off new FOSS enthusiasts.

Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)

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