Letter to the FSF

http://newartisans.com/2011/04/letter-to-the-fsf/

by Adrock • 14 years ago

17 12 14 years ago

batgaijin2• 14 years ago

Stallman isn't thinking about you or anyone else who reads this forum. He is thinking about the 4 billion disconnected individuals who haven't even entered the net.

Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user. That is not equivalence, and it is sad to continually see developers heed simply because they know where their paycheck comes from.

There is more to this world than us enlightened ones.

astrodust• 14 years ago

For things that should be free, let them be truly free. Do not wall off software from adoption because the GPL prohibits certain kinds of use. Don't discourage people from producing free software by making demands about how and with whom they share their creations.

There is a certain kind of software that needs to be free, that shouldn't belong to anyone in particular. This is not all software, and arguably it is not even the majority of it, but it is an important subset.

Stallman seems to treat free software as if it were something that was a scarce resource that needs to be protected. This is absurd considering the limitless number of copies of software that can be made.

The act of sharing software has benefits to the individual who is sharing. This much has become obvious and will continue to be made clear to others.

If licenses like the GPL acted as a catalyst to promote this discovery then they have surved their purpose. That is not to insist they must be refined, become more restrictive, or further hardened against hypothetical aggressors.

einhverfr3• 14 years ago

Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.

mseebach2• 14 years ago

> Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user.

This is a false dichotomy. The user pays or otherwise rewards the developer because he gets utility from the software. The developer makes software that has utility for users because there's no reward (monetary or otherwise) in making software that isn't useful a user (which could well be the developer himself).

batgaijin2• 14 years ago

Your false dichotomy is separating people as users or developers. We are all both, and we should all have the potential to grow as our minds see fit.

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

This is too long and will not change his mind.

aaronsw• 14 years ago

Shorter johnw: I heart Ayn Rand.

In particular, I'm pretty sure Stallman (like most Americans) is in favor of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, so trying to persuade him that free software is a bad idea because it's like that seems pretty clueless.

einhverfr3• 14 years ago

I dunno about the letter. I use the GPL v2 for most of my work and Stallman is a major reason I am opposed to moving to the GPL v3 (that and the license is long enough to be difficult to understand, while the GPL v2's difficulties come from simplicity).

Part of the thing though is that I am not convinced the GPL has the reach that Stallman likes to pretend it does. At least in the US (and presumably even fruits-of-labor countries) copyright is not supposed to be a way to monopolize secondary markets for practical tools. See the concurrance in Lexmark v. Static Control and also the opinion of the court in Sony v. Connectix. Note that no court in the US has ever allowed secondary markets for practical tools to be controlled through copyright of a work in the primary market, and I am not aware of any country which has held otherwise.

In general, copyright is supposed to protect artistic contributions, and protect and author from having his/her work distributed without compensation. How that work is used in a practical way (i.e. other than as a work of art) is beyond the scope of copyright law at least in the US, and presumably in other places as well. Indeed, steps required to use a piece of software, even where it involves literal copying and even distribution of literal copies, have been held to be fair use under 17 USC 102(b). See Sony v. Connectix, Lexmark v. Static Control, and Oracle v. Google.

So I think that copyright only gets you so far. The sort of control that Stallman wants to see the GPL have can only be possible through software patents and we know how he feels about that topic. The GPL cannot reach cases where interoperability is sought and where the original work is not distributed. Anything else is wishful thinking.

So I don't see the GPL as any great menace, but a lot of that is because I don't think it reaches as far as Stallman likes to think (or at least pretend) that it does.

IANAL, TINLA, and if you are looking for legal advice here you are a fool for trying to get it on HN ;-)

Letter to the FSF

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