"Free Software": An idea whose time has passed

https://r0ml.medium.com/free-software-an-idea-whose-time-has-passed-6570c1d8218a

by doener • 1 year ago

5 13 1 year ago

r0ml.medium.com

To save others from wading through this bloated and disingenuous article, the core seems to be:

With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software (at least in the United States) of the rights afforded them by Congress under Article I, Section VIII, Clause VIII. [..] The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want, and the freedoms that they wish to restrict for software producers are freedoms that most software producers would rather retain.

He tries to trick the reader into thinking of "software producers" as if they were a single entity. He finds room to talk about IBM's software distribution practices in the 1970s, but "forgets" to mention any case where free software prevented, or could have prevented (or simply never included), user-hostile practices (such as the now-pervasive DRM and spyware/telemetry, or anti-competitive moves [1]).

To use a car analogy - I don't want Volkswagen preventing me from picking my own mechanic. Yet the article tries to frame it as if this is some kind of burden on the user, and an infringement of Volkswagen's rights.

Of course the article is never that direct or honest - it exhausts the reader with irrelevant stories, skirts around the real issues, obfuscates and never states its thesis in plain language: that it is somehow to the user's benefit to be prevented from examining, modifying, or sharing software.

More than wrong, this article is dishonest. This is the kind of prose that is used to deceive, not explain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

michaelmrose• 1 year ago

The weird thing about this argument is that those who prefer to retain all rights have zero barrier to doing so. The only folks who can under this argument claim to be affected are those who would prefer to use the software produced by creators of free software without the restrictions those creators would themselves prefer in whilst preferring to impose their own restrictions on those downstream of themselves.

Users who want the maximum freedom should logically prefer that no such restrictions exist and failing that should prefer the restrictions imposed by free software to that which is imposed by closed source software not least because it imposes not at all on usage.

like_any_other2• 1 year ago

I should add that the quoted part is also literally false - free software (I assume he means the GPL, as this does not apply to permissive licenses that are also FLOSS, whose existence he ignores) grants the recipient strictly more rights than proprietary software. Rarely does one encounter prose so dense with falsehood and deceit.

dghlsakjg• 1 year ago

The absolute irony of posting this on infrastructure that is powered on every level by free software and open source protocols.

schoen2• 1 year ago

(2021)

comex• 1 year ago

(2021). Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26573425

The top thread discusses how the claim that the L in FLOSS stands for "Liberal" is highly dubious.

scj• 1 year ago

Stallman, who apparently speaks French, said the 'L' stands for "Libre". https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

The word matches his intent of "Free Software" without English's ambiguity around gratuity vs. freedom.

Etheryte• 1 year ago

This whole argument makes no sense and is contrived at best. Software being free as in freedom is a choice and there is no one out there forcing you to use or create free software.

I would prefer software insurance to “software freedom”.

This is commonly referred to as an SLA and this is orthogonal to whether the software is free or not. You can have an SLA with both Microsoft and with SUSE, whether the software is free is completely unrelated to that fact.

7e• 1 year ago

On GitHub, GNU licenses (a.k.a. "Free Software") have only 22% share. The vast majority of OSS software created these days is licensed under Apache/MIT/BSD, not GNU. Free software is increasingly unpopular, to the point where I would call it a failed idea.

orwin• 1 year ago

BSD and apache2 aren't free software nowadays? Because I remember learning that you had 3 types of FLOSS: no copyleft, weak copyleft (Gplv2, LGPL, CEciLL-C) and strong copyleft (gplv3, AGPL) but maybe nowadays terms have changed?

schoen2• 1 year ago

FSF's Venn diagram:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html

Some people seem to have gravitated toward saying that only copyleft licenses are "free software" (because FSF promotes both concepts?), but this is contrary to historical usage, where copyleft and permissive licenses were both considered both "free" and "open source".

johnea• 1 year ago

Bla Bla Bla. This article is an argument who's time has passed.

If anything, the difference between "free software" and "open source" is more significant today than ever before.

Free Software being developed primarily by user/developers, who then share the s/w with other users, who may also be developers who contribute. Whereas Open Source being primarily developed by an organization that intends to profit from the s/w, but uses a public license to facilitate getting other people to contribute to the development of their product.

The two continue to diverge, in spite of using similar licensing. Thus continuing to emphasize when a project is actually Free Software, not just Open Source is more relevant and important today than ever.

soygem• 1 year ago

Author's name is "Lefkowitz". Every single time.

"Free Software": An idea whose time has passed

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