Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

http://lwn.net/Articles/582242/

by microtherion • 12 years ago

81 100 12 years ago

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taspeotis• 12 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7116144

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

In a way I kind of agree with him.

On one way, it is clear that pure GPL software is not a way for whole industry to function. Taken to the extreme, 100% GPL software, from what would software developers live from?

Not all use cases can be applied to support, training or selling hardware.

On the other had the other open source licenses, promote the freedom of the software developer, but not the end user.

Which is usually of no importance when the end user is a plain user.

However developers are also end users from the products of others.

I grew up in culture, where we had to pay for every piece of software we used, except if we typed it ourselves from code listinings in magazines.

So in one extreme we have the everything free model, and in the other we have the old model.

Currently we seem to be more or less in the middle.

I just wonder to which direction will the balance change.

gjulianm2• 12 years ago

You can still get paid for building free software. For example, take a employee management program that needs to be catered to the specific needs of each company. You still get paid for those adaptations + deployment the same you'd get paid with closed source software.

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

That falls under the support part I mentioned.

drdaeman2• 12 years ago

100% GPL software, from what would software developers live from?

As usual, from their craft, the software development. GPL-everything scenario doesn't mean there won't be need to develop software anymore.

It is quite usual to be paid to hack upon FLOSS code. Neither it seem too weird to be paid to write new FLOSS projects. A customer needs a solution and has money, an engineer has skills and needs money.

The only downside (or upside, depending on point of view) is that developers won't be able to make $0.99-priced apps unless they really make it in mere minutes of their time. They'll have to raise funding using some form of threshold pledge system.

jiggy20114• 12 years ago

The problem with a pledge system is that my $.99 on it's own won't make or break the project and since I'm getting the software for free anyway it's more rational to keep the money in my pocket. So you would have to impose it as some sort of tax, which has it's own problems.

microtonal2• 12 years ago

As usual, from their craft, the software development. GPL-everything scenario doesn't mean there won't be need to develop software anymore.

It highly depends on the category and user. Outside crowd funding, no one will pay for the development of a game if there is no return on investment.

Despite having a slight preference for FLOSS software, I also believe that whoever invests the money or time to develop a piece of software should be able to choose how they license it.

In some cases it makes sense to open source some software immediately, e.g. when there is little loss of income. Sometimes it makes sense to sell it first and open source it later (e.g. see Id's engines). Sometimes it does not make sense to make the code freely available (e.g. if it destroys the value of your company).

Does it always lead to the best outcome? Certainly not! But with freedom comes responsibility. And ethical individuals and companies will want to contribute to their community and society in ways that is possible for them.

belorn4• 12 years ago

Taken to the extreme, 100% GPL software, from what would software developers live from?

From people who pay them to develop software that they need? Last time I saw statistics on the subject, developers paid to code for internal use was still more common that developers working on software meant for the public.

But lets disregard that, and only look on the proprietary model. You trade software for money, and then you threaten them with lawsuit and jail if the customer share or modify the work.

Can we have a software industry without the threat of lawsuit hanging above every customers head?

marcosdumay2• 12 years ago

Another problem is that the GPL is quite easy to circunvent (that's why the cloud is big), but Affero is a horribly restrictive, and quite probably illegal in nearly the entire world (copyright laws are very similar).

You know, I'm under the impression that nearly all of the current problems would simply go away if copyrights duration was reduced to a sane amount. But one of those problems is that there is a set of incompetent people with way more power than they deserve, and those people won't help fix it.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC4• 12 years ago

How do you think would the AGPL be illegal?

As for reducing the duration of copyright: I am not sure, binaries without source that you are allowed to disassemble still aren't anywhere near source code, don't you think?

davidgerard2• 12 years ago

Almost no developer works on shrinkwrapped software sold as proprietary. Such developers are a tiny minority.

pjmlp4• 12 years ago

People buying desktop software and games think otherwise.

codeflo4• 12 years ago

I'm still quite convinced by the idea of software freedom, as explained in Stallman's earlier writings: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Having said that, I find Stallman's war rhetoric increasingly disturbing:

The only code that helps us and not our adversaries is copylefted code. Free software released under a pushover license is available for us to use, but available to our adversaries just as well.

This is the language of war propaganda, and shouldn't have any place in rational discussions.

If that enables GCC to "win", the victory would be hollow, because it would not be a victory for what really matters: users' freedom.

All while endorsing the Affero GPL, a license that doesn't even allow users full control over their own servers.

Maybe if someone is that convinced of a cause, the ends seem to justify every means. I'm not sure what's going on at the FSF, but it seems that they've lost sight of some of their original principles.

bjourne• 12 years ago

Isn't it you who are being irrational? That closed source software is the adversary of free software has been the fsf's position for ages. I see no war propaganda and "adversary" is not a synonym to "enemy."

stephenr3• 12 years ago

Software doesn't have adversaries - people do.

Open source and commercial and "free" software are no more adversaries than vanilla and chocolate ice cream are adversaries.

As Steve jobs pointed out in (I believe) the late 90s - "Microsoft doesn't have to lose for us to win". Software is binary, the culture and mindset around it shouldn't be.

prawks• 12 years ago

"Adversary" might not technically be a synonym to "enemy", but in modern-day, common, spoken language, they are both thought of as very militaristic terms.

NAFV_P6• 12 years ago

All while endorsing the Affero GPL, a license that doesn't even allow users full control over their own servers.

Thanks for mentioning the Affero version, I'd never come across it before. In what manner does this licence affect the users' control?

codeflo4• 12 years ago

The FSF's FAQ on the Affero GPL explains it best: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-affero-gpl.html

Quote: If some program on this server is released under the GNU Affero GPL, the server is required to offer the users the corresponding source of that program.

pgeorgi• 12 years ago

If you use the software (ie install it on your own server) and make it accessible to third parties, you must make the sources available to them.

That was quite a surprise for some after they got used to slapping GPLv2 software on a server and making it SaaS.

mjn3• 12 years ago

I don't think it's much of a departure from original principles. The original impetus for the FSF was the "closing off" of some previously public code by MIT AI-lab spinoffs, who hired away developers and withdrew from the previously common practice of everyone sharing the code of the systems that were being run at the lab.

That led to his views that: 1) if any software is used by users, its code should also be available to and modifiable by those same users; and 2) anyone who tries to keep users from getting access to the code of the systems they use (or uses legal means to keep them from modifying it when they do get access to it), is the users' adversary.

If anything the Affero GPL fits the 1980s motivation better than the original GPL does, since Stallman has always had the view that users of multiuser systems, not only the sysops, should also have full source access. A user of a SaaS app is basically the modern-era version of a non-privileged user of a multiuser Unix system. I'm not sure why that use-case wasn't included in the original GPL, come to think of it. My guess is just that it wasn't in practice possible to do what Stallman objected to at a large scale, given technology of the day. If you developed a proprietary app based on GNU software, installed it as sysop, and then didn't want to share the source, your userbase would generally be limited to one site. In theory you could run something more like today's SaaS: a central Unix system where you sold accounts but never distributed the software. In that case Matlab could incorporate GPL'd components without releasing their code by installing Matlab only on in-house servers. They'd sell people shell accounts on mathworks.com, but would never let the software leave the building. In practice this wasn't done at large scale, and instead any widescale usage required distributing the code to sysops at other sites to install local copies (e.g. Matlab licensed its software to departmental and corporate Matlab servers), at which point the GPL would kick in if the software were built on GNU software.

The Affero GPL in a sense formalizes that previous status quo, by saying that the GPL distribution requirements don't apply for in-house usage within one site, but do apply once you're making the software available to users outside the organization (even if "making available" is now via telnet or ssh or vnc or http rather than binary distribution). The law around proprietary software has also been moving in this direction, to consider hosted usage to invoke a distribution-like copyright requirement such as "public performance", even if no binary goes over the wire. For example, if I buy an NES game legally, but then I sell accounts where thousands of people can VNC in to my server and play it on an emulator, that is probably not legit, even though I am technically never distributing the ROM to them (it never leaves my servers). This isn't completely sorted out though.

codeflo4• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why that use-case wasn't included in the original GPL, come to think of it. My guess is just that it wasn't in practice possible to do what Stallman objected to at a large scale, given technology of the day.

Stallman isn't exactly known for letting practicality and feasibility compromise his ideals. Given that, as you said, the usecase was widespread when the FSF was founded, I consider it much more likely that he considered this case and didn't include it on purpose.

However, if you or anyone else has a good (older) quote from RMS on whether he considers it evil to connect your free browser to a proprietary HTTP server, I'd be very interested to see it.

The only thing I could find (actually rather recent, 2010's The JavaScript Trap [1]) only argues that a free browser shouldn't run proprietary JavaScript on your own computer, because that would violate your software freedom. It says nothing to suggest that the HTTP download of data from a proprietary server is considered a problem.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

im3w1l• 12 years ago

For example, if I buy an NES game legally, but then I sell accounts where thousands of people can VNC in to my server and play it on an emulator, that is probably not legit, even though I am technically never distributing the ROM to them (it never leaves my servers). This isn't completely sorted out though.

I'd guess the textures and sounds you would transmit are copyrighted anyway?

marcosdumay2• 12 years ago

Having said that, I find Stallman's war rhetoric increasingly disturbing

When a set of powerfull people vow to destroy one of your freedoms, you only have two options. And yes, this is disturbing.

joezydeco• 12 years ago

"However, in the end it was the GCC developers that rejected Apple's willing GPL contribution to GCC (still in the pre-GPLv3 days when GCC was GPLv2 licensed). The upstream GCC developers didn't want LLVM because of wanting C instead of C++ code, GCC developers didn't like the modular and library design of LLVM, LLVM wasn't formally "done" at that point, and there was some "Not Invented Here" syndrome going on by the FSF developers."

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTU4MzE

saurik9• 12 years ago

If you actually dig into the history of this, you see that the GCC developers were actually quite positive (even about C++) and that merging parts or even all of LLVM (even parts that conflicted: maintainers from gcc stepped up to explicitly say "I worked hard on this piece, but I am mot attached to it: let's throw it away if LLVM's version is better") came up quite often for the following year (there was a lot of interest from the link-time optimization people, as well as gcj for the JIT features), but in the end (much later) this came down to most of the promises from Chris Lattner not panning out. (I was remarkably happy that the comments on Phoronix actually got this right, so if you read over the comments there you see a lot of discussion of this.)

> The lack of FSF copyright assignment for LLVM is a problem. It may even be a bigger problem than what we think. Then again, it may not. I just don't know. What I do know is that this must absolutely be resolved before we even think of adding LLVM to any branch. Chris said he'd be adding LLVM to the apple branch soon. I hope the FSF assignment is worked out by then. I understand that even code in branches should be under FSF copyright assignment.
This is a solvable problem, and has been pointed out to Chris repeatedly, by many people, at various venues, for over a year.
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-10/msg01146.html
He keeps hand waving, saying that it's possible.
Great.
I say, enough grandstanding: it's not enough to be possible, it needs to be actual. If it is indeed actually possible to release LLVM under the GPL, then he needs to pick a version and GPL it. Then we can get serious.
Make it so.
He seems to be operating under the mistaken idea that the GCC community can go ahead and make plans around LLVM being free as defined by the GNU project, without it actually being so.

-- http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2005-11/msg01065.html

codex2• 12 years ago

Apple will never, ever assign copyright to the FSF out of fears the code will go GPLv3--or even to support an organization that advocates GPLv3.

RexRollman• 12 years ago

Stallman's view on this was quite predicatable, as he is very consistant in his opinions.

keithpeter• 12 years ago

As is Mr Raymond, to whom Mr Stallman was replying.

Another HN thread pointed out a subsequent email in which Mr Raymond realised that the GCC compiler did in fact have a sort of plug-in system.

judk• 12 years ago

RMS is far more knowledgeable, accurate, and respectful when discussing people he disagrees with, than almost anyone else is.

(People he disagrees with in the open source world, like ESR/OSI, who he considers neutral or incompletely free. He isn't respectful of people like Bill Gates who promote actively non-open software)

stephenr3• 12 years ago

Stallmans rhetoric and ridiculous hate for apple specifically is nothing new and still makes no sense.

His argument about not being able to install modified versions of open source apps on ios is either a blatant lie or sheer ignorance.

But that doesn't matter - his opinion is quite obvious as soon as he uses the word "win".

It's apparently too horrendous for stallman to imagine a world where some people support and use commercial software and some support and use open source software and some support and use "free" software, without constantly getting into a pissing match.

Stallman is frankly no better than a religious fundamentalist claiming abortion and condoms are the work of the devil, and not only will they avoid them, they will lobby governments to enact laws banning such items.

saurik9• 12 years ago

His argument about not being able to install modified versions of open source apps on ios is either a blatant lie or sheer ignorance.

This is only true if you are willing and able to pay (and are allowed to pay) Apple $99 to get into their developer program, for a limited number of devices, to get access to a now closed-source fork of LLVM (the AArch64 support is still not merged, and no code from Xcode 5 has seen the light of day now over four months later) that would let you swap in replacement code; and then, even after compiling it, you wouldn't be able to freely redistribute it to others without submitting it to Apple's store review process (which might very well reject it for any number of reasons, including "similar to existing apps", which is actually a documented rejection criteria).

stephenr3• 12 years ago

Membership is required to distribute via the App Store, not to build and install to a device via USB.

There is also nothing stopping you installing the app onto others devices the same way.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC4• 12 years ago

Nice rhetoric you have there - if only there were any arguments in it!

It may be surprising to you, but fighting for a cause is not bad because you are fighting for a cause, but because you are fighting for an idiotic cause. Religious fundamentalists aren't idiots because they are fighting for something, but they are idiots because they are fighting for something that would be detrimental to society (including themselves). You may remember there were people who fought against slavery, they even lobbied government to enact laws banning slavery. If only someone had stopped those fundamentalists!

Also, you might want to familiarize yourself with RMS's position sufficiently to not fall for "commercial vs. free software". RMS never opposed commercial software, in fact he is very much for commercial software. Chances are you don't have a clue what you are actually arguing against. Go, read the FSF's FAQ, so you can at least argue without using any strawmans.

mwfunk3• 12 years ago

...and if there was even the slightest, remotest equivalence between human slavery and proprietary software, this argument might hold water.

Anyway, fundamentalists are bad because fundamentalists are bad, period. Even if they're fighting for the right thing, they're still doing it for the wrong reasons, and people need to at least acknowledge that before lionizing them too much. I'd much rather get behind someone doing the right thing for the right reasons, or at least maintain a modicum of skepticism about everyone if no such leader exists.

saurik9• 12 years ago

When this came up yesterday[1] I made a comment that a lot of people seemed to find interesting (by votes, not responses: there's nothing in it really to respond to), so I figure I'll make it again today.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7116144

In case anyone doesn't realize this: the ARM64 LLVM backend used by Apple in Xcode 5 to target, for example, the iPhone 5S, is currently not open source. There is a vague promise that it will be merged, but the time frame described was itself long, many months have already passed, and it doesn't really seem like much progress has been made since (although of course things could be happening internally at Apple).

(In fact, none of the code actually backing Xcode 5 or iOS 7, even LGPL code such as WebCore/JavaScriptCore, has yet to be released; but, in the case of the ARM64 backend, there was a specific discussion about it on the mailing list, and in fact some iOS-specific ARM64 patches to LLVM languished seemingly due to the idea that "well, some day the ARM64 stuff will be merged from Apple", so it is already having "chilling effects".)

BudVVeezer2• 12 years ago

A quick search for ARMv8 and AArch64 in the LLVM commits list shows that a considerable amount of work has been happening on this front. In fact: http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-...

I would have a hard time saying there's "chilling effects" happening.

saurik9• 12 years ago

LLVM has their own ARMv8/AArch64 backend that is unrelated to Apple's. This backend, as far as I understand, does not target Apple's modified conventions and file formats for iOS. A patch was provided for this, and as far as I understand it was not merged. The patch was ignored on the mailing list, and even came with the caveat attached "I'm not sure if the llvm maintainers want the patch given the previous message that there's going to be an official patch set from apple to support this, but here is mine."

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-September/06...

For further evidence of this, we can look to Haskell: Haskell currently has been unable to target iOS's ARM64 architecture because of this part of the compiler not being open source. It is precisely these kinds of ripple effects that Stallman is concerned with: he would argue that by supporting LLVM the community set themselves up for a situation where Apple was able to later hoard valuable changes while still getting the benefit of an army of people fixing bugs in their compiler for free.

Also in "Build Settings", change "Architectures" to "Standard Architectures (armv7, armv7s)" (as opposed to "(including 64-bit)") as Apple hasn't yet merged Arm64 support into the LLVM source that we'd need to fully support 64bit iOS devices. The code will still run wonderfully on the 5S/iPad Air/mini Retina in 32bit mode.

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/CrossCompilin...

Honestly, it is as if you just saw "ARM64", did a Google search, took the first hit, and decided "that's enough research for today"... :(. Your citation is from over a year ago, long before all of this happened, and is not relevant. I specifically stated in my comment that the issue was with relation to the "ARM64" backend as it targets "iOS", not the general "AArch64" backend as it could be used to target other platforms or operating systems. This is a critical distinction when talking about Apple.

thatthatis8• 12 years ago

With copy middle there are always going to be examples of "x wasn't re released into the community." I think focusing on these is extremely short sighted. It cedes a premise that the way to judge the health of an open source paradigm is %_advances_open_sourced, or as a negative indicator #_advances_not_open_sourced.

The true equation for the value of an open source paradigm should be: #_advances_open_sourced, and nothing else.

It doesnt matter if 99% of advances stay closed, what matters is if there is enough value repatriated.

Copy middle allows a company to take something open source, invest speculative resources on improving it, and it successfull sell for a portion of the incremental value - both improving the quality and decreasing the cost of software to consumers. Then, if/when a company tries this and fails to find a market, the advances sometimes/often get repatriated as part of the shutdown.

Copy left tries to use anti-ownership ideals to ensure software remains free. This seems like a good idea, until you realize that copy middle effectively harnesses capitalist motives to make free software better.

In my mind: Copy left is, by design, a virus. Copy middle is a symbiotic guest organism. I know when given the choice between a probiotic and the flu virus which I want to ingest into my body. I have the exact same preferences when it comes to what I invest in my company.

saurik9• 12 years ago

This is your opinion. I will not even attempt to say it is not a valid opinion: a lot of people I know hold this opinion, and at least in the short term it seems to be a consistent opinion. I think there is an interesting discussion to be had "in the long term", but it is just that: a discussion. However, I am going to assert that it is, in fact, an opinion. The thing you need to understand is that the other side of this particular opinion does not actually care about either "#_advances_open_sourced" or "%_advances_open_sourced": the goal is freedom, not openness, and these are assets that are neither equivalent nor convertible.

To put this into a very simple example: if Apple open sourced every single software component on the iPhone, that would be extremely "open". We would know everything about how the iPhone worked, and we'd have learned a lot as a community about how to build mobile phone operating systems. This would help other people and companies work on mobile phones, and might have positive effects on things entirely unrelated to mobile phones. To the people who care about variables related to "#_advances_open_sourced", this would be a great outcome, and "%_advances_open_sourced" is even 100%: seems great.

But, in such a universe, I will argue that the users of an iPhone are still not "free" because they are unable to take the software running on their iPhone and replace it with modified software based on all of that wonderful open source code. In fact, lest you say "people then shouldn't buy an iPhone", it might be the case that users of any device are not free, because there is absolutely no guarantee in such a universe that any of the numerous devices that are based on this open source software--even if 100% of the software on these devices is itself open source--actually allow users to modify the software running on them (hence, GPL3).

This is the difference between "free" and "open", and in my understanding this is why Stallman makes the points he makes: he doesn't care whether there are more cool and fun toys built out of open components, what he cares about is whether the toys we have restrict our freedom. It might be that a world where we are more free has fewer toys. In my interpretation, Stallman would consider that a "win" for mankind. In his mind, that argument "so don't buy an iPhone" seems to be related to the argument "so don't link against their code", and he wants people to stop: the idea is that if you don't like people restricting freedom, you should actively avoid yourself supporting it.

(So, that's all I really have to say in response. However, if you--or anyone else--finds this kind of stuff interesting, I spent a lot of time a few months ago writing a lot about this subject, and in particular this tradeoff, in a comment thread on Hacker News when FreeBSD deprecated gcc. Of particular highlight, I go into detail on the property that GPL is more a license about binaries and hackability as it applies to end users than about source code and extensibility as it applies to developers, as well as why this causes debates about this subject among a bunch of developers to be problematic, due to the different incentives developers have from end users.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209724

hnwhatevz• 12 years ago

My capitalist motive requires that the yucky viral non-incremental value of your post be repatriated from my brain and back into yours.

NAFV_P6• 12 years ago

I have just thought of a hypothetical scenario:

Someone writes a revolutionary piece of software, then it is released under ....

0 > a closed source

1 > a bsd style

2 > gpl v3

.... licence.

I think the last choice would have a far more profound effect upon the science and business of computing than the two alternatives.

EDIT: Oh, tor is under bsd, how would things be if it were released under gpl v3?

andreasvc• 12 years ago

I think you forgot to provide an actual argument to back up that claim. Personally I don't think the direct effect will differ depending on the license, but it will have a big effect on how viable the software is in the long term. Closed source will be abandoned when the original authors lose interest, and with BSD code it is arguable that companies taking work but not contributing back has a negative effect on the sense of community, but this is of course hotly contested by BSD license proponents. One big example is the Linux kernel which is GPL; but of course its success may or may not have anything to do with its license.

NAFV_P6• 12 years ago

I think you forgot to provide an actual argument to back up that claim.

I purposely refrained from giving one because it is a hypothetical situation. If you want a potential example I had a quick scroll through the GPL FAQ:

"All GNU GPL versions permit such combinations privately; they also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too."

Imagine BSD under GPL, since in this universe it is apparently used on Apple OS's.

protomyth• 12 years ago

from the article's first comment:

"On the other hand, Stallman's goals (having the best compiler technology be foverer a copylefted one) is perhaps achievable by having the GCC developers abandon GCC, switch to working on a fork of LLVM/Clang relicensed to GPLv3 with continuous merging of Apple's work, and make that fork far superior to Apple's version."

I assume this person means the changes would be licensed as GPLv3 because you cannot just go and relicense someone else's code without the copyright holder's permission.

Calling it "Apple's version" might be a tad bit offensive to the other companies working on LLVM / clang.

bitkrieg• 12 years ago

Plus this actually would be a step backwards since gcc's code generation is still significantly ahead performance wise.

nzp3• 12 years ago

The biggest problem (possibly the only problem, but still a severe one) with Stallman's views on software copyright licensing is that he seems either unaware of, or unwilling to accept, broader social, economic and political issues of our civilization. Software and processes around it, like any other product of human social production, doesn't and can't exist in a social vacuum. It's nice to be focused on a specific social issue, but when your work scales to a certain level it becomes impossible to consider it in isolation. Reading the comments on that article made me glad to see an LLVM developer who chimed in (silvas) understands this perfectly and he articulated it quite well:

We don't do everything in public purely because of internal constraints of the companies that we work for and those won't go away without significant societal changes (i.e., the necessary changes vastly transcend the developers' own attitudes on the issue: we're talking changes at the levels of entire business models).

[...]

What about iPhone platform support?

I assume you mean that the platform is locked down?

Well, that's their platform. They make the rules for who gets to compile for it. Now, you may say "well, they shouldn't restrict who gets to compile for their platform!" and that's fine, but it's a different issue, one which goes to the core of Apple's business model and the society that enables it and the individuals that make up that society. Even if LLVM/Clang were to magically become GPL'd tomorrow, the platform would still be locked down.

[...]

It's myopic to think that the software is somehow the key factor here: the assault on freedom in this situation is the incentive to keep it proprietary, and that is a much larger issue. There is a similar assault on freedom from the fact that their hardware designs are proprietary as well, and the incentives are similar.

[...]

In my experience, Stallman's view is extremely myopic because the real impediments to free software are larger societal issues[1]. Within the hacker community these issues don't really exist (Eric Raymond's essays cover this well), and so the default is that code is free software (four freedoms), but the other 99.99% of society is still stuck with archaic principles, and any time that a hacker's paycheck comes from "the rest of society", they are subject to a world where these issues exist.

[1] The GPLv3 "anti-Tivo-ization" wording is a perfect example that shows that confining your view just to software is myopic. Why shouldn't we want the entire device and all its chips to be free also? Why shouldn't the company's internal discussions be done in public? The answer to these questions is the same as the answer to "why does non-free software exist?".

sp332• 12 years ago

He is pretty obviously "unwilling to accept" those issues, but he's not acting as if software is in a vacuum. He's been working to change those issues. Most obviously, the concept of copyleft, which uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce openness, is very much an attempt to change society. And it's been very successful.

nzp3• 12 years ago

"Unwilling to accept" was meant in the sense "doesn't recognize the issues even exist", not "unwilling to let the issues go unsolved".

He's been explicitly not willing to consider issues I'm talking about. In fact, he's quite happy to live in a system which enables and produces conditions which enable the existence of proprietary software. He's never been working to change those issues. In fact, the concept of copyleft, the mechanism it relies on, is firmly rooted in the status quo. You say it yourself, it uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce "openness", but the crucial point is that it's an openness with a severely limited scope. It does absolutely zero to change society in any meaningful, fundamental way. The very act of relying on capitalist state legal system to force people to be "open" serves only to further legitimize that very system which makes possible, even desirable, for things like proprietary software to exist. The GPL isn't even a subversive hack of copyright law--the law was meant to enable authors to put almost any kind of conditions on the use and distribution of their works, as they please. It's the purpose of copyright law all along to enable things like the GPL. The fact that it's highly unusual to release works under such conditions is beside the point. Stallman almost autistically only sees his most immediate grievance, the incidental fact that software can be restrictive to its users, but is completely blind to the actual fundamental social causes of the issue. So no, the GPL is not in any meaningful way successful at actually changing society, the whole concept is fundamentally conformant to existing socio-economic conditions.

pavanky• 12 years ago

The flip side of the story is that having RMS pushing for copy left software relentlessly means you have an free OS + kernel and free development tools that can run on practically any given device.

APPLE is one of the few companies that refuses to use GPL because they are staunchly anti copy left. There are many companies out there that feel otherwise.

Before I get too far off the road, the point I am trying to make is that the business models ARE changing back to be more free. They changed in the first place from free to proprietary in the late 70s.

nzp3• 12 years ago

We have a free OS + kernel (and mind you, GNU/Linux is not the only viable free software OS) because RMS hacked relentlessly in the 80's on GCC and other C toolchain components. In fact, so relentlessly it destroyed his hands with RSI. No amount of political pushing for copyleft would have made any difference if the code wasn't there. I'd rate GCC as by far the most important enabler of the abundance of free software we have today, and for that I'm deeply grateful to RMS.

I'm fairly certain that no company chose GPL because the management's first concern was joining FSF's struggle against proprietary software. Businesses can't operate that way. Whether a company adopts GPL or not depends on perceived business benefits of adoption. So the question of this or that company adopting GPL or not doesn't have anything to do with moral reasoning behind GPL and is therefore irrelevant to what we're talking about.

Yes, they're changing, in the same way that a factory may change when it adopts new machinery. Companies who adopt copyleft adopt it because of the "open source" philosophy, not because of the "free software" philosophy. This is actually one of Stallman's talking points (open source vs. free software) I'm very sympathetic to.

mwfunk3• 12 years ago

Apple is clearly anti-GPL3, which is not the same thing as being "staunchly anti copy left". They ship a number of GPL2 components, some of which were essentially forked when the upstream project moved to GPL3.

Your last comment has been made a gazillion times over the last 20+ years but it's just not that simple. There was no time in which the default business model for software was free. What there was, was a time in which there was no mass-market business model for software, period. There was no such thing as a store you could walk into and buy software prior to the mid-'70s, and a much larger proportion of software developers were scientists, engineers, and hobbyists, who passed around a lot of common code, as they still do today. It's not like there was some golden utopia back in 1973 where the world's #1 spreadsheet application was free software, because such things didn't exist back then.

rsynnott2• 12 years ago

APPLE is one of the few companies that refuses to use GPL because they are staunchly anti copy left.

Hrm? I think a lot of companies are pretty wary of GPLv3. And even GPL in general, really; look at Android. About the only remaining GPL component is the Linux kernel (and that's GPLv2, of course).

Only major corporate adoption of GPLv3 I can think if is some Oracle dual-licensed GPL/commercial stuff.

EDIT: It's worth noting, of course, that Apple does still use GPL stuff, just not GPLv3 stuff.

X4• 12 years ago

If this is true, Stallmann has kept right with all what he said!

> "by having the GCC developers abandon GCC, switch to working on a fork of LLVM/Clang __relicensed__ to GPLv3"
> Yeah, not allowed by copyright law. They aren't the authors, so they could only GPL code they wrote.

If even the best developers of the world (allow me to exaggerate a little, it's from my perspective anyways) aren't allowed to work on OSS, then this is really a CUT of Freedom. I would love to see GCC people switch to LLVM GPL.

I see it this ways: GPL is an insurance that guarantees that whatever is made with this code, will benefit this code in a way that everyone can take care of that benefit.

Even though I'm new to this, I don't understand the hate towards Mr. Stallman, he seems to be a fine man and his own strong opinions on a movement he has started. There is nothing wrong with it, he's not beating someone up, just because he's not of the same opinion, he's keeping the premise of his movement alive. That's a good trait, not a bad one, esp. because he keep talking openly about it. He's not wirting private confidential emails to discuss such things, but makes it public, so that everyone can see. it. Imagine someone publicises only one of your emails attached to your own name, it could be thrown out of context and people could start a shitstorm, just because wrong word was used, or because of your look . Takes guts to say your opinion, non-anonymously, when you already have reputation in stack.

thatthatis8• 12 years ago

If you care about free as in freedom, copy middle is how to get it.

Copy left tears from you ownership of your incremental work, it makes your work an ideological prisoner of the commons.

Copy left ensures a certain degree of openness, but open does not equal free.

Only copy middle is truly free software.

rsynnott2• 12 years ago

I have to wonder if there'd be so much fuss about any permissive-license project where Apple _wasn't_ a major contributor. I mean, you rarely see this level of concern that the existence of the Apache web server or Python or whatever will pollute the FSF's precious bodily fluids.

It might be just that GCC is such a flagship project for them, but, really, the level of concern seems unwarranted. You'd think LLVM was the first software ever to use a permissive license or something...

codex2• 12 years ago

Stallman consistently ignores the free market when writing about software freedom. What users want, the free market will provide. If they want customizable software, the market will give it to them. If they only want feature X, the market will give it to them. If they want interop., they will get that too. If they don't care about modifying the source code, well, people won't offer it.

The GPL is not what allows users to get what they need from software or technology. It's the market. As long as you have a free market, with able competitors, you don't need the GPL, and the whole discussion of "free software" is a red-herring. As far as mainstream users are concerned, you don't need the source when you have the dollar.

Stallman's initial experience with closed software was not in a free market, so I can see how he's grown up with a colored view. The world has changed, however, and he has not.

Stallman's original problem was essentially, "I had a broken car once and I couldn't get the part I needed to repair it. That sucked, so all manufacturers should provide everyone with all the information needed make any replacement part, or turn my Beetle into a Porsche."

In today's world that problem really doesn't exist anymore. Software is a mass market product, and the software that is produced already conforms to what people want pretty well. Sure, I'll take cheaper parts for my car, and I love getting something for nothing, but on the list of humanity's problems, non-GPL software is very, very low.

Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft

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