Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

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

by rfreytag • 12 years ago

113 252 12 years ago

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

I think Stallman misses the point that many of us who are at least latent distributists see in free/open source software. Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others.[1]

The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under, and under what circumstances. If freedom to create things is economically valuable (and I think it is), then one need not worry so much about people misappropriating things because in the end they cannot out-compete what is free and open. Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions?

These days, my preferred license is the BSD license. I am uncomfortable with the MIT license's sublicensing grant, and I am even more uncomfortable with the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating. I am willing to tolerate the GPL and in fact most of my works are licensed under that license for legacy code reasons.

But I still prefer the BSD license. This license is very simple. I own my work and give everyone else a right to use it. They own their own contributions and an decide how to license those. Since freedom to create new solutions with the software is economically valuable, there I can expect that the original BSD-licensed versions will win out over the long run.

[1] http://ledgersmbdev.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-distributist-view...

mpyne2• 12 years ago

Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to creative endeavors without micromanagement from others.

Freedom certainly can be defined in such a way, even if you don't happen to fall in with that definition. Put bluntly the big question between the two major license types is whether you're pushing for individual freedom or collective freedom.

Rather I think the point that Stallman misses (or more likely, chooses to argue against) is that many open source programmers deliberately choose not to be "Free Software" political activists, but simply choose open source licenses for technical or social (but not political) reasoning. They don't want to save the world, they want to sling the best code.

rout39574• 12 years ago

He doesn't miss it; he outlines it specifically in the linked article. He correctly identifies it as a philosophically different approach to software, and to licensure.

He hopes to communicate to those who have that short-sighted view, that their interests are not best served by focusing on just the code.

jordigh5• 12 years ago

The free vs open source thing is irrelevant to what you're saying above. Both the GPL and the BSD licenses are free and both are open source. Some BSD distributions even make a point of calling what they're doing "free software", e.g.

http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

But my disagreement with Stallman is ideological. In particular:

1. I think that enumerating freedoms is at best a waste of time and at worst a way to justify abridging the freedoms that matter.

2. I think the question really is who gets to direct downstream licensing and under what circumstances. The MIT license allows an individual to add restrictions to the license without even making contributions. The AGPL encumbers services provided with license terms. The other licenses are in the middle.

Instead of enumerating freedom, I would rather define it, namely as the right to engage in economic production without upstream obligations. From this viewpoint, the AGPL is significantly less free than the license of the closed source redistributable libraries that come with Microsoft Visual Studio. Since I find the latter too restrictive for my taste, I won't touch the former.

_delirium9• 12 years ago

I am even more uncomfortable with the AGPL, which strikes me as a demonstration that freedom in the name of freedom is ultimately self-consuming and self-defeating

I actually read the AGPL as driven by mostly pragmatic factors. It didn't even come from the FSF initially, but from a developer (Affero) who believed it fit their business strategy better than the existing licenses.

One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. People who are willing to GPL their own software may incorporate your code under the GPL's terms. Other people who prefer more traditional commercial terms can, alternately, purchase a commercial license.

In the webapp setting this approach no longer works, because the GPL only covers "distribution", and a webapp backend is never distributed. Therefore nobody will buy a commercial license. The AGPL more or less restores the traditional GPL terms in the webapp setting, where you have to GPL your product if you ship an app containing the GPL'd code: only now, deploying a public webapp is a form of "shipping" (which is how most software devs actually do see the situation... deploying a live webapp is a modern-day form of shipping software).

And in practice, it seems the most common alternative to the AGPL in this setting is to just keep your code fully proprietary, so competitors can't build on it. I think in that sense AGPL is helpful if it encourages more releases, e.g. if it encourages more companies to take the Launchpad approach with their code (AGPL) rather than the GitHub approach to it (proprietary). The other common alternative is to release the source but under a non-OSI license like "free for noncommercial use only, commercial users must buy a license". The AGPL seems at least more generous than that.

jordigh5• 12 years ago

One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach.

He actually does like it:

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/selling-exceptions

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

One of the traditional business strategies built on the GPL, which RMS does not greatly like, but is quite possible to do, is the dual-licensed GPL/proprietary approach. People who are willing to GPL their own software may incorporate your code under the GPL's terms. Other people who prefer more traditional commercial terms can, alternately, purchase a commercial license.

You can't effectively dual license software unless the public license has restrictions that don't serve your target market. The more restrictive the license, the more it favors dual licensing. This is actually my biggest concern with the GPL.

And in practice, it seems the most common alternative to the AGPL in this setting is to just keep your code fully proprietary, so competitors can't build on it.

Efficito (of which I am a co-founder) offers hosting for a web-app based on open source software. We have few specific enhancements that don't make it upstream but those are really specific to our hosting offers (i.e. they don't provide customer-facing functionality, but provide functionality to us as hosting provider). Almost all of our work gets contributed back. The software is licensed under the GPL v2+, and the community is (I think rightly) hostile towards upgrading to the GPL v3.

I don't like the AGPL. I think that once you start encumbering services, then you have added a series of restrictions which really are even unheard of in the proprietary software world. Yes, it is pragmatic, but this is the way real freedom is lost, by insisting that practice serve some notion of freedom rather than the other way around.

Spooky233• 12 years ago

Your preference for BSD is certainly valid, but it's valid because of your objectives.

If you want a software package that you own to be openly collaborated, but still controlled by you, the GPL is a great copyright construct to do that with.

There isn't a right answer here. I think Stallman has an ideologically pure argument that is appealing to me as a consumer, but not always ideal for my business needs.

I disagree that BSD solutions will necessarily "win" in the long run. There's no incentive to share.

yxhuvud• 12 years ago

There are plenty of incentives to share. They can be summarized by this: Code that you don't share is code that you have to maintain yourself. Code that you share is code that you can offload the maintaining to someone else.

midas0072• 12 years ago

Licenses are a toolbox, like the tech they cover.

Wanna stop basically everything commercial related? AGPL

Wanna stop tivozation? GPL 3

Wanna allow tivozation? GPL 2

Wanna allow general commercialization? 2-clause BSD

EDIT: if anyone remembers the OSS license feature matrix site that's new, plz reply.

dragonwriter7• 12 years ago

I think Stallman has an ideologically pure argument that is appealing to me as a consumer, but not always ideal for my business needs.

I, OTOH, given the conflict between Stallman's position on selling GPL exceptions vs. his position on non-copyleft licenses, and given the GPLv3's domain-based discrimination in what is required freedom, thing Stallman and the FSF have ideologically incoherent positions.

I disagree that BSD solutions will necessarily "win" in the long run. There's no incentive to share.

There is only no incentive to share if you think that open source has no independent value to producers, that its a sacrifice they make in order to be permitted to use others work. While the GPL model and a mass of early high-quality software licensed under that model was probably essential in getting people to accept the value to producers of open source, once that value was widely accepted -- as it now is by many major software producers -- the incentive to share isn't from someone holding a gun to the producer's head, its from the value of community engagement with the code that permission to use it fosters.

aaron-lebo3• 12 years ago

A friend recently introduced me to the ISC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISC_license which is similar to the MIT and BSD except extraneous language has been removed. If you like the simplicity of BSD, maybe you'll like this even more?

OpenBSD uses it.

brianpgordon• 12 years ago

I am uncomfortable with the MIT license's sublicensing grant

I did a little research to try to figure out what you meant; tell me if I have it right:

MIT allows you to redistribute the code under a different license. The problem is that the sublicense might be more permissive than the MIT license, potentially allowing someone to bypass the requirements of the MIT license.

Is that what you meant?

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

Not quite.

One right that can be passed on is the right to sublicense, which gives the licensee the right to issue new licenses. The licensee cannot provide downstream licenses to rights he or she did not receive. So the license can never be more permissive than the existing one.

The difference is that under the BSD license, the original author grants licenses and requires notice on downstream redistribution. Someone can add code, however, and add restrictions to that code. The MIT license allows something very different, which is the right of a mere licensee to negotiate licenses (provided they are no more permissive than what was granted) on behalf of the licensor.

So you can take MIT licensed code with no changes and relicense it under the GPL. The BSD license requires that you license only your code in it (and the corresponding work as a whole) under the GPL, but the MIT license allows you to add restrictions to code you did not author.

koide4• 12 years ago

I don't think he misses the point. He just doesn't find it a good one. I mean, you are of course entitled to your opinion, and to call his a mistake, but saying RMS "misses the point" of what he's been working on almost 30 years is a bit disingenuous.

And I personally disagree with the statement that BSD-like licenses are definitely better than GPL. As always, it depends. What would have happened to Linux without GPL? Would it support as many devices as it does? Would it be as widespread as it is? On the other hand, I agree that a BSD-like license has been a plus for PostgreSQL, by permitting the existence of various 'PostgreSQL enhanced' companies selling their versions and offering support.

What's ultimately more important than the license is the people working on the project and the community that forms around it. They are what ultimately lead to success or failure, not the choice of a license.

zanny11• 12 years ago

What's ultimately more important than the license is the people working on the project and the community that forms around it.

Is it? Look at the router industry - licenses like zlib, the busybox license, and the "no copyright" sqlite licenses have enabled an entire industry to take open source software and use it for profit without having to invest developer hours to making it themselves. But they still sell that software, and take away their users freedoms, on their routers. Every time I buy a new one, I have to either look for one with an open source firmware already installed, or be very careful to make sure one I get is supposed so I can reflash it (if its even possible on some models) to reclaim my freedoms.

Tons of other embedded devices do the same. As long as Linux at least is gpl v2, they can get away with using the kernel as well as long as they don't modify it directly.

And who knows how much open source code Microsoft and Apple have in their OS installs that has been heavily modified without any of that work being contributed back to the source projects while those companies profit off license key sales?

HerraBRE2• 12 years ago

My apologies if this is slightly inflammatory, but in my opinion preferring BSD-style licenses over copyleft licenses is both selfish and elitist (or classist, if you will).

It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough. The freedom of the end-users does not matter, even to the point that when Free Software advocates ask developers to take their end-user's freedoms into account, that request is met with outright hostility.

It's a very selfish and one-sided type of freedom. Freedom for us, not for them. Freedom to oppress, monetize and lock-in the peons who don't know how to code.

clarry12• 12 years ago

Permissive licenses give freedoms for techies and users equally. If it's free for one, it's free for the other.

Less permissive licenses, and the GPL in particular, restrict both users and techies.

Users can be subject to oppression, monetization and lock-in if they are willing. But it is their choice. And if they so want, they can grab that free code and hire a developer to "oppress, monetize, and lock-in" the other guy. If he is willing to be oppressed.

dragonwriter7• 12 years ago

It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough. The freedom of the end-users does not matter

I actually don't see the additional restrictions in the GPL as doing much for end users, per se. The real beneficiaries are still developers, just developers one level further removed from the licensor than the beneficiaries of the freedom in permissive licenses. But if you think that a substantial portion of the people using your work under a permissive license are themselves likely to offer a Free/Open license (whether permissive or copyleft), a copyleft license actually may reduce the freedom actually experienced by the indirect beneficiaries as well as that experienced by direct licensees.

joesb2• 12 years ago

What freedom does BSD takes from users? Users are equally welcome to use BSD code.

BSD allow anyone to do anything to BSD code. GPL prevents developers from doing everything to GPL code. That says more about users being selfish and eilitst than the other way around.

Why? Just because they are end-users means they are better then me? That's exactly selfish right there.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

It's an attitude which says that as long as the elite class of techies get freedom to do as they like, that's good enough.

Well, no.

The question (if you read the blog post I linked to) is whether you go for institution-centric and centralizing controls here or whether you go for decentralized controls and questions of community structure.

The point is the best protection for everyone is widespread ownership over private property. Ownership means "the right to use" here. The BSD licenses demand greater community controls because the community cannot survive without them.

Freedom to oppress, monetize and lock-in the peons who don't know how to code.

And yet, if you demand that there be a stronger power capable of preventing oppression, then you typically get stronger organizations more capable of oppression. The end goal is, really, to decentralize and ensure that end users have a choice of what to use.

Interestingly I am living in Indonesia right now. It is amazing to see a Distributist economy in motion and see that, although the nation is poor on paper, the society functions for the poor much better than it does in the US, and so real poverty is far less of a problem. Sure the poor may have fewer television sets than in the US but they do have better access to housing and wholesome, nutritious food.....

The reason why things work so well is because the economy is so heavily decentralized. 70% of the economy is self-employed. Self-employment means that capital and labor are not separate. This is what the freedom to produce things with the software has to offer our economy.

EGreg6• 12 years ago

I would say that the FSF is using Free Software as a weapon to get all the other proprietary software to open up.

Usually the biggest barriers to entry by free software are network effects and proprietary agreements. See the recent article about Bloomberg

http://mattturck.com/2014/03/19/can-the-bloomberg-terminal-b...

(I bet someone at bloomberg read it because they released an article the next day: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-03-20/tesla-can-t...)

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

That's why so much new software is FOSS. It's basically the only way to break in without massive funding and unrealistic expectations.

Again, freedom is economically valuable.

mcguire3• 12 years ago

"Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions?"

How is BSD doing compared to Linux? (Keeping in mind that BSD is officially something like 20 years older than Linux.) I wonder how much better it would be doing if it hadn't been forked so many times by so many really smart people in the 80's and 90's?

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

I can personally count the FreeBSD contributors in the LedgerSMB community. I don't know that firm counts are really possible but I would say FreeBSD ports were one of the first packages formally added (even before Debian).

It's hard to say for sure. However, from what I have seenof the FreeBSD community, they seem quite active and vibrant.

belorn2• 12 years ago

The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under, and under what circumstances.

When ever I see this question put forth regarding GPL, I see it as extremely dishonest question. No one want to license software just for licensing sake. What some people want to do is to prohibit copying, modification and usage of work in order to create profits.

The question you actually asking is: Who has the right to tell if restrictions on copying, modification and usage is allowed on a work. It has nothing to do with freedom, and the answer is always going to be the author. Political philosophers has long since past agreed that permission to restrict other people freedom is not liberty.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

The question you actually asking is: Who has the right to tell if restrictions on copying, modification and usage is allowed on a work. It has nothing to do with freedom, and the answer is always going to be the author. Political philosophers has long since past agreed that permission to restrict other people freedom is not liberty.

Read the full blog post. The question goes effectively to a question of enumerated liberties vs work ownership, and myself siding with the latter. There may be lots of reasons to license or not under the BSD license but once you do, then you are saying that anyone downstream gets to own their own work.

Again I define "own" and "work" in the piece. I would recommend you read it.

thatthatis8• 12 years ago

Well said. I've tried in the past to articulate the "creator's freedom" that you're talking about. To my view copy middle is the only truly free as in freedom licensing paradigm. But, I also don't think proprietary software is necessarily evil.

dTal2• 12 years ago

Freedom can't be defined as a freedom from restriction or a Lockean framework of liberty, as Stallman imagines, but rather the freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others.

How is "freedom to engage creative or productive endeavors without micromanagement from others" not a "freedom from restriction"? Is the implication here that using the GPL is tantamount to "micromanagement from others"? Because I don't really see it.

one need not worry so much about people misappropriating things because in the end they cannot out-compete what is free and open. Yeah, SunOS forked from BSD. How is it doing these days compared to the open source versions?

That's not the example I would pick. How about Apple forking FreeBSD?

The question, rather literally is who has a right to tell you what license your works go under

I'm not sure what this has to do with GPL vs BSD. Nobody has the right to force you to use a particular license. Ideally, nobody gets to change the license of code you wrote either, just because they changed a variable name. It is this particular guarantee that the GPL provides and BSD doesn't.

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

What's more is that terms "open source" and "closed source" by themselves allow many companies (like GitHub) to sneakily evade the stigma of shelving out proprietary software. After all, you can view the source, right? So it must be open source! And it technically, is, too. Even if not by the OSI definition, it still fits the criteria, because having source access is only one piece of the puzzle.

What's more is "closed source" sounds much less scary than "proprietary".

Now you might say that the same can be said for "free software". Not if you explicitly denote it as "libre" or "free as in freedom", in which case its meaning becomes unequivocal.

Terminology matters.

jasonlotito2• 12 years ago

After all, you can view the source, right? So it must be open source! And it technically, is, too.

No. It's not. It's technically viewable source, or readable source, but it's not open, which as you know, needs to meet certain criteria.

Those of us who have been around long enough know this old game. Microsoft has tried this in the past. If it doesn't pass by OSI, it's not open source, and that matters to some of us. It's also why being an "open source" company is meaningless to many of us.

ramonex• 12 years ago

"all existing free software would qualify as open source" - does Stallman missed Freeware software? I hate this guy.

mpyne2• 12 years ago

Stallman has a rather precise definition of "Free" software, which does not include freeware (i.e. "free as in beer") software.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

It's not just Stallman insisting on it. "Free software" has been a well-defined term for a long while now.

jestinjoy1• 12 years ago

I got the point "Free" in Free Software. Whether it ends up in giving the software Free since we can modify and redistribute Free Software?

captainmuon• 12 years ago

The distinction between Open Source and Free Software seems increasingly silly to me (as a user and someone who has to program for his job, but is not a developer, and is not terribly interested in licenses). Both are open source (lowercase) as in, I can see the source openly. That's what's important for me, personally. Then there is the question of Copyleft or not, which is partially orthogonal to that. Copyleft is this neat hack of the copyright system where you can make people who use your code (and care about copyright) share their code, too. I think the real question Stallman is addressing is copyleft vs. non-copyleft.

) In fact, I'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source", that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive license a la: "You may not use this for anything."

jordigh5• 12 years ago

Is the distinction between "advanced interrogation techniques" and "torture" also silly to you? How about the distinction between a republic and a democracy? Or the distinction between socialism and communism?

Copyleft vs non-copyleft is not the distinction between free and open source. The distinction is about the emphasis in the language, that's all. Stallman wants people to think about their freedom. The open source initiative wants to sweep this freedom talk under the rug.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

Yes, it depends, and no, respectively.

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

In fact, I'd be really happy if e.g. Microsoft would "open their source", that is show the source code to Windows, even under a ultra non-permissive license a la: "You may not use this for anything."

That is proprietary software. Source code by itself is useless when you have no rights to go with it. This is why "open source" is such a sly term. Companies can very easily pull off shenanigans like in your hypothetical scenario and then hide behind the banner of "open source". They would also technically be correct, even if not abiding by the OSI. After all, it sure as hell isn't closed source!

Free software, so long as you specify "libre" or "free as in freedom", is unequivocal. Bullshit like freely viewable source without distribution rights doesn't cut it.

Your views are misguided, and are even potentially harmful.

lucian1900• 12 years ago

This is why "open source" is such a sly term. Companies can very easily pull off shenanigans like in your hypothetical scenario and then hide behind the banner of "open source".

They would be technically incorrect to do so. Microsoft tried, but they had to retreat to "shared source" because of the backlash.

morganherlocker2• 12 years ago

There are plenty of benefits to being able to read the code without the ability to distribute it. Two things come immediately to mind:

1. Is the software secure? Are there gaping security holes riddled through the source? Think about all the times you hear about people "working on getting the project ready for open source". Often this is due to vulnerabilities that are ticking time bombs waiting to go off as soon as the security by obscurity clock runs out.

2. There may be GPL code in the source that is being used in violation of the license. I would not be at all surprised if a significant chunk of closed proprietary software is using GPL code, but no one knows because they cannot read the source.

Both of these points are moot if you simply avoid proprietary software altogether RMS style, but only a tiny fraction of users are going to do that. Of course, these benefits are also the reasons why this will never happen.

Spooky233• 12 years ago

All copyleft really is a cost. "I will give you the fruits of my labor, but in exchange, you must share your enhancements on the same terms."

Being able to see the source isn't very useful at all, at least if you do something significant with it. You can pretty easily access Windows source code, but doing so "taints" you with NDAs and other hooks that potentially make it difficult for you to apply whatever you learned in your own products.

Saying that things like the GPL are silly because complying with it brings you some short-term angst is a really short-term thought pattern.

People bitch about GPL in Linux because of things like ZFS and graphics drivers. But without GPL, who is to say that you would be able to actually build a operating system that supports as broad an array of hardware and features as linux does?

icebraining10• 12 years ago

All copyleft really is a cost. "I will give you the fruits of my labor, but in exchange, you must share your enhancements on the same terms."

I'd re-word it as "in exchange, if you share your enhancements, you must do so on the same terms". Because lots of people think that if you modify for your personal use, or if a company modifies for its own internal use, they must share those changes, which is not true.

sdegutis2• 12 years ago

I used to put a lot of stock into RMS's philosophy of How The World Works Best™. Now I ask myself why I don't just treat it any differently than reading some random blog on the internet. Yes, RMS has done great work in leading emacs through the ages. That's pretty awesome. But that doesn't really give him any credibility in the realm of philosophy. And such a social and human topic as software licensing is pretty genuinely venturing into actual philosophy.

splawn• 12 years ago

Correct me if im wrong, but I don't think he just invented this mindset out of nowhere. It was born from the hacker culture at MIT before industry completely took over software production. Im not very hip on philosophy, what makes someone a credible philosopher?

zenbowman2• 12 years ago

Absolutely, but that model relied on programmers being paid by MIT, who was in turn paid by the US taxpayer. It was never going to pay for millions of programmers salaries, it was designed for the elite few.

I think the past decade has shown that free, open source, and completely proprietary software can all co-exist without negatively affecting consumer choice.

sdegutis2• 12 years ago

It seems like a degree in philosophy would. RMS's qualifications appear to just be his experiences.

morganherlocker2• 12 years ago

what makes someone a credible philosopher?

Peer review in major academic publications typically. Philosophy is a lot more rigorous than many imagine. RMS' ideas are interesting, and may even form the basis of some philosophical positions in the future, but I would not call him a philosopher in the academic sense. A lot of the distinction is wrapped up in culture and context. As a programmer, I work on subjects that delve heavily in mathematics, but I would not call myself a mathematician, because I am not part of that culture or the peer review process.

herge• 12 years ago

It seems that the only reason why people would prefer BSD/MIT over the GPL is to say "I want people to give me their code for free but I may want to sell it in the future."

clarry12• 12 years ago

Or maybe they just want their code to be unquestionably free.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7404914

Besides, there's nothing wrong with selling software. And for what it's worth, I can sell GPL software too, even though it's not free.

dublinben3• 12 years ago

Placing any license on code imposes restrictions. The only "unquestionably free" license is public domain.

chrisyeah• 12 years ago

Maybe some people might say "I want to give you my code for free and you can sell it in the future."

gress6• 12 years ago

Absolutely. Except that you phrase it in a way that makes it sound artificially one sided.

I want to give away code for free that other people can sell, because it is mutually beneficial.

Money provides freedom for programmers, so I want programmers to be able to make money.

mwfunk2• 12 years ago

Seriously? Really? Every programming-centric forum that I've read for the past 20 years, HN included, has recurring flareups about this specific topic. Every single one. The debates don't even change, at least not in their fundamentals. I bet this very thread will turn into 500-600 posts which don't look all that different from innumerable threads on Usenet from 20 years ago.

Point being, half of the posts on every single one of the instances of this seemingly never-ending debate are from people explaining why they prefer BSD/MIT, and none of them are for the reason you gave. Like, none of them. So, there's plenty of counterexamples for you. I don't know how you would have missed them.

johnbellone2• 12 years ago

I don't think that's the case.

I prefer BSD/MIT/Apache over the GPL because I don't have to worry about legal issues in regards to library integration with binaries that I may build. Why should I have to make sure that I'm using LGPL versus GPL, etc? Its much easier just to use, and license, software that is under BSD/MIT/Apache.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

It seems that the only reason why people would prefer BSD/MIT over the GPL is to say "I want people to give me their code for free but I may want to sell it in the future."

Not even close.

For example, client libraries in LedgerSMB are moving towards a BSD-licensed model. The reason is that this way we allow things like proprietary shopping carts to be integrated easily. Before you ask, basically, I re-engineered/fully rewrote the relevant modules for LedgerSMB 1.5 so it wouldn't be a problem. There are some subtle API differences but they mostly clean up problems with the old implementation.

There are lots of reasons to prefer the BSD license. Here's one:

1. I want folks to be able to take my work in different directions and grow the possible market.

2. I want the overall competition to expand the project as many people contribute back to a common base.

These are the things which make PostgreSQL's pace of development so high. Yes there are proprietary spinoffs but the project will certainly outrun them all.

bjourne• 12 years ago

The point, for me at least, is to increase the total volume of freedom in the world. Here is a radical thought: Western Civilization hasn't reached "freedom peak". The freedom level can continue to rise or it can decrease. Peasants in the Middle Ages probably thought they were free. We think we are free. How silly do we think those peasants were? How silly will future generations think we are?

It depends. If everyone just shrugs their shoulders, then we can easily slide back to the Middle Ages. Freedom is not monotonically rising all the time. What I, who likes computers much more than people, can do to generate freedom is write free software. It's not much but it provides value and proves that valuable stuff can be produced without a profit motive and that salary slavery isn't necessary to ensure that good software is programmed.

That's why I like the GPL. In a way that is saying "This is highly valuable software, but you can have it for free, provided..." vs BSD "Do whatever you want with this shit I just wrote for fun." Free software is great fun and I contribute to it only because I like writing code, but as a side effect of that I'm also, well, improving the world one tiny step at a time.

aaron-lebo3• 12 years ago

You can have an end goal of increasing freedom and just disagree that coercing people in any way shape or form to spread that freedom is either wrong or counterproductive. Especially if you have a belief that simply sharing knowledge is a way of increasing freedom and human advancement, "do whatever you want with this shit I just wrong for fun" can be just as powerful.

Really when you get down to it, the battle is still open source (however you want to define it) vs non open source, and squabbles between copyleft vs permissive can miss the larger picture.

phillmv• 12 years ago

They really don't. I have almost zero control over my phone (a situation that only slightly improves with Android) and even then limited control over my workstation. You're not even allowed to use GPL'd code on Apple app stores.

It'd be great if the distinction were merely academic.

zanny11• 12 years ago

The GPL operates under a spectrum:

Proprietary software takes away your rights <----> permissive <----> free software guarantees your rights

It is about the user, not the developer. The free software movement for the most part sees the power of the developer to take away a users rights as unethical, and does what they can (via copyright) to correct that.

dwc4• 12 years ago

So GPL'd software is highly valuable where BSD'd software is just hobbyist stuff...because of the license?

Less loaded (and more accurate) one-liners might be...

GPL: you may use this code, provided you follow rules representing my views on software freedom.

BSD: you may use this code however you see fit.

Which approach fits with your personal philosophy depends on you. But certainly BSD does nothing to lessen the highly valuable software licensed with it. OpenSSH, sudo, and many others, for instance.

caniszczyk• 12 years ago

Word, thanks for cleanly explaining this to people.

zanny11• 12 years ago

You can spin these lines any way you want:

GPL: You can use this software however you see fit as long as you provide the same courtesy for everyone else.

BSD: You can have my labor for free, and then profit off it all you want. Call it free money, you're welcome.

rsmith05• 12 years ago

Something interesting that I never thought about before:

Arguably, the BSD license in this case allows for more freedom in the short term (I can do whatever I want with this software...awesome!). But the GPL license, especially the older ones, helps promote a particular version of freedom in the long run. It's an interesting case.

mcguire3• 12 years ago

To a first-order approximation, possibly. On the other hand, the BSD license encourages fragmentation (or at least doesn't discourage the natural tendency to fragmentation), which does lessen the value of the software because network effects, among other things.

subb• 12 years ago

It weird to me that the free software license is more restrictive than other licenses. GPL maintain the end user freedom, but not the freedom of the programmer.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

BSD is more like: you're free to buy a gun and kill anyone you want.

GPL: you're free to buy a gun, but can only use it in self-defense.

That's why GPL feels "restrictive" - but in a good way - to preserve the freedom of the software in all instances of it.

ekianjo3• 12 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but something with a BSD license can be turned into proprietary software if you make a derivative of it. At least with GPL, all derivative software has to remain GPL compliant.

vu3rdd• 12 years ago

Free Software and GPL is about users. It puts users first and then developers. FSF considers that freedom is a social problem than a technical problem.

Open Source is about businesses and the technical merits of the software being freely available.

IMHO, BSD, MIT/X licenses put developers and their rights first and only then the users.

That's my view of the Free/Open source licensing landscape.

d0mine• 12 years ago

"BSD" -- take it, do whatever you want

GPL -- keep it free

The latter allows us to program in 20 years without asking a corporation for permission.

maratd• 12 years ago

What I, who likes computers much more than people, can do to generate freedom is write free software.

Life is not that simplistic.

So you wrote a new CRM suite and made it free. This put a bunch of shops out of business, because their clients bolted to your free alternative.

The owners of those businesses have less "freedom" now. So do the employees. But the users of your free software have more "freedom", because they now have more money to spend on other things and make their life better.

Is there some aggregate increase in freedom? I have no idea and neither do you.

Do what you want to do. If you want to write software and make it available for others for free, go for it. If you want to sell it, that's fine too.

But whatever you do, no preaching, please.

tjr• 12 years ago

So you wrote a new CRM suite and made it free. This put a bunch of shops out of business, because their clients bolted to your free alternative.

If this is actually a problem it all, it's a matter of software with zero monetary cost, which could be true of open source software, proprietary software, and "free software".

ekianjo3• 12 years ago

The owners of those businesses have less "freedom" now. So do the employees. But the users of your free software have more "freedom", because they now have more money to spend on other things and make their life better.

NO, they had a rent, and they lost their rent because it became irrelevant. They haven't lost their skills, so they are still free to go and look for other rents to make.

Note that this rarely happens in the actual world. There are tons of products where proprietary offers are better than FOSS tools. That's how can continue being relevant while doing proprietary software. Or, even if you are not "better" than the free software offer, you can offer paid support for your application, etc... and function as a service company and not a product company anymore.

icebraining10• 12 years ago

Do what you want to do. If you want to write software and make it available for others for free, go for it. If you want to sell it, that's fine too.

You're confusing free and Free. My job is writing Free Software, but you can't get all of it for zero monetary cost, since it's not online except for clients of ours (and nobody has ever asked us for the source).

sounds• 12 years ago

I feel like you are preaching against his preaching – which is a good debate and I enjoy it and all – but you had the stronger argument with "put a bunch of shops out of business."

chriswarbo10• 12 years ago

Is there some aggregate increase in freedom? I have no idea and neither do you.

Yes there is, for the same reason that the third billy goat gruff increased aggregate freedom by butting the troll off the bridge.

torrent-of-ions• 12 years ago

The point, for me at least, is to increase the total volume of freedom in the world.

Yes, absolutely. This is something I rarely hear mentioned. Many people consider freedom only as a local optimisation problem. This is why some people argue that the BSD licence, or the public domain, is "freer" than the GPL. It's true that if you receive a program which is in the public domain that your personal freedom is maximised with respect to that current program. It's also true that if you receive a program licensed under the GPL that you have less personal freedom (you now lack the freedom to deprive others of the same freedom you received).

But we can do better than this. Freedom is a global optimisation problem. Locally optimised freedom is called divide and conquer. Copyleft is the best solution that I'm aware of for the global optimisation problem. It should also be noted that copyleft itself only needs to exist in order to "undo" the effects of copyright. Public domain would be a trivial solution to the global problem if copyright didn't exist, or at least didn't exists in its current form whereby it automatically attaches itself to anything and everything. Having a world where both copyright and trivial copying by each member of society exists makes this a non-trivial problem.

dTal2• 12 years ago

Very astute on local vs global optimisation.

copyleft itself only needs to exist in order to "undo" the effects of copyright. Public domain would be a trivial solution to the global problem if copyright didn't exist

This I must disagree with. In this world of no copyright, how do I prevent people from taking my code, making interesting changes to it, and distributing the binary without sharing what they did?

Copyleft uses copyright to make it against the rules to violate the user's "four freedoms". I don't know whether we'd be better off overall in a world without copyright or copyleft, but there would be no way to guarantee the freedom of your software's future users.

Note that it's perfectly possible to explicitly cede copyright protection by putting your work in the public domain even today. Note that copyleft is nevertheless much more popular for software than "raw" public domain.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

Interestingly, the late Middle Ages are the time I would point to for the greatest economic freedom at any point I know of in history.

IgorPartola4• 12 years ago

Free Software is dead. Long Live Open Source Software. The reason for this is simple: Free Software is simply too radical for most practical uses. The majority of users don't care about the philosophical benefits of one over the other and are never going to contribute back to the original project (think of the millions of Android/Linux or Firefox users). On the other hand, OSS allows plenty of practical benefits: you can view the source, fork it, often times contribute to it. It's often done on good faith. Think of all the projects released under the Apache or MIT licenses which are doing so great. Who cares if someone somewhere is not contributing back: most people that matter do and the license does not hinder them.

The GPL is an appropriate license for lots of projects, such as the Linux kernel. Those are too important and too large a target to leave to good faith. However, something like a JavaScript framework of the week does not benefit from being GPL. Also, think of all those BSD distributions.

Having said that, open source your technology now. Not your secret sauce, but most of your code can be OSS. No reason to hide the Rails app that runs your site. It's not why you are making money, so open it up and let others take a peek. The worst thing that's going to happen is that nobody will look. Chances are, nobody will clone your exact product because you are likely delivering value that's past just the code you are writing.

Flimm• 12 years ago

Copyleft and permissive licenses are all both free/libre and open source. The distinction between free/libre and open source does not lie in the distinction between copyleft and permissive licenses.

fluidcruft2• 12 years ago

You seem to be under the very, very, very mistaken understanding that "Free Software" requires either the GPL or copyleft. Apache, MIT, BSD, GPL are all both Free Software licenses and Open Source licenses. The definitions make "Open Source" and "Free Software" almost synonymous.

But the term "Open Source" is much easier to co-opt and abuse. There are a variety of things that broadcast themselves as "Open Source" based only on the sense that "Hey you can look at our code! You can't actually do anything with our code, but hey you can look at it, so duh, it's Open Source!". This is not actually Open Source.

The problem with Open Source is that it seems intuitive that these Open Source posers could be correct--the "open" vs "open" clarification is more difficult and nuanced and not-intuitive esp. compared to clarifying the meaning of Free in Free Software as "free as in freedom" vs "free as in beer".

IgorPartola4• 12 years ago

I understand the distinction. I am talking about the FSF pushing the GPL on everyone as if it's a one size fits all solution. There has been much debate on GPL vs MIT-style licenses and I believe both have their place.

Now, as far as OSS vs open-to-view-but-not-use, it's a different point. The problem is that you can have something like Android where Google has lots of control over where the software actually runs. Technically nothing would prevent you from forking it, putting together your own hardware and running a completely open platform that will compete with Google. Practically, it would cost you a lot of money. I actually think that CyanogenMod is a counter-example to this for Android: it is an open build of Android for the devices that support it. In reality, the problem with Android devices is not Android-the-OS. It's the closed bootloaders and the hardware that supports them. If only every phone's bootloader was as permissive as the BIOS on PC's (EFI notwithstanding), we wouldn't be complaining about this. You get your Moto X, nuke the Motoblur crap, install your favorite Android distro and you are good to go.

Another example: would you classify WordPress as free software? Most people do. The reality is that it is very tightly controlled by Automattic which has its own roadmap that is often times not public. You submit a patch to them, they sit on it, then produce their own solution in the next release that does things completely differently.

In the end, the license can do very little to prescribe governance of a project and that's what things most often come down to: who is in charge and how flexible are they? So we can debate the finer points of licenses or even what to call those licenses or we can write useful software where the source is available and others are free to run it and fork it.

hacknat2• 12 years ago

A lot of people probably don't open source their web code because it could open them up to attacks, but it also probably wouldn't be that interesting.

It never would have occurred to me to open up my work's rendering pipeline, it's just to boring and ho-hum for words.

rwallace• 12 years ago

Interesting versus boring isn't really the criterion, though. I mean, doubtless there are some programmers who read code for entertainment, but they're in a minority. Usually what we care about is what the code does.

Right now I'm using the excellent Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which is useful enough to me that I bit the bullet and paid for a license. But it would be even more useful if it were open source, not because I want to read the code for intellectual stimulation, but because there are several bugs that would be easy to fix, would make it even considerably better, that the developers refuse to fix (a common enough occurrence) and nobody else can fix (a problem peculiar to proprietary software).

npsimons• 12 years ago

It never would have occurred to me to open up my work's rendering pipeline, it's just to boring and ho-hum for words.

You say that, but if there's anything I've learned from HN, it's that nothing is "too boring". I'm not advocating that you do open up your rendering pipeline, but you never know who might find it interesting, useful, or even help you make it better.

zanny11• 12 years ago

Not your secret sauce

Open source your damn secret sauce so other people can improve and benefit from it rather than hoarding it as your precious in a lockbox like Gollum.

IgorPartola4• 12 years ago

If you can do so without damage. I suspect that if Google opened up their exact page ranking algorithm, the quality of the web overall would drop dramatically for everyone. But for example, if they opened up their home page, or Google Docs people could actually improve upon them with no downside to Google.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

There are times and places not to do this though.

I see business encapsulation as a legitimate goal. the general public should not be exposed to the internals of your business. They should know what you do and what you can do to help them but they don't need to know all the administrative details. Keep your interfaces with customers clean. That requires not revealing the internals of your business to everyone in the world.

At Efficito, virtually all of our work on LedgerSMB gets contributed back to the community. There is one exception which is not given back for this same reason: We modified LedgerSMB to work ok in a multi-tenent environment.

To do this we did two things. First we enhanced the authentication structure to make it work, and we contributed this work back. However, secondly, we wrote a custom authentication provider to handle the details.

Now, had we wanted to release the custom auth provider back, we would have made some changes in structure. As it is, however, the structure of the auth provider is closely bound to our approach to hosting. Publishing it would effectively ensure that everyone would see our internals, and the benefit to them would be only in cloning our services. The work wasn't significant (maybe 5 hours development time) but it also wasn't generally useful to everyone else.

So we kept it secret. There's nothing wrong with this any more than there is anything wrong with insisting that you don't break encapsulation when doing object-oriented programming.

gress6• 12 years ago

The problem is that code doesn't afford freedom. Money does. So to the extent that a license inhibits users of a codebase from making money, it is anti-freedom.

dllthomas19• 12 years ago

To the extent that the Underground Railroad inhibits would-be slave-owners from making money, it's anti-freedom.

Note that I'm quite emphatically not saying these are exactly the same thing, but pointing out by example that there are other factors that can clearly be far more important.

gress6• 12 years ago

It's not clear at all what you are trying to say. If you think there are other more important factors, why don't you just say what they are?

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

The problem is that code doesn't afford freedom. Money does.

What do you mean by "freedom?"

I would argue in fact that code, as a tool for producing goods and services, affords greater freedom than money does. The argument is specifically about, IMO, the question of restrictions on what goods and services can be provided. Those restrictions I would agree are anti-freedom but it has nothing to do with money per se.

If you are paid in chickens, does that make you any less free?

gress6• 12 years ago

So you are arguing that a barter system provides more freedom than a money based economy.

I'm genuinely interested and open to being convinced of that, but you've only said "I would argue that.." and then offered conclusions without actually presenting the argument.

hacknat2• 12 years ago

There are a host of issues that one could take with Stallman's proposals/ideas, but one that I think doesn't get much attention is the slight falseness in some of his assumptions.

We give up our freedom to a plethora of things in the world all the time that we all interact with (be it cars, planes, microwaves, televisions, etc). I interact with tons of products that I know, in theory, could threaten me because they are closed systems, but I use them anyway. I suspect RMS does the same and I'm sure he and I try to be cautious and judicious of our use of these things (many others are probably not).

For example, I use Gmail. I know that there is a possibility, however remote, that my correspondence could be hacked or used against me in some way, because of the distributed and closed source nature of the program I'm using. I don't care though. I simply don't trust Gmail with correspondence that is sensitive to my personal life and I get along happily.

How is Gmail impinging on my freedom if I am able to choose, taking a knowing risk? I know RMS would respond that since I don't have access to the source that I actually don't know the risks that I am taking, but I think this is a straw man. Even if every product in the world was open source we would all still be taking risks with them, because there is no way we could spend our time reviewing all of the specific implications of every product.

fluidcruft2• 12 years ago

If your statement proves anything it's that you are unfamiliar with RMS and his writings beyond what trolls write.

Also, what on Earth do you think you are proving by building a strawman and then explicitly arguing about it being a strawman?

mwfunk2• 12 years ago

That's actually probably not how RMS would respond. He goes out of his way to emphasize that Free Software is fundamentally about morality rather than any sort of pragmatic reasons like security. He would probably make some analogy equating you choosing to use Gmail with some hypothetical people in the past choosing slavery or indentured servitude because they either didn't know any better or had no better choices in life. He might even chastise you for choosing expediency over moral correctness, and he might even question your own morality because you are contributing to the capital-E Evil in the world by doing so.

You might think that this is somewhat crazy and shortsighted and absolutist and nonconstructive, and you might question the groundedness of someone who equates other people's choices in mail clients with things like slavery, and you'd be quite correct in feeling that way. If you then vocalize these concerns, you will be roundly flamed by one or more CS undergrads claiming that you just don't get it and that you either need to get on board or be steamrollered by history. You might think said CS undergrads are also a little lacking in the groundedness and perspective departments, and you'd probably be right about that too.

HerraBRE2• 12 years ago

As long as you are happy with the terms GMail is offered under, and the feature set of the software, you are right, in the short term it probably does not impact your freedom in a way you are likely to notice. It may even enhance your short-term freedom by letting you focus on other things.

However, the fact remains that if you dislike something about GMail (the ads, the way it renders ASCII art, or maybe you wish it supported OpenPGP encryption), you are powerless to do anything about it. This also means that if GMail changes in some way you don't like (e.g. the recent UI changes), you have no choice but to accept them. If one day they decide to forbid normal attachments and force everything to go into Google Drive... well that's just too bad.

Basically, your choices always boil down to "take it or leave it", where leave it means migrating (or losing) your mail and learning to use a new app. This is not a trivial undertaking, even for a skilled user.

When you further consider how many people are putting their eggs in the same basket, these issues (especially the privacy concerns) become much more worrying. GMail, through its market dominance, is actively holding back the adoption of encryption and actively harming the privacy of entire nations. This wouldn't be a concern if it were free software people ran in a decentralized fashion.

Free Software comes with its own issues - running your own software and maintaining it does incur a cost. But with Free Software you have the option of doing things yourself or hiring someone to help you out. With non-free software, you don't have that choice.

How important these issues are to you personally will of course vary. But that doesn't mean Free Software supporters are wrong to believe these are problems worth spending time and effort on fixing. Raising awareness is of course a necessary part of that.

(disclaimer: I work on https://www.mailpile.is/, a Free Software project which aims to offer many of the features of GMail with strong emphasis on privacy/security, so I feel pretty strongly about this.)

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

But this comes back to why I keep saying that freedom is economically valuable. If you don't like something about Gmail, if you have all the components, you can bring another service to market.

This is what's missing in the discussion. The point of freedom is in production, in bringing things to market. There are certain things (like DRM) that Stallman does not want to be brought to market and so the FSF tries to discourage them using the license.

But that's a dangerous power, left in the hands of a few organizations and companies. I prefer to see this as something that should not be in the hands of anyone, but a case where the freedom to bring products and services to market is the primary goal of the movement. However, this only really exists in Distributism, and of this, the BSD license is the best fit.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

To begin, my position on this matter has been clear for years: both free software (as defined by Stallman) and non-free software (as defined by Stallman) can co-exist. I believe in free market (not ideal free market).

-->

For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.

We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters.

These two quotes strike me. Why should we label proprietary software as enemy?

If we clone all proprietary developers to work on free software alternatives, then we definitely have more options to choose from. The problem is not a social problem -- it isn't that people, average like my parents, don't know free software exists - but because there aren't enough to choose from. Like I said, if you can clone all of the developers to work on free alternatives every day, you will definitely have free alternatives. If you only have a handful of people working part-time as a hobby to contribute to free software, how can you compete with proprietary software?

I am not against free software. I like free software (as defined by R.S). I like open source. I also think proprietary softwares have value. Note here on HNs a lot of people run X-as-a-service. In the ideal world, if everyone knows how to program, if everyone has access to a computer, if everyone has time, we could have the old Internet back; imagine a world where everyone can write, distribute and host their free X-as-a-service for people to use? That's why knowledge base like Wikipedia is important to us. I like this ideal world, but at the moment this is not easy to achieve.

You don't need to teach me to use free software. If it is free and open source, and reliable, I will use it. But if the interface is ugly, unusable, crashes all the time, and if there is no reason for me to contribute back (say an IRC client), I will dump that software and look for something else. I am a programmer, but I am not going to contribute to every software I use. I don't have the time. I don't have the necessary skill. I have more important things to do like finishing my work, looking after my family, relax, cooking, working on my hobby project, and getting enough sleep.

-->

But software can be said to serve its users only if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove

<delete chars>

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage.

This is a good time to re-mention MS Office vs LibreOffice/OpenOffice. I am fine with LibreOffice's Word processor and PowerPoint program until I need to do something complex. If I just need a quick PPT or a quick doc I can get away with LibreOffice. But when I need something complex, polished, I like to use MS Office. True I have been raised to use MS Office since I was a kid. It is true MS is locking me in all the time, but it is simply because the features in LibreOffice is still lagging behind. I will be happy to dump Office completely if LibreOffice continue to improve.

-->

Under pressure from the movie and record companies, software for individuals to use is increasingly designed specifically to restrict them. This malicious feature is known as Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) (see DefectiveByDesign.org) and is the antithesis in spirit of the freedom that free software aims to provide. And not just in spirit: since the goal of DRM is to trample your freedom, DRM developers try to make it hard, impossible, or even illegal for you to change the software that implements the DRM.

I don't want to start a flame war on DRM. This is as dirty as complex as politics. After reading the FAQ on http://www.defectivebydesign.org/faq#what I will point out a few striking remarks:

If you purchase electronic copies of games from Steam, you can't sell them or share them with a friend after you're done playing them.

I don't see this as a violation of my freedom. If the license given to me is restricted to my account, why is it okay for me to distribute it to my friends and everyone in my friends' circles? The other examples may be violation of freedom, I won't argue. What do you propose? Create a universal gaming platform where you can download games and all you need to access a game is to own an account. Say pay $29.99 and I can run a Steam game I didn't purchase but acquire from my friend? If Steam has a feature to transfer game (say only once) but locked to Steam platform, is that a violation of freedom?

Are Hollywood the one to blame? Not exclusively. This way, all their customers remain dependent on them, and helps maintain their dominant position in the market.

I think this is a direct attack on anyone who is trying to come up solutions. If you are a solution technology company, your job is to create a solution. Just as Google is an excellent search engine I feel attached to using it because it provides what I want 8/10 times. As a customer of Google's search engine, I am okay with Google keeping its dominant position by using the search engine. When Google SE fails to deliver the right results I might use Yahoo, Bing or even DDG.

-->

I feel like a lot of the free software advocates seem to be against the existence of proprietary software and any business depends on proprietary software development. As I have said before, I think both can co-exist. Do I want free software? Of course. I would like to own a free copy of Mac OSX and able to modify from start to finish. But I don't think everyone should be told to use free software.

zanny11• 12 years ago

I believe in free market (not ideal free market).

Nothing about proprietary software reflects a free market. The entire proprietary software industry can only exist through the existence and practice of copyright law. Nothing about copyright law has anything to do with the usual tenants of free markets - voluntary exchange, property rights, and informed transactions. It is just made up rules with (maybe) good intentions and catastrophic consequences.

Why should we label proprietary software as enemy?

Because it violates Richard Stallmans, and anyone who agrees with him (so at least the entire FSF and GNU project) ethics.

I also think proprietary softwares have value.

The act of being proprietary adds no value to any software. It only serves to take away potential value in the ability to trust, understand, reuse, and modify it. The only exception is software that only functions through its obfuscations, such as DRM, and that entire class of software is implicitly anti-user and only functions to take away more freedom.

but at the moment this is not easy to achieve.

The ease of accomplishing something should never be just cause to work for or against it.

because the features in LibreOffice is still lagging behind. I will be happy to dump Office completely if LibreOffice continue to improve.

You probably (assumptions here) have done no part to fund or participate in the continued development of LibreOffice, while you have paid Microsoft for their Office suite. You are directly incentively the continued usage and development of proprietary software without doing anything for the free alternatives. Even if you have contributed to LibreOffice in some way, you are still sustaining the proprietary freedom depriving Microsoft suite through both your purchase and usage of it.

I don't see this as a violation of my freedom.

Free software has three tenants - the ability to study, modify, and share software. Implicit to Steam is a violation of (at least) one of those freedoms. You are free to not consider them freedoms in your ethical outlook.

But I don't think everyone should be told to use free software.

It isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it is about removing the force already imparted upon you by proprietary software vendors that restrict your ability to modify or redistribute software. Richard Stallman (probably) doesn't give a shit if you use emacs or a competitor, as long as both are free, or at the least that you understand that you are sacrificing your freedoms to use convenient proprietary alternatives.

yeukhon2• 12 years ago

It is just made up rules with (maybe) good intentions and catastrophic consequences.

Not necessarily catastrophic though I can see this as an argument to defeat patent trolls.

My main point is that in a market where can freely consume a freeware, free software and fully proprietary software is a free market. A world with only free software is still one sided.

The act of being proprietary adds no value to any software. It only serves to take away potential value in the ability to trust, understand, reuse, and modify it.

There isn't always a need to actually understand, reuse and modify a software if the user only wants to use it. Proprietary software cannot be studied and trusted fully -- that's true, but if there is no free alternative competitive sacrificing is how we live in this world.

Using a software is already participating in the continued development of LibreOffice.

If I could take a train to get to work in 15 minutes, why would I bike for 45 minutes to work every day? I may bike occasionally, but definitely not everyday. If LibreOffice is convinent to do everything I need to do with MS Office, I'd switch permanently. If not, they will both co-exist on my computer.

How will removing MS Office do any good to free software if I don't actually write code for LibreOffice in the first place?

Is there not enough people already writing code and plugins for LibreOffice suite? Sounds like free software moment is pushing people to write free software because they don't have enough developers who are willing to put time writing code for free software.

Implicit to Steam is a violation of (at least) one of those freedoms. You are free to not consider them freedoms in your ethical outlook.

That's why free software movement from R.S. is radical to me.

It isn't about forcing anyone to do anything, it is about removing the force already imparted upon you by proprietary software vendors that restrict your ability to modify or redistribute software.

The force imparted upon me is due to the fact the free alternatives aren't good enough or just don't exist. If there exists one that works really well, like proprietary software, the force is not as strong as you think.

If we shall, free software is awesome, it has the ability to study and modify the software in any way the user wants, now, how do I make a living off my work?

icebraining10• 12 years ago

Nothing about proprietary software reflects a free market. The entire proprietary software industry can only exist through the existence and practice of copyright law.

Not exactly, since Freedoms 1 and 3 could still be abridged even without copyright, by just releasing binaries.

nycticorax3• 12 years ago

It's also worth mentioning that without copyright, all GPL-licensed code would enter the public domain, so you would then be free to modify it and only release the modified software as a compiled binary.

midas0072• 12 years ago

"Why Free Software missed the point of Open Source.":

doing WTF you like, commercial or not.

dllthomas19• 12 years ago

To be clear: Free Software does not object to commercial activity. Copyleft requirements happen to get in the way of some commercial activity, which the FSF and related community finds objectionable for reasons unrelated to its commercial nature. Stallman opposes "noncommercial" requirements in licenses, no FSF license has these, and such clauses are reason to call a license "nonfree".

thatthatis8• 12 years ago

Gpl on commerce, in a nutshell:

Sell this software without ability to modify: tyrant

Use this software to create a closed REST API: no problem

EGreg6• 12 years ago

For the record I am more of an open source guy. I think tools are used by people in all sorts of ways and I care about how good they are and that they should gently encourage the right kind of culture. Free software is about liberty as the foremost social value and derives everything from there. It would be interesting to many laissez faire market advocates that almost all the Free Software advocates are extremely leftist civil libertarians.

In fact the whole thing might not compute for anarcho capitalists because the main enemy of Free Software -- which is restricted or unfree software -- is produced and used, not by governments, but by corporations. You might realize why they are so leftist and why they actually use the copyright laws to ENFORCE software freedom (an interesting twist!) when you realize that their main enemy is privately held companies who build large platforms on top of proprietary codebases.

I am for open source for practical reasons, they are for free software for philosophical reasons. And lookit: The PRIVATE COMPANY (which anarcho capitalists so admire as the outcome of a completely laissez faire society) is in fact the government over its little jurisdiction, which is the proprietary installed code base that people have. Such as the Bloomberg terminal, or Windows or the iPhone. In many industries, you have to pick one of several companies and they all are run as feudalism. They grant certain favors to some app developers and not others. You can't just deploy apps you write on them.

The exceptions are Linux and the Web, etc. Which have in fact become the most widespread operating system and platform, respectively. Linux and other open source software did it using licenses on their code that USED GOVERNMENT OVERSIGHT THROUGH COPYRIGHT to prevent the software being used by companies to lock people out. The Web did it through a culture of openness where every user could View Code and browsers had to conform to standards of bodies like W3C and WhatWG.

My point can be summarized as usual: people create groups, and if it's not governments then it's companies. Someone will always be lording it over others, creating barriers to unrestricted freedom. And the most we can do is have systems to guide things away from terrible abuses of power.

EGreg6• 12 years ago

One of my friends (who is an anarcho capitalist) replied:

There's nothing wrong with creating groups, as long as nobody forces me to be a member. I'll read about open source vs free software, but I think you know my view: I'm against IP because I'm against legal fictions, because they violate natural property rights.

No one is forcing you to become a member of New York City or your particular town or state. You can move.

What anarchists are really lamenting is the lack of available space where people havent set up a group with a government. That just goes to show how it emerges naturally out of other states, which can briefly be described as close to anarchist. And sometimes those states arent so glamorous.

Anyway it's the same in software. It takes massive effort to build a system that is completely free for everybody. That is what the Free Software movement has done. But they are besieged at every turn by PRIVATE, proprietary interests such as businesses who lick their lips and want the "freedom" to use the software those guys built to RESTRICT the freedom of THEIR users. So the Free Software Foundation and its allies have a great ally in the US government and copyright laws! They use them specifically to banish infringers who would use software licensed under GNU License for example without giving their users freedoms.

Interesting? Government helping keep people more free. Thats what happens when the perps are private companies and not governments.

And to address your point - it is just as hard to move away from Windows and Mac, or from Android, iPhone and Blackberry all of them etc. as it is for you to move from the United States. Sure it's possible. But first you need a massive effort to build a natio-- err I mean a platform that is based on principles of freedom. And along the way you will need the help of governments to defend it from people easily coming in and ruining the whole thing because they were "free" to take what you built for their own selfish interests.

The dynamics are almost exactly the same! But it's an interesting case study because software battles are virtual, hurt less people, and softwrae moves really fast. Yet you can actually see the problems that would happen with anarchy without enforcement.

Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source program.

zanny11• 12 years ago

I was going to write something up to the guy above you, but you nailed all my points. Good show!

Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source program.

And a lot of people miss that this is why they wrote the GPLv3 in the first place, and why it is such a big deal that the Linux kernel doesn't adopt it.

dragonwriter7• 12 years ago

Even today, the free software movement is developing new licenses to combat a new threat: hardware that will only run an approved version of an open source program.

You mean, like the GPLv3, which restricts the freedom to choose such software to business users?

sethish• 12 years ago

This licensing terms of this article is not compatible with the GPL or the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

dublinben3• 12 years ago

This article isn't computer code, it's an editorial.

Toenex• 12 years ago

tl;dr Open Source is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for Free Software.

pbbakkum• 12 years ago

While its intentions are noble, in my experience the GPL is Free as in "you probably need a lawyer to ensure you're not violating it". Doubly so for AGPL.

The irony of RMS spreading his own vision of "Freedom" is that the GPL restricts things which he doesn't agree with, which seems to violate the most basic principle there. I've been involved with several organizations which try to avoid GPL code, by policy, in favor of MIT/BSD because it raises too many issues. Not saying GPL hasn't done good things (my understanding is that much of Apple's compiler work is public bc they started with GPL code), but the wind seems to be blowing towards less restrictive OSS licenses.

mixologic• 12 years ago

Imagine a world where all software adheres to the tenets of Free software. Our freedoms would continue to be egregiously curtailed by website Terms of Service Agreements at, Contracts with the service providers of hardware devices, Firmware restrictions like UEFI safeboot, and legal straightjackets like software patents. I dont understand how the philosophical underpinnings of just the software are really all that effective in guaranteeing any sort of freedom without also having all the other freedoms we're already denied.

ilaksh• 12 years ago

The name "Free Software" is bad. The explanation is confusing. The idea that you can have a class of software that is Free but not GPL is confusing, and I'm not sure what he means unless he is just saying you can use other copyleft licenses.

The obvious practical reality in our society driven by money is that if your product must include its source code then you may have some big problems making money or maintaining whatever competitive edge you had.

Whatever your license says or the law says, if the source code is available its a good chance some people are going to copy your software and distribute it for less.

Also, as far as old-school copyleft components (such as GPL, not LGPL), if including the component in my software means that I have to distribute the full source of my application, that means that I go from having a product that is only available by purchase to a product that someone can compile on their computer for free.

The reality is that we live in a monetary society and people aren't always honest. And insisting that source code be distributed with proprietary software is not compatible with business.

Now, I believe that the current form of the structural aspects of society related to business and the monetary system are ultimately incompatible with the truthful holistic application of science (technology) and with ethics in general. We need to fix that. Until we do, copyleft isn't practical for many products.

EGreg6• 12 years ago

I once wrote Richard Stallman suggesting what I thought was a much more helpful name, keeping all the good connotations but with less of the ambiguity:

Liberating Software

But I never heard back.

theorique• 12 years ago

Some people use the term "Libre" or "Free as in Speech" also.

bdicasa3• 12 years ago

How does the free software movement live in a capitalistic society? I'd be all for writing and contributing to free software if I could make a living off it. But I need to make a living, and that likely isn't coming from writing free software. I charge for my software because I want the freedom to choose what I create, rather than just pounding out code for someone else to make a profit from.

chriswarbo10• 12 years ago

How does the free software movement live in a capitalistic society?

One obvious way is to sell Free Software. The market has raced to the bottom recently, but a while ago a lot of GNU development was funded by Free Software sales.

Compare this to proprietary software, which can't operate in a capitalistic society. It relies on government interference in the software market to create an artificial scarcity (ie. copyright).

bdicasa3• 12 years ago

How does one sell free software?

dragonwriter7• 12 years ago

Compare this to proprietary software, which can't operate in a capitalistic society.

Er, what?

It relies on government interference in the software market to create an artificial scarcity (ie. copyright).

Capitalistic society relies on government involvement in the market to create property rights; among the property rights that were features of the systems for which the term "capitalism" was coined is copyright.

So, to say that proprietary software cannot exist because it relies on government for the system of property rights that underlie it is a gross misunderstanding of "capitalism".

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

How does the free software movement live in a capitalistic society?

Define "capitalistic."

If you mean free market there are all kinds of ways it can live. If you mean investor-backed corporations, then the answer is dual-licensing.

dragonwriter7• 12 years ago

How does the free software movement live in a capitalistic society?

Quite well. Which is why so many for-profit corporations release F/OSS.

I'd be all for writing and contributing to free software if I could make a living off it.

People do -- by selling their expertise with the software, or selling solutions in which the software is an enabling component.

bdicasa3• 12 years ago

I understand this model, but with some software there is no obvious model for selling solutions beside the software. A lot of times the software is the solution.

cottonseed2• 12 years ago

It is interesting to read this through the eyes of the burgeoning Open Source Hardware (OSH) community. There seems to be an Free Hardware Foundation in Italy, but I have never seen it mentioned before, and rarely do I see discussion of the sort of essential freedoms I see Stallman is talking about. However, I often see people struggling with (and reverse engineering) proprietary hardware, firmware and software. Hardware tools often come feature locked and internals are intentionally obscured, down to sanding the labels off chips. When the question of open tools comes up, the response is usually something like this: "How much demand is there for, say, a 100 MHz open 'scope that costs a bit more than a Rigol?" Taken from a recent discussion about Free/Open Hardware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7375771

Does the Free Hardware movement need a Stallman?

vanderZwan• 12 years ago

Eh... you do realise Arduino comes from Italy, right? That's not a coincedence.

I'm currently studying Interaction Design at Malmö Hogskola, and have had David Cuartielles as a teacher. I have also seen Massimo Banzi give a workshop on the Arduino in the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

So I can say from experience that there are Stallmans for open hardware out there.

cottonseed2• 12 years ago

I think you misunderstand my comment. I know there are lots of advocates for OSH. But I don't think there is someone like Stallman who is advocating for free as in speech hardware the way Stallman does for software. I don't see the "social and ethical values" of the kind of freedom that Stallman talks about reflected in OSH discussions. However, I only see the English language part of the conversation, so something different might be happening in Europe/Italy.

chroem• 12 years ago

It seems like HN is mostly missing the point. Stallman's four essential freedoms are intended to fix proprietary software vendors abusing their users.

For example, let's say there's some "open source" software that allows you to read the code, but prevents you from distributing it. Well, what's stopping them from slipping in a nasty backdoor in their binaries if you're not allowed to compile your own clean version? I'm really shocked, and quite frankly disgusted, that you all can be so critical of free software after all that has come to light about the NSA.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

For example, let's say there's some "open source" software that allows you to read the code, but prevents you from distributing it.

I think btw that is a bigger restriction than allowing you to distribute the binary but not read the code.

lazylizard• 12 years ago

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute the original SQLite code, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

einhverfr38• 12 years ago

Question:

If I license my software under the GNU Free Documentation License and include invariate sections, is it still free?

markhahn• 12 years ago

Stallman is wrong that proprietary software hurts users; that's the essence of his critique. It's sad that so much software has sailed under the GPL flag of convenience, simply because it existed and could avoid license bikeshedding. Most of the efforts embodied in Linux or even GCC are not motivated by RMS's political spin.

What's really unfortunate about his noise is that it has consumed the air that should be supporting more fundamental topics - especially the nature of protocols (which must be free, documented and unencumbered in order to really qualify as protocols.) The IETF really embodies the philosophy that has made the net a success.

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

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