Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software

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

by codelizard42 • 11 years ago

298 311 11 years ago

gnu.org

outside1234• 11 years ago

tl;dr: "Free Software" is a religion that vilifies just about any commercial use of open source (Tivo, Apple, etc.).

Open Source is the response to that that finds a pragmatic middle way.

astazangasta• 11 years ago

Ah, pragmatism: the reason we bombed Cambodia.

odiroot• 11 years ago

Why the downvotes? I got a sensible chuckle.

zimbatm• 11 years ago

It's easy to dismiss the freedom of tinkering as a religion. If it wasn't for that most entrepreneurs on HN wouldn't be able to start their own business at a fraction of original costs.

davexunit• 11 years ago

What an unbiased summary. Thanks for sharing.

belorn10• 11 years ago

Like the pragmatic way of reinventing software because they are of the "wrong" license.

Or are we talking about the pragmatic way of not updating software for several years because of licenses?

madez4• 11 years ago

You berate free software as a religion while it is clearly not. Also, you say that it stands against commercialisation, while it does not, either.

It only goes against excercising power over others to extort money, or literarily take their freedom away. In a way I think free licenses like the AGPLv3 do what the government should be doing. But today government is too easily influenced by companies, so it often doesn't act in the best interest of its people.

vinceguidry• 11 years ago

I love Stallman because he takes the very very long view and has shown himself to be remarkably adaptable over time. The battles he's fighting today are the same as they were 30 years ago, and they're still relevant. He's an anchor to a world that would be very much unmoored without him.

Carry on, you magnificent bastard.

aaron-lebo• 11 years ago

I prefer permissive licenses like BSD/MIT over GPL for every project I work on/use, but I'm glad Stallman is around. He frames the issue, moors it as you said.

Weird analogy perhaps, but MLK was acceptable to the establishment partially because you had more extreme individuals like Malcolm X. RMS makes permissive licenses acceptable because he's suggesting something more radical.

Overton Window maybe?

unholythree2• 11 years ago

I appreciate Stallman's views and agree with many of them but I just wish a slightly different word was chosen for the free in "free software". Now you have a situation where you need to correct an understandable misconception for the layperson almost everytime free software comes up.

codelizard422• 11 years ago

This is one of the reasons people in the Free Software community have been recently shifting away from wording like "free as in freedom", "Free and Open Source Software"/FOSS in favor of the use of the word "libre", "Free and Libre Open Source Software"/FLOSS

aschampion• 11 years ago

Introducing more arbitrary jargon isn't going to make the distinction any more clear to a layperson, but if you do choose a neologism "libre" is just plain awkward.

joesb• 11 years ago

IMHO, it's cheap practice in any movement.

Use a common word with positive meaning in your movement to cause confusion and they try to own the word.

It also easier to make your opponent looks bad. Saying a software isn't "free" makes other people feel like the software is bad when, in fact, it's only not their movement's definition of free.

icebraining8• 11 years ago

Saying a software isn't "free" makes other people feel like the software is bad

Really? I've never seen that, except when the "other people" understand that to mean it doesn't fit the FSF's definition. People who don't know about the FSF's definition would just think it's paid software, not "bad", in my experience.

What software are you thinking that is considered "free" (and not in the sense of cost) by some people but doesn't fit the FSF's definition?

adrusi2• 11 years ago

A point that doesn't often get brought up in this discussion is that $0 software was virtually nonexistent at the time of the founding of the free software movement. In the internet's infancy, when software was still delivered on physical media, it made little sense to give software away for free because the shipping and material costs would drive the cost to the user significantly above $0.

Not that there wasn't ever software given away for free. There was source code published in magazines for the user to type in and compile for themselves, and there were friendly neighbors who would give you a program that they wrote for free. Even in the earliest years of the internet, people were sending their programs for free over the network.

But in a way, free-as-in-speech software predates free-as-in-beer software.

spc4762• 11 years ago

Actually, software was free at one point. Given without extra cost with the hardware. The concept of piracy wasn't an issue when the number of computers that could run the software ran in the two or three digits (maybe even four digits worth of computers). Also, without software already existing, those multi-million dollar computers wouldn't be worth the price.

This started changing when computers became plentiful enough to sell to a mass market. Bill Gates certainly saw the profit in selling only software (I'm not saying he was the first to do so, but I do suspect he was among the first to do so).

quadrangle13• 11 years ago

Should have been the "Software Freedom Foundation"

Software Freedom is a great term, but just works in some grammatical contexts. You can otherwise say "free/libre" or "free/libre/open" or "freedom-respecting"…

loomio• 11 years ago

Agree completely. I understand the deeper issues and concepts being discussed - because I'm the kind of person that happily takes time out of my weekend to re-read Stallman essays from 2007. However, as a SaaS startup trying to communicate with non-geek end users about our AGPL-licensed FLOSS product, we have found the misunderstandings caused by the term "free" insurmountable.

Our choices are to use "open source", which more or less gets it across to lay people completely unaware of the subtleties, use "free software" and then launch into some long-form explanation of why we also charge money (of course anyone can grab the code for free and run their own instance but most of our customers don't care about any of that), or say FLOSS or Libre and it's totally unintelligible to most people and they stop paying attention before we've gotten anywhere.

Unfortunately I don't think this problem will be constructively progressed until it evolves past the realm of geeks arguing about it amongst themselves, and actually is approached as a marketing issue. Perhaps the reason the debate is still festering is there hasn't been much alignment of incentives between the marketers and the geeks to work together on it, because most software companies don't try to mutually hold the values of Free Software and commercial profit. But we won't see Free Software and its underpinning values go mainstream until that happens, and I think it would be good for everyone if it did.

aaronbrethorst• 11 years ago

    This malicious feature is known as
    Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)

Making up a new name for DRM, regardless of what you think of it, sounds childish and silly.

codelizard422• 11 years ago

Childish it may be, but rephrasing the term this way does better cover the majority of the actual use cases of the technology in the wild, IMHO

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Didn't Stallman habitually refer to a certain disk operating system as 'MS-DOG'?

icebraining8• 11 years ago

Well, Emacs does (did?), but I don't know if that was rms' doing.

eosrei• 11 years ago

It wouldn't be surprising if RMS said that and you got me to look it up. The source for "MS-DOG" seems to be Morten Welinder (http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/msdog.html)

alayne• 11 years ago

Reminds me of http://everything2.com/title/POSIX_ME_HARDER

hga2• 11 years ago

Very funny, but I sure seem to remember BSD adopting 1KiB sized blocks before all that.

belorn10• 11 years ago

In Swedish copyright, we have a copy tax which grants me the right to make private copies. If DRM is about rights, we should then see all rights associated with copyright to be managed by it.

But in practice DRM only restricts access to copyrighted works, including overriding rights which the state has granted me. If it managed rights, it does so faulty. If it manage restrictions, it does so correctly. The name then either reflect programmers that create faulty systems, or it is a incorrect name made in order to market something as better than it is.

madez4• 11 years ago

In Germany you also have the right to copy copyrighted works for private use, say, to give a copy to your parents, your brother or your best friend. You are even allowed to study and remove DRM if it stops you to do so. That is perfectly legal.

Not every country has those rules and that's okay, but it's outragous when other countries bully yours to adopt their copyright laws. Besides that they also spy on you.

madez4• 11 years ago

I'd take a child fighting for freedom over a grown-up trying to exercise power over others any day of any week.

Karunamon2• 11 years ago

Even when that name is more representative of what it actually accomplishes?

"Rights" is a misnomer. There are no "rights" being managed, it's all about restrictions. You don't add DRM to something to make it more open, you add DRM to make it more restricted.

The original name is some impressive marketing doublethink on the part of whoever coined the name, IMO.

jholman3• 11 years ago

I agree with you that the new name is more representative, and I am a fan of using the new name, and I disagree with aaronbrethorst's comment.

But you're just flat wrong that there are no rights being managed. The right that is being managed is the only right of copyright: the right of the "owner" of some "property" to restrict the copying done by other parties. (the scare-quotes are there because I dispute the idea that "IP" is actually property)

"Rights" always make things more restricted than their absence; they restrict what people can do. Any right you might consider does not in fact guarantee that the entitled party actually gets the thing they have a right to; it only makes it illegal for other people (or governments or non-natural persons) to violate those rights. Right to freedom of movement doesn't give you the ability to cross oceans nor walk through walls, it only makes it illegal for others to put walls deliberately in your path. Etc.

quadrangle13• 11 years ago

It's not childish and silly at all. DRM is Digital Restrictions Management. That's what it is. It isn't an institution or a program code or anything, it's literally just language summarized. It's not like USA, it's more like LOL and AFK. Adapting it to a more accurate meaning is perfectly fine.

btilly6• 11 years ago

I think this is an important distinction to be aware of.

Licenses like the GPL exist for a reason. And that reason is an attempt to maximize the amount of software that is free.

Licenses like the MIT and BSD license exist for a different reason. And that reason is to give people who want to share what they did on generous terms a way to do so. And historically this was done in the belief that enlightened users would see it as being in their interest to contribute back.

The result was that people who used generous licenses got frustrated that others would come along, use their software, criticize the original author for "not protecting freedom", then create a modified version that the original author was not free to use as they wish!

Historically the free software movement was very clearly described with long essays by Stallman. With the open source marketing campaign, there were essays that people who liked more generous licenses could get behind. And indeed lots of people began producing free software with no encounter with the ideas that started the free software movement. The link above was Stallman's response to this.

If you understand the conflict, then you can form your own opinion. Here is mine.

When you choose a license, you should choose correctly for what you want to have happen. Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing? Well then, you shouldn't use a BSD license. By contrast you shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be, "Bully for them, I had fun and they made the world better."

Conversely if someone else used an open source license, DO NOT assume that their motivations are yours. It is their code with their choice of license chosen for their reasons. Respect that.

PaulHoule2• 11 years ago

For instance, the Gnu Public License serves the needs of Oracle very well and quite possibly helped MySQL AB be salable to Sun and thus to Oracle.

Most of us who use MySQL are limited by the GPL, whereas Oracle has the right to use it in other ways, license it to specific customers on different terms, etc.

iwwr• 11 years ago

That's why Stallman prefers distributed code copyright: if contributors own their contributions, then dual-licensing won't work. On the other hand, this prevented a project like the linux kernel from moving to gplv3 since the distributed corpus of contributors could not all agree to switch.

nanny• 11 years ago

For instance, the Gnu Public License

GPL stands for "General Public License", just fyi.

sarciszewski• 11 years ago

I write open source application security software (e.g. https://github.com/paragonie/easydb) and use a very permissive license to encourage the wider adoption of better practices.

I don't care if I make some schmuck billions of dollars off my work while I suffer through poverty (which won't happen from a simple DB library), I care about making the Internet more secure, even if only a little.

(My motivation was this blog post http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/ by moxie)

However, for everything else, I'm inclined to use GPLv3 / AGPL and offer commercial licensing under MIT for companies (h/t 'patio11) instead.

Just my $0.02

icebraining8• 11 years ago

rms himself has advocated for permissible licenses to encourage wider freedom (e.g. in the case of libogg).

JoshTriplett3• 11 years ago

However, for everything else, I'm inclined to use GPLv3 / AGPL and offer commercial licensing under MIT for companies

Do you actually use MIT, or something similarly permissive but without permission to redistribute in source form? Because offering a true MIT license to paying customers means they could then redistribute that version to everyone. (Of course, doing so might mean they don't get any future versions from you under that license, but still...)

coldtea• 11 years ago

Licenses like the GPL exist for a reason. And that reason is an attempt to maximize the amount of software that is free.

Does that work well out in practice though?

I think companies are much more likely to work with and contribute to open source programs if they are MIT/BSD/Apache.

The result was that people who used generous licenses got frustrated that others would come along, use their software, criticize the original author for "not protecting freedom", then create a modified version that the original author was not free to use as they wish!

How many cases has that happened?

btilly6• 11 years ago

Does that work well out in practice though?

In 2015 most of the internet is running on free applications running on top of free operating systems and commercial companies are spending billions to maintain this situation. If you had predicted that circa 1990, you would have been dismissed as a lunatic. So something resembling success has happened for the free software movement. And no matter how you ascribe credit, it is hard to say that it would have happened without RMS.

How many cases has that happened?

A lot, but you don't hear about it if you're not swimming upstream trying to maintain code under a generous license. For a random example where it boiled out in public, see http://lwn.net/Articles/247872/.

icebraining8• 11 years ago

I'd rephrase parent's statement to "that reason is an attempt to maximize the relative amount of software that is free."

So, if with BSD/MIT you'd end up with a few more contributions, but you'd also help a few companies build proprietary software that restricts their users, it's better to use GPL since fewer users end up being restricted by proprietary software.

And yes, I know that the users have the choice to not use proprietary software, but regardless of that discussion, that still doesn't mean you should help that happen.

Tyr422• 11 years ago

So, OpenWRT (https://openwrt.org/) exists only because of the FSF enforcing the GPL. A non-complient company tried to unlawfully withhold it, and only because the GPL has some teeth did it actually end up with the source available.

Sir_Substance5• 11 years ago

I really don't get why people don't just declare their work public domain.

I hate having to dig through and grok licenses to figure out what using some random library does to the precarious legal framework of my project. Developers often engineer software dependencies badly, but we don't bother engineering legal dependencies at all, we just slap them in like new coders copy-pasting from stack overflow.

I see people saying this:

Licenses like the GPL exist for a reason. And that reason is an attempt to maximize the amount of software that is free.

But mostly I think they are really concerned about this:

Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing?

It's just another means of jealous control. We bag commercial licenses for stealing developer freedom, and then willfully use licences that deliberately obstruct people from using our work as a foundation for successful entrepreneurial efforts, because we can't handle the idea, even the /mere possibility/, that someone might be more successful with our own project then we are. We even have the nerve to pretend that we're being generous when we do this!

I think it takes guts and trust to really let your work go, but I'd like to see more of it. I also truly believe that making our works public domain will foster innovation now we have tools like github that allow living public domain works. People won't stop contributing just because you aren't forcing them, BSD is proof of that, and I'd be using way more open source libraries and doing way less Not Invented Here if I didn't have to wade through legalese to do so.

kazinator11• 11 years ago

I really don't get why people don't just declare their work public domain.

Firstly, people do. Secondly, those who do are uninformed. Declaring your work to be "public domain" does not actually place it in the public domain. It in fact remains copyrighted.

Passage into public domain occurs when a copyright expires.

knocte• 11 years ago

Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing?

If he does it with the same license as mine (i.e. GPL), then no, it wouldn't outrage me (I would even be interested in applying to his company, so he teaches me how she did it). What I care about is the freedom of the users of my software (so I want to seal it to not be proprietary, ever), not about how other developers benefit from my creation.

JoshTriplett3• 11 years ago

I really don't get why people don't just declare their work public domain.

Among many other reasons, because "public domain" doesn't include a disclaimer of warranty.

microtonal2• 11 years ago

I really don't get why people don't just declare their work public domain.

It's simple to understand. If it is in the public domain, people can just strip your name from your work. I have always seen the BSD, MIT, and comparable licenses as 'this is effectively in the public domain, but please keep my name on what I wrote, and don't sue me if it causes damage'.

amalcon• 11 years ago

I really don't get why people don't just declare their work public domain.

Because in many jurisdictions, this is not a thing that can be done. It is not in the author's power. If you want people in those jurisdictions to be able to use your software, you need to provide some sort of license even if you consider the work to be public domain.

Even in jurisdictions when it is possible to do this, it's understandable that hobbyists would still want the protections of the "Don't use my name" and "Don't sue me" parts of 3-clause BSD at the least.

As for GPL, people choose that because they have different priorities than you. For an obvious and topical example, see Richard Stallman. He believes that nonfree software is actively harmful, and therefore takes measures to avoid accidentally supporting its development. You may not agree with this viewpoint, but he is clearly sincere in holding it, and it is his right.

adrusi2• 11 years ago

I really don't get why people don't just declare their work public domain.

Well there's one very good objective reason not to: it's not clear if you legally can in all jurisdictions. It's not clear that you can just relinquish all IP rights to something. This means that the user of the IP can't be completely sure what they are and are not allowed to do with it, and they may be less inclined to use it than they would a BSD style license where they know what they can't do.

Some public domain desgnations, like CC0, partially get around this problem by including a clause that says that if they can't relinquish all rights, then they'll relinquish as much as is legally possible. This helps, but doesn't completely get around the uncertainty.

But mostly I think they are really concerned about this

Please don't be so quick to pass judgement. First, there are plenty of people who use the GPL to maximize the amount of software that is free, for whom "jealous control" is a secondary objective or completely irrelevant.

Second, there's nothing wrong with what you label "jealous control". If someone is made uneasy by the idea of someone taking their code and "stealing" from them, but they still want to embrace their users' freedoms, and they use the GPL, more power to them.

The only way that the GPL restricts my licensees is by requiring them to not use the fruits of my labor to restrict other people's freedoms. I don't want to be involved in infringing on people's rights like that.

belorn10• 11 years ago

I would be perfectly fine if everyone declare their work public domain. Free software licenses was an reaction to people who stopped putting their work in public domain and started to deliberately obstruct people from doing changes, running them, and distributing. Some people think you have to restrict those things in order to make a successful company, and until that changes, I doubt we will return to the time where everyone declared the work public domain.

rmc6• 11 years ago

I hate having to dig through and grok licenses to figure out what using some random library does to the precarious legal framework of my project

For 99% of open source libraries, there is only one yes/no question: Does the whole thing have to be under this licence? i.e. is it a GPL licence or not? I don't think that's too hard.

rmc6• 11 years ago

It's just another means of jealous control.

That claim works both ways. If I write a GPL library that you want to use, you could accuse me of wanting to control the library and not letting you use it however you want, but I could just as easily accuse you of wanting to control your resultant application by not wanting to release it under the GPL. If you GPLed your application, there's no licencing headaches.

walterbell• 11 years ago

SQLite is in tbe public domain and it can be licensed for a one-time fee of $1000

Public domain dedication: http://www.hwaci.com/cgi-bin/license-step1

Paid License: http://www.hwaci.com/sw/sqlite/sample_license.html

thrownaway1222• 11 years ago

We bag commercial licenses for stealing developer freedom,

You have completely missed the point of the F in FOSS. It is not just about developer freedom but user freedom as in all users to modify (or pay to have modified for non-developers) code as they need.

Deejahll5• 11 years ago

deliberately obstruct people from using our work as a foundation for successful entrepreneurial efforts

No, the GPL does not do this.

Obeying the requirement to share source code does not necessitate that your profits must evaporate. If your competitor picks up your (A)GPL'd source code? They too then must release their changes.

because we can't handle the idea, even the /mere possibility/, that someone might be more successful with our own project then we are.

If by "success" you mean "rich," then no. GPL is not concerned with money, it is concerned with the user's freedom to inspect and modify the source code of the software they use.

Go ahead, get rich. Be more popular than me. But if you base your work on mine, I want to see what your software is doing in my computer, or with my information. I want to fix a bug long after you have stopped supporting your software. I want to make the software run on devices that you will never care about. I want all the value and data and time I've spent on your SaaS service to not simply evaporate when your crappy VC-funded startup gets bought and shut down by Facebook.

People won't stop contributing just because you aren't forcing them, BSD is proof of that,

Yes, some people would still be ethical and contribute back. Many won't. Companies are notoriously sociopathic, especially companies who are legally required to maximize profit for their shareholders, especially companies whose primary goal is return on investment for the VC that funded them.

I don't trust companies to be nice. You want to avoid paying a developer to build a poor NIH mimic of my awesome work? The price is that you must give your users the source code of your changes. I don't care if you get rich in the process. But I reject the implied assertion that you're "obstructed" from doing so.

ralmidani• 11 years ago

It's just another means of jealous control. We bag commercial licenses for stealing developer freedom, and then willfully use licences that deliberately obstruct people from using our work as a foundation for successful entrepreneurial efforts, because we can't handle the idea, even the /mere possibility/, that someone might be more successful with our own project then we are. We even have the nerve to pretend that we're being generous when we do this!

The GPL is not strictly about developer freedom, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's about guaranteeing user freedom.

From the GPL's Preamble:

"The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users."

Nursie2• 11 years ago

> Developers often engineer software dependencies badly, but we don't bother engineering legal dependencies at all, we just slap them in like new coders copy-pasting from stack overflow.

You sound like a legal liability waiting to happen.

Developers absolutely must take licenses into account or just don't use third party software.

It's that simple.

snom3203• 11 years ago

Your comment is focused about how terrible the GPL is for you as a developer. But the GPL was not created to make life easy for you as a developer, it was made to increase the freedoms of the end users.

kazinator11• 11 years ago

I use the BSD license for all the GPL reasons, plus one more: I am not bothered by the existence of other uses, and do not wish to eradicate them. I don't see them as a threat. The free version of the code is there, and gives users all the same rights as the GPL, and more.

I like all the freedom and sharing as does Stallman. I just don't see proprietary software as evil, and I don't think that if I prevent some code of mine from being proprietized, that I'm striking some blow against proprietary software. If anything, it might backfire: instead of using my quality, debugged code, they will have to choose something else that is perhaps not as good (or worse: whip something up from scratch). Somehow, in some way, that will come back and bite me.

belorn10• 11 years ago

While I believe there are those who is genuine when saying that, I am a bit burned by all those people who would quickly complain if someone made a patched version of their code and put it under GPL.

Karunamon2• 11 years ago

You may want to consider Apache instead of BSD simply because it includes a patent grant where BSD does not. (Which will cause some people to treat your code with suspicion because we live in a world with patent trolls)

The licenses are functionally equivalent in every other way.

IANAL, IANYL, this is not legal advice.

greggman• 11 years ago

I agree with you. I also feel kindness breeds kindness. I don't give out charity and expect something back. I don't look at it as "hey, I just gave you $100. If you ever do anything you must do the same". I just give the money and walk away. Similarly with my open source, it's all MITed.

Would I feel miffed if someone stole my biggest open source project?Maybe. Would that make me wish I had GPLed it? No.

I also have no idea what the percentages are on influence but my personally belief is MIT/BSD breed more open source than GPL. GPL attempts to breed open source by force. MIT/BSD by kindness. I'd like to think MIT/BSD does better because of that. It makes it easy for people to contribute and or fork and share and not worry their contributions can't be used in their own non open projects. You might see that as less open but I see it as more because their contributions wouldn't exist otherwise.

I think LLVM and all the zillions of things that are being spawned from it are a good example. If it was GPLed I doubt most of those projects would exist.

pron• 11 years ago

I think the point of the GPL is to make a political statement about changing the state of affairs, and it's done remarkably well in that regard.

When you choose GPL you're saying "I believe software should be free"[1]. When you choose BSD you're saying, "here's something I've made; use it as you like". Those are two very different kinds of statements, operating at entirely different levels.

[1]: Of course, not everyone chooses GPL for that reason.

japhyr3• 11 years ago

When I choose MIT over GPL I'm usually trying to make my work as easy for others to adopt as possible. I want some of the software I wrote to become a commodity. The MIT seems a clearer path to commoditized software than the GPL.

Is that a reasonable line of thinking?

icebraining8• 11 years ago

Yes, and in fact rms himself has made that decision in the past.

bahamat4• 11 years ago

The problem with the GPL is that it presupposes its own supremacy and refuses to work with other free licenses. Two prime examples are MPL and CDDL (which was based on the MPL). Both of which GNU regards as free software licenses, but says to not use them because they don't bow to the FSF.

The binary in memory linking clause is the most harmful thing to ever happen to free software. It destroys collaboration and restricts user freedom. It causes partisanship and infighting within our communities and prevents good ideas, the best ideas, from being freely shared (breaking both freedoms 2 & 3!). GNU has declared war on other licenses for far less than that.

Can we all admit that the in memory linking clause makes GPL non-free software? We'd all be better off to realize it.

phkahler4• 11 years ago

License proliferation was a problem largely supported by the OSI. IMHO there are really only 3 free/open licenses necessary - GPL, LGPL and BSD (or MIT). Anyone else is trying to be open or free while also supporting some other agenda.

If you want it both ways, go dual lincense with GPL and a commercial license. Just be up front and honest about it.

That said, I need to reread GPL3 in detail...

skrebbel• 11 years ago

I don't understand what your point has to do with memory. Care to elaborate?

Dylan168072• 11 years ago

Wasn't CDDL designed to be incompatible with GPL? That is not something you can blame GPL for.

belorn10• 11 years ago

License incompatibility happens when two licenses has different conditions which both need to be happen in order stay in compliance.

Its very easy for a license to fix this. They can either use common conditions, or they do like GPLv3 and have a list of additional conditions which may be added in order to be compatible with other licenses. MPL do not have that, nor does CDDL, and thus we have the situation where they are incompatible with most other copyleft licenses.

gillianseed4• 11 years ago

Both of which GNU regards as free software licenses, but says to not use them because they don't bow to the FSF.

CDDL is and was created with the purpose of being GPL incompatible, because Sun did not want Linux to be able to use ZFS and DTRACE which were technical crown-jewels of Solaris.

The binary in memory linking clause is the most harmful thing to ever happen to free software.

What ?

anonbanker9• 11 years ago

CDDL is not a free software licence. it was explicitly created to be GPL-incompatible, in order to preserve Sun's control over their IP.

rmc6• 11 years ago

* Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing? Well then, you shouldn't use a BSD license.*

Pedantically, with the GPL, that could happen. However it'll be a GPLed GUI programme. That sort of business, selling units of software, doesn't like when customers can just copy the software and sell it themselves (so GPL would kill that business models), however many non-technical consumers would not know that they could do that, or have the business acumen to pull it off. We often say execution is important for a business, so does the GPL matter much for that?

Coding_Cat• 11 years ago

And, IANAL, but I remember reading the the GPL doesn't cover SAAS either because you're not distributing a program.

Dylan168072• 11 years ago

Licenses like the MIT and BSD license exist for a different reason. And that reason is to give people who want to share what they did on generous terms a way to do so. And historically this was done in the belief that enlightened users would see it as being in their interest to contribute back.

And this works on an individual level, but once corporate bureaucracy gets involved it tends to turn into "why would we give away proprietary code?". GPL has its flaws, but it helps to fight short-sightedness.

callahad3• 11 years ago

It is their code with their choice of license chosen for their reasons. Respect that.

If I may offer one addition to this: if you intend for your software to be open source, please use a recognized open source license, rather than rolling your own. Doing so makes it much easier for outside parties to understand how you would like them to interact with your software.

The Open Source Initiative has a good index of licenses: http://opensource.org/licenses/

Deejahll5• 11 years ago

Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code ... and make millions while you make nothing? ... You shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be, "Bully for them, I had fun and they made the world better."

This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't.

I don't want somebody to take the work I have done and turn it into proprietary software that other users may no longer have the freedom to inspect, modify, and share. THAT is why all my work is GPL or AGPL. It has nothing to do with whether you make money or those users spend money or I get a cut of some money.

Now that we have so many SaaS startups, "turn it into proprietary software" includes "use it to build a service and never distribute the sources."

GPL and AGPL protects my code from this happening, while licenses like MIT and BSD ("permissive" licenses) do not.

Permissive licensing, in the context of SaaS, is functionally equivalent to proprietary licensing. Somebody benefits (not necessarily monetarily) from the use of my software without paying its price: improvements must be shared.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

Precisely. The thought that someone might take the code I wrote and make it into a proprietary product, removing the freedoms I had, is horrible. But if someone made an free software product based on it and made millions, all the better for them!

ChristianGeek• 11 years ago

I don't care if somebody gets rich off my software while I don't.

This is either incredibly naive or incredibly stupid. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former. To spend your time like most of us do, getting paid to make someone else wealthy, is one thing. Getting paid nothing to make someone else wealthy is little more than voluntary slavery. Don't want/need the money? Fine, then give it to a worthwhile charity and make the world a better place. But at least make your time and effort count for something.

Edit: Grammar

dgreensp• 11 years ago

In that case, the parent could have asked, "Would it outrage you if someone slapped a GUI on your code and released it as freeware?" I think they didn't because even fewer readers would see the harm in that.

danbmil993• 11 years ago

This is wrong. Copyleft licenses are concerned with freedom, not price.

I have long been annoyed by this canard. Yes, someone can create a piece of code, slap a GPL license on it, and charge $10,000 a copy. In the real world, that developer will make exactly $10,000, because their first user is free to share the code with the rest of the world at zero cost.

"Free as in free speech and beer, not just free beer." FTFY

alecco3• 11 years ago

And even the GPL was too short sighted. The "ASP/PHP" loophole exploited by Google and others had a dismal impact in the free software community. They used the code, extended but never shared it. Some sociopathic corporations made BILLIONS on top of it buy contributed back almost nothing. Yes, the glorious Google being the prime example, but there are many others.

And let's not forget the patent trick Oracle pulled on Apache and Google.

I used to be a BSD fan, but from my own experience and some close firends's experience I learned the lesson. I would only release via Affero-GPL from now on. I hope the FSF will eventually bring out a revised version with a more aggressive stance against software patents (e.g. not valid to use if you ever sued anybody with a software patent or something like that).

reitanqild3• 11 years ago

I would only release via Affero-GPL from now on.

Fine with me. Do as you please.

Everyone else keep in mind that your potential userbase drops dramatically if you only offer your software under AGPL. Even adding a commercial option in addition makes AGPL more usable.

wstrange2• 11 years ago

To be fair, Google has contributed a ton of code back to the community.

They have also made Linux relevant on the "desktop" (if you consider Android / Chromebooks desktop substitutes).

Net net, I would say their use of open source has been a benefit to the community.

giancarlostoro2• 11 years ago

I believe the MS-PL does this, which is closer to BSD-like.

carussell5• 11 years ago

What Oracle patent trick are you talking about? If you're referring to the Java suit (Oracle v. Google), the Federal Circuit didn't issue a decision that found Google in violation of any patents. Google is currently awaiting a response from the Supreme Court to Google's petition to hear the case so that it may find Google's actions to be noninfringing under copyright, not patent law.

anonbanker9• 11 years ago

let's not forget the current systemd loophole, by allowing proprietary applications to bypass GPL restrictions via RPC.

The legally-gifted amongst the free software movement should probably fork GPLv3 to insert a clause about good faith efforts to ensure the application doesn't circumvent the license.

dredmorbius4• 11 years ago

You're missing a _technical_ reason for using a BSD/MIT license, and one that's been relied on to great effect: to promote use of a standard.

Apache was licensed under the BSD license in part due to philosophical preferences of its creators, but with the effect of promoting HTTP as a standard transport for online documents. Nobody had to ask for permission to use Apache, or to incorporate it into their own products (as IBM did).

Arguably the orginal use of the BSD license, to spread use of Berkeley Unix, achieved similar aims.

From the ideological standpoint:

* If your goal is to promote Free Software, use the GPL (or a variant with stronger ties to distribution for Web or online services).

* If your goal is to promote use of Free Software Libraries, in an environment where there are numerous non-free alternatives, the LGPL has benefits.

* If your goal is to promote use of an open standard, the BSD/MIT licenses are more effective because they allow for proprietary use.

overgard• 11 years ago

Licenses like the MIT and BSD license exist for a different reason. And that reason is to give people who want to share what they did on generous terms a way to do so. And historically this was done in the belief that enlightened users would see it as being in their interest to contribute back.

I think the thing that people ignore is that there's a huge incentive to contribute back with licenses like MIT/BSD. The incentive is not having to maintain a set of patches and an in-house fork. Proprietary forks can be expensive (an engineer will have to apply those patches every release -- and engineers are expensive. Not to mention the good ones won't want this kind of work.)

The notion of a company taking a BSD-licensed product and taking it to market while leaving the creator out in the cold seems rare. I won't say it never happens, but for most companies it makes economic sense to contribute back.

Daishiman• 11 years ago

On the contrary, out of all the free OSes out there, it was Linux with GPL the most successful, because companies could contribute back knowing that their competitors would not take the code and run away and produce proprietary forks backed by large marketings budgets.

See FreeBSD and Mac OS. If I contribute to Darwin, Apple will take my changes to improve their product. I get nothing in return. This may be fine for an individual, but for a company who depends on a product, it's a bad scenario.

comex• 11 years ago

It makes economic sense... if you plan to ever update the software (especially more than a small handful of times). For most software, that's a pretty sane assumption, but there's a fairly important niche where it's not: embedded firmware, all the way from the GUI of some random thing-with-a-cheap-LCD to device drivers for flagship Android phones (which are more likely to be in the "small handful" category than "never", but still). In the latter case, even though Linux is under the GPL, at the rate the hardware changes there is often little incentive to contribute back to mainline. Or fulfill GPL obligations at all, for that matter - but at least most big Western manufacturers have some place to get a source dump. If Linux were BSD-licensed, things would be even worse.

avinassh• 11 years ago

When you choose a license, you should choose correctly for what you want to have happen. Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing? Well then, you shouldn't use a BSD license.

Which license you should use? I thought licenses does not discriminate wether you use it for personal use or commercial use. Sorry, newb here.

riquito• 11 years ago

When you choose a license, you should choose correctly for what you want to have happen. Would it outrage you for someone else to take your code, put a pretty GUI on top, sell it, and make millions while you make nothing? Well then, you shouldn't use a BSD license. By contrast you shouldn't use the GPL if your response would be, "Bully for them, I had fun and they made the world better."

BSD or GPL equally won't get you a dime, this example is flawed. The difference is that with GPL they must redistribute whatever modification they did (unless they are providing a "service", then you had to protect the code with AGPL).

belorn10• 11 years ago

The difference is most noticeable when a console or phone has open source software running which one can't modify, run or distribute because of DRM or patents.

The software might be of better quality because it uses a common shared base, but as a user I have a hard time valuing it above proprietary developed software.

teh_klev• 11 years ago

Given how long ago this was written, the title should probably include the original publication date (2007).

forrestthewoods• 11 years ago

I continue to have a radically different opinion on what free means from Stallman. And that's fine! I've warmed up slightly to his viewpoint over time. Not enough to touch GPL software with a 10 foot pole. But slightly warmer none the less. I'm even glad he's out there vocalizing his view. That's generally a good thing. In the meantime I, and seemingly most of the community, will continue to use and push MIT style licenses.

madez4• 11 years ago

Besides the fact that there is a lot of GPL-licensed software out there, what makes all this software so abhorrent to you that you wouldn't even come near to it?

In general, I think rants need stated reasons.

hga2• 11 years ago

I think a lot of this depends on what you place the most value in. While agreeing that the things RMS/GNU/FSF value are worthwhile and important, I place a higher value on "quality" and wide adaptation.

stephenr• 11 years ago

This is one thing I think many people don't realise. For RMS, code quality is not the #1 goal.

oldmanjay4• 11 years ago

You understate things a bit. In the view of rms every aspect of a software project is a sacrifice on the altar of the GPL, if necessary.

It makes sense to have that policy when your goal is eradication of copyright, which is a goal quite a few people do share with the FSF. The trouble is, that's a destructive goal, and software is a creative enterprise, so things are fundamentally at odds and weird results happen, such as the refusal to allow a modular structure in GCC to prevent undesirable uses. A strange definition of freedom indeed!

Edit: typo

anon13853• 11 years ago

I'd go even further than that. For RMS he'd rather a problem not be solved using computers at all, if solving the problem with computers would require or even just enable non-free software.

The most recent example of this was the debate over refactoring tools in emacs that used an AST generated by gcc. RMS was against this, even though all the code involved was free, because it would mean exposing the AST generated by gcc to external processes, some of which might be non-free. So he'd rather people not have refactoring tools at all, than enable the possibility of a non-free IDE existing that uses the AST from gcc.

diminish• 11 years ago

Seeing this article again in previous discussions https://hn.algolia.com/?query=why%20open%20source%20misses&s...

I suspect HN is refreshing its user base every 1 year or so.

thsealienbstrds• 11 years ago

I can't help but think that the spirit of free software, namely control over your computing/computer, is more relevant today than it ever has been. Just that the problem doesn't really seem to be in any particular computer program... It's a shame that even the FSF has no solution for web services that make mass surveillance possible.

brudgers2• 11 years ago

I admire Richard Stallman and believe that his efforts are among the most important contributions to practical ethics in the last 50 years...yet [and we knew there had to be one] the issue I have with the GNU license is that it is a license. It's use relies on all the same implicit threat of state sanctioned violence and its infrastructure as its closed proprietary opposites. The GNU license is meaningless without modern intellectual property focused trade agreements to provide teeth when there is a violation.

The GNU license is inherently litigious. That's the nature of licensing. Alternative licenses are also de jure, but some are de facto non-litigious by virtue of permissiveness. The primary contract for a GNU license is legal and the social contract is secondary...I'm not giving back when I am coerced by the threat of legal sanction into the act. Gifts don't come with strings attached, and it is reasonable for someone to hold the ethical belief that true giving means placing creative works in the public domain.

Which is to say that GNU lies on a spectrum and reflects some noble ethical values and not others. Among those ethical values GNU does not reflect are many that deem an intellectual property infrastructure backed by state sanctioned violence on behalf of wealth [e.g. music downloader prosecutions] worse than actions which GNU's copyleft prohibits.

arto• 11 years ago

Note that Stallman himself is quite comfortable with his notions about mandatory sharing being enforced through state violence:

"Richard is against abolishing copyrights because, to his view, without copyright, enforcing copyleft would be impossible."

http://rudd-o.com/monopolies-of-the-mind/thoughts-after-my-d...

quadrangle13• 11 years ago

Indeed, Richard Stallman is self-described "not an Anarchist".

So? Anarchism has lots of neat ideas and is right about a lot of philosophical things. It's a daunting challenge to convince anyone that it could practically work. On a large scale, it remains only theoretical discussion divorced from reality.

loup-vaillant2• 11 years ago

I understand the view that state sanctioned violence is bad. But right now, this is not our biggest problem. Corporate violence is.

Granted, states do give corporation power by enforcing laws that suits them. But they also keep them in check: there are anti-monopoly laws, people aren't allowed to enslave themselves by contract… Let's get rid of corporations before we get rid of the state.

This is why I have absolutely no problem with the GPL. The only meaningful way to infringe it is to use GPL code to make proprietary stuff. Presumably to make money —wait, no, to extract money. The worst potential offenders would be big corporations, who can do many bad things with proprietary (or secret) software. I mean, just look at Gmail: its purpose it for Google to read your e-mail so it can send you more effective ads. (I know no Google employee will actually read your email. It's all automated. Which makes things worse: if you can search for unicyclists to sell them juggling balls, you can search for dissenters to rat them out.)

In our ongoing fight against power-hungry corporations, the GPL is at worst a necessary evil. We need state sanctioned violence to prevent the likes of Apple, Microsoft, or Monsanto from enslaving us all. It's a double edged sword, but it's the only one we've got. (I'd like to avoid contemplating the more… direct approaches for now.)

hansjorg• 11 years ago

The GPL is not primarily about charity or giving.

It's a pragmatic approach to keeping software free as in freedom, given the current political and economical realities.

ajarmst2• 11 years ago

I'd argue rather it's copyright law that is "inherently litigious", and that mechanism wasn't selected by Stallman. It was selected by those who began entailing it to source code, in contrast to the earlier ecosystem that RMS came up in: where hardware was often considered a commercial product, but software was near-universally treated as simple technical information of a similar order to academic papers. Most early manufacturers shipped the source code with the product, and were delighted if customers wrote or modified code, as it increased the value of their actual commercial product: the hardware.

jakejake3• 11 years ago

I think the cause would be better served if RMS would stop calling it "free" software and stop with the speech/beer analogy. As hilarious as the wordplay may be, most people simply don't get it.

The other irony is that GPL is not even free (as in speech) either, it imposes rather strict conditions.

oldmanjay4• 11 years ago

I feel like you get the explanation reversed - everyone gets it, but it's just not that funny. Jokes that aren't funny are off-putting, not attractive.

quadrangle13• 11 years ago

it's not even supposed to be a funny joke. It's just an idea, "think free as in speech, not as in bear" is a plain thing to say just explaining which definition of the word is meant. It's not a joke or clever.

jakejake3• 11 years ago

I should have added *sarcasm regarding the funny part.

I have to disagree though, most users have no clue what that means other than it costs them nothing. And many developers simply ignore and violate the terms because they don't understand the restrictions.

grok2• 11 years ago

I doubt that he is going for wordplay. Rather, he is trying to convey that it's not the price he is talking about when he says "free", but "freedom". And it's a simple example that makes the distinction and sticks. Maybe he should've called it "Freedom Software"?

phkahler4• 11 years ago

> The other irony is that GPL is not even free (as in speech) either, it imposes rather strict conditions.

The only "strict condition" is that it enforces the golden rule. That's really all its designed for.

jakejake3• 11 years ago

Maybe golden shackles would be appropriate?!

I actually do release some code under GPL, but it's when I want those restrictions in order to prevent certain types of commercial usage (and of course when my code uses or is based on GPL code). But I certainly don't consider it to be free in any way except free as in beer.

craftsman• 11 years ago

Regarding "it imposes rather strict conditions": Yes, it imposes the condition that the user of the software retain their freedoms with respect to the software.

Software freedom is a double-edged sword: to have it, you have to restrict other people's freedom to take it away from you.

clarky078• 11 years ago

IMO, Free Software misses the point. it's open source things like MIT and BSD that actually allows entrepreneurs on HN to start businesses at a fraction of the cost of before. GPL helps not even a little bit. Open source is awesome, and amazingly useful to the community. "Free" software that I can't sell, is of almost no use to me or any other entrepreneur.

Some people might be independently wealthy, the rest of us have to actually charge for our software so we can try to attain that goal. "Free" software doesn't benefit nearly as many people as "open source" software.

callahad3• 11 years ago

"Free" software that I can't sell, is of almost no use to me or any other entrepreneur.

The Linux kernel is a strong counterexample to that claim.

clarky078• 11 years ago

i've used linux plenty during my life, and yet i see very few people using it personally. i find Mac and Windows to be better in almost every way, and I doubt I ever use Linux again.

i will give you servers though, they are certainly useful, and obviously key to many businesses. I'm not sure them being "free" is any better than it being "open source" though. It wouldn't change the equation at all, except that we might have a better version of linux that someone could also sell....

clarky078• 11 years ago

As I'm thinking about this more, I think it almost makes my point even more. The only thing about Linux that is useful for an entrepreneur is that it is "free as in beer". How many startups are looking at the source code for Linux, ever?

Certainly thankful for cheaper servers, but that could be accomplished with MIT or BSD, or even closed source.

phkahler4• 11 years ago

What about dual licensed software like GPL + commercial? QT gets used by a lot of free software but the developers still make money by offering a commercial license.

clarky078• 11 years ago

How does that help me as an entrepreneur? The GPL provides me nothing, and the commercial is normal commercial I can buy. How does this change anything I said?

mverwijs• 11 years ago

The GPL, and the Free Software Foundation, isn't there for the entrepeneurs. It's not there for businesses. It doesn't exclude them, but they are part of a bigger whole. That whole being humankind. And to ensure the software freedom for all humandkind, the FSF tries to persuade programmers to use the GPL.

That sounds horribly pompous, but IMHO that's the bones of it.

clarky078• 11 years ago

but how is it actually better than MIT or BSD? Why does precluding anyone from possibly making money on it make it better?

moonchrome4• 11 years ago

Actually GPL is more often than not the "we give you the source but we keep the copyright so if you want to use this in commercial purposes you need to re-license with us" - and it also doesn't work really well in the "open sourcing" in that case because people often build "enterprise version only" features on top. Look at Qt or Mono for example. I'd say GPL fails at "free software".

Also GPL leads to a lot of shitty situations - for example - I'm developing a muscle simulation library for my product and my content pipeline is based on Blender. Under Blender GPL license, since I'm not redistributing Blender or any code from it in my product, I don't need to opensource my code.

But if I want to integrate my tool in to Blender and give it away for free (to give back to community since my product isn't about animation) I would have to release it under GPL which I can't do. So in the end I can't give something back because of GPL. I could maybe do stuff like distribute a binary that talks to Blender via IPC but that's just a waste of my time and a suboptimal design solution because of a non-technical license reason, I'm not going to do that.

Also Blender is actually a decent core tool, if they allowed companies to develop commercial plugins on top of it via LGPL or something it would (IMO) make the Blender adoption much faster.

IMO GPL only makes sense if you plan on making a profit from the code you're releasing by re-licencing for commercial use, otherwise it's just a PITA.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC3• 11 years ago

You are misinformed, the GPL does not prevent you from selling your software. The GPL only requires that whoever you sell it to can do with it whatever they want, more or less. That might limit some business models, but neither does it make GPL software useless for entrepreneurs nor does it prevent you from making money by selling software based on it.

clarky078• 11 years ago

Actually it does. I'm primarily and iOS developer, and the GPL does prevent me from selling my software.

Even if it weren't for Apple, the clones are bad enough without just having to give my code away to anyone who wants to use and sell the exact same app competing with me.

FWIW, I would have no problem with something that forces open sourcing improvements to the open sourced software. What I don't like is not being able to use it as a tiny piece to a larger project without making the whole project GPL. That's the part that makes it not useful in many many cases.

nickysielicki• 11 years ago

Read the fucking article.

the_why_of_y8• 11 years ago

Free software creates a competitive free market in providing support and development services for the software, whereas proprietary software relies on government granted monopolies to exclude competition.

If you are unable to make money with free software, that says more about your lack of business skills than it does about any perceived "anti-business" attitude on the behalf of the authors of free software.

Here's John Gilmore, co-founder of Cygnus, a company that made money with free software (in particular, the GNU toolchain) that was sold for $1 billion:

http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/2015/03/sort/time_...

"Years ago I thought about how to make a living in a post-scarcity economy, then debugged my ideas in real life. In 1989 I cofounded a company that wrote free software, gave the software away for free copying under the GNU General Public License, and sold live human support for it, to the small fraction of users who wanted support. What others called piracy, we called distribution! We also quipped that we made free software affordable. Every big company we cold-called to sell support to WAS ALREADY USING OUR SOFTWARE. Many of them depended deeply on it and were happy to hire us to make it do exactly what they wanted it to. We saved Sony a year in developing the PlayStation, for example."

jokoon3• 11 years ago

Eitherway, it will be difficult for some lonely, hard working programmer to release some code and attract contributors or make money out of it.

This debate is just about politics of business and project management regarding the law, nothing more really.

I don't like this debate, because its political nature does not have so much importance nor relevance. If you don't make money thanks to a project, you still need some time to work on it, and if it doesn't bring you money, how can conciliate this project and a paying job ? Unless your company understands open source and agrees to attract contributors, but what if you can't find any ?

There are not so many programmers like Linus Torvalds out there who can really make it like he did. He is the best example open source has, but I think citing linux over and over to praise the open source model is really dishonest.

Writing decent quality, open source software is really hard in term of management and business. There is not a lot of money to make in open source, or else it's pretty difficult to find a way to monetize it. You must be talented, find a network, and still find a source of income.

It's pretty much like research. If you have time and food, go for it, but nothing will build a project better and faster than investors full of cash and NDAs.

Nobody cares about open source or free software. Everyone just want to work in the industry, have a career, some colleagues, and not get screwed by lawyers. Open source will drive away lawyers, but it might also drive away cash. Not everybody can just code at home, without any income or on welfare, and just hope to become like carmack or torvalds.

It's true that computer software is spoiled by money, but it's not specific to software.

oldmanjay4• 11 years ago

Nobody cares about open source or free software. Everyone just want to work in the industry, have a career, some colleagues, and not get screwed by lawyers. Open source will drive away lawyers, but it might also drive away cash. Not everybody can just code at home, without any income or on welfare, and just hope to become like carmack or torvalds.

This paragraph is utterly incorrect in a way I find almost senseless. It's almost like trolls from the 90s wrote it for you. I mean that in a technical sense, I'm not trying to disparage you. It's just a point of view I haven't seen espoused in over a decade.

Edit: quoting against edits

capkutay2• 11 years ago

How is it incorrect exactly?

anon13853• 11 years ago

It's not totally wrong though is it. For the most part selling shrink-wrapped software is dead (compared to the 90s), because end users expect native software to be free (in both senses, although the beer sense is probably the more important). The only real exception is B2B software and games. It's why the vast majority of developers younger than about 30 are either working on internal corporate software or on SaaS web apps.

Nobody will graduate from university with a CS degree in 2015 thinking that they will sell software directly to people. Those graduates will dream of creating or working for a web service supported by ads or subscriptions. It won't be any more 'free', in fact it will probably be much worse than the shrink-wrapped proprietary software of the 90s (your data controlled by a 3rd party server, tracking for ads, no ability to stick with old versions, software stops working when the server goes down etc). But despite that it feels more morally acceptable to people to work on SaaS, and I think the way freedom is framed by the GPL is a big part of that. People who work at Facebook or AirBnB or Twitter or Google don't view themselves as evil merchants of proprietary software. They see themselves as socially aware employees of modern companies who 'get it' and support open source and free software - look how much open source code facebook and google gift to the world!

The marketing push towards open source was a mind blowing runaway success. It killed the most profitable industry ever seen in human history and replaced it with an even more profitable subscription service where a non trivial amount of the work is done for free by volunteers. This hasn't impacted developer employment because the overall industry has grown due to the huge number of SaaS companies springing up every day. It remains to be seen if that's sustainable. (There's enough profitable B2B SaaS subscriptions based companies to mean it probably is, overall, but the ad supported consumer sector is a bit scary, at least from an outside perspective).

jokoon3• 11 years ago

You should try to think about the software industry and how code gets written and then used.

The quantity of low quality code that gets deleted is just enormous.

The world runs on money. If your code doesn't get sold, it's being sold in other ways, which are not accounted, but the results are the same.

I'm not against open source, but I'm just saying that software patents are ruining the software industry, and open source doesn't solve that problem. It fights it, but it doesn't solve it.

loup-vaillant2• 11 years ago

We don't hear much about them, but most software is actually custom software. Only a tiny fraction of software enjoys wide distribution. Operating systems and Web browsers for instance are a minuscule niche, in terms of development effort. They just have a disproportionate impact.

Writing decent quality Free Software is easy: write custom software. Just give them the source code, and assign copyright to them. Or, give them a GPL (or BSD) licensed copy. Depending on the specifics, the software may not be free for you. But it will be free for its sole user, which is what matters.

epx• 11 years ago

"Why free software misses the point of open source."

MichaelCrawford• 11 years ago

"Open Source is the enemy." -- unknownlamer

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2005/7/21/161557/626/8#8

agounaris• 11 years ago

I cannot accept anything from a person eating something from his foot during a speech!

mekoka• 11 years ago

My issue with free software is the ideology. I tend to have mixed feelings about movements that claim to absolutely know what's good for humanity, no matter how noble the cause. I believe that if given the power to reach their goals we'd notice that a fraction of that same humanity will still end up suffering some consequences. Unless you can acknowledge that I cannot be a firm supporter.

In the context of software, I'm more comfortable with open source because it has shown that it is aware of the "it depends" nature of the field today, and is capable to adapt to get to 60% of the goals _right now_ by reaching some compromises, rather than going nowhere because of principles.

This is the definiton of Open Source, a really short read http://opensource.org/docs/osd

To me it's good enough.

Some open source licenses can indeed be too restrictive, but as Stallman says himself Fortunately, few programs use such licenses. However, depending on your point of view free software as an ideology can also be too restrictive.

Change is gradual and happens over time, but you need to give a chance to different parties to warm up to unfamiliar ideas. Open source accomplishes this. Free software as an ideology does too, albeit at a much slower pace.

I think it's Max Planck who observed that (I'm paraphrasing) the world doesn't change because old smart people tend to warm up to new ideas, it does because as they die out, growing generations are familiarized with these same new ideas from the start. As I see more startups (and new executives from old companies) embracing open source, I have to concur.

I understand Stallman's advocacy here and am even glad that it has perdured the way it has. It is a reminder of an ideal world towards which I feel open source actually strives to get. I'm still personally convinced that open source will be able to more successfully reach these goals with its flexibility than free software would with its rigidness.

curiously• 11 years ago

but here's the absurdity of free software. you got someone spending thousands of hours writing it and releases it. then you got hordes of freeloaders who bitch and moan about missing features and bugs for something they didn't pay for.

So lot of developers try different ways like cyber-begging (donations), licensing, selling support which tends to only work for people who have reached critical mass where for majority of projects and software nobody bats an eye. and in closed free software (bundling malware, ads, annoying features). The latest is crowdfunding but some esoteric video compression library for some specific distro nobody is going to take out their wallet for.

people who never pay for shit are the ones that are the most abusive. it's fucking appalling and my own negative experience of open sourcing and of other developers have made it clear that software or code is never to be released for free unless your motive is to monetize it later.

cwyers• 11 years ago

Or Free Software misses the point of Open Source -- Open Source isn't just Free Software done wrong, it's done by people with different motivations and values than Stallman.

ndesaulniers• 11 years ago

I think both stances have merit. Anyways, here's a plug for a meta-project; an open source definition of open source; https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/What-Open-Source-Means-To... kind of surprised no one has split hairs over free vs open source, yet.

ajarmst2• 11 years ago

I sometimes think that RMS is to a certain extent the victim of the "the first task of a successful revolution is to kill all the leaders of the revolution" effect. Raymond and others sort of hijacked what was essentially a political philosophy and dressed it up for commercial palatability. (Full disclosure: I am NOT an ESR fan, which tends to colour my view of the events, despite not really sharing RMS's deep concerns---or, at least not his energy for them.)

danbmil993• 11 years ago

After the rhetorical dust settles, the fact remains that GPL-licensed software gives me less freedom than the same software licensed under an MIT/BSD style license. The latter allows me to create and distribute a closed-source, proprietary version; the former prohibits that.

There is a reason the MIT/BSD style licenses are typically referred to as "more permissive" &/or "less restrictive".

ekianjo• 11 years ago

you donT get that its not yor freedom it protects, its the software users. A frequent misunderstanding.

danbmil993• 11 years ago

When I download a piece of code under the BSD license, I am the user. I am free to do whatever I please with that code, including to modify it, and release the modifications under a different license (ie executable only, heavy DRM, whatever).

Anyone is still free to use the original release under the original license. They can modify it, improve it, and perhaps release those changes again under the BSD license. No one has lost any freedoms at all under these scenarios.

What RMS and cohorts really want is not freedom the way it is usually understood. As he explains clearly, he wants a world without reliance on any proprietary, "non-free" (by his definition) software. By extension, the free software crowd is basically against the concept of intellectual property in its entirety.

What the GPL does is create a scenario where users are restricted from ever creating modified versions of the software licensed under terms of their choosing. The viral nature of the license forces users to continue enforcing those restrictions on all descendent versions of the software. The goal, quite clearly, is to foster a world of software that is fundamentally impossible to "sell" commercially in any shape or form. The new restrictions on patents and services in the AGPL3 make this agenda strikingly clear.

In the world I inhabit, permissive licensing frankly provides a way for a multiplicity of parties to communally build things of potential use to all members of the community. However, it does not restrict those members from branching off the communal tree for profit or any other reason. The collective work stands as a sort of "commons" that all farmers can allow their cattle to graze on. However it also allows for each farmer to maintain private grazing lands in addition to the commons.

Yes, in such a scenario some farmers could game the system by over-grazing -- in the analogy, that would mean taking lots of code and never giving back. Naively it would seem the GPL approach is better for disallowing this selfish behavior. But in the real world, the price for such draconian policing is the inability of anyone to create a reasonable business case for developing software -- no one can ever profit from the work they contributed. Richard Stallman may be fine with that scenario (I understand he was born wealthy), but it doesn't work for anyone who has to sling code for a living.

Paradigma11• 11 years ago

You don't get that he is not the softwares users.

golergka• 11 years ago

Once again, I find myself not agreeing with Stollman, but having an utmost level of respect for his level of arguments and rhetoric. I wish that people whose opinion I actually share could support these opinions in such an intelligent manner.

hyperpallium• 11 years ago

I'm sure this has been discussed many times, but instead of saying "free software, that means free as in freedom, not free as in free beer", why not just call it "freedom software"?

Lorento• 11 years ago

There's a powerful part of the "free software" ideology that's not explained well at all here - the GPL helps to force non-free software out of the market. Unlike, say MIT which can help non-free software get a leg up over free software. This part is kind of aggressive and can be seen as negative, which I imagine is why the FSF doesn't directly address it much.

jveld• 11 years ago

Reading Stallman these days always gives me such mixed feelings. I appreciate the fuck out of all the work he's done for the software community, and admire his courage and willingness to stand out. Overall, I think his agenda to keep the power of computing available to everybody is extremely important. Now more than ever, with computers everywhere and internet of things seemingly just over the horizon.

But these terminological squabbles seem to me like the worst kind of bikeshedding. Open source may have began as a way to depoliticize free software, but the battle has ended and "open source" has won. People who are not advanced computer users have never heard of "Free Software," the FSF, GNU, or Richard Stallman. On the other hand, "open source" software has some name recognition among folks like, say, my mother. Young developers (such as myself), have discovered Free Software through an original interest in "open source."

With that in mind, I think it would make sense to just use the terminology people are comfortable with, and continue making the same distinction by promoting "ethical open source" or "permissive open source" or something like that. If the worry really is that the language around open source is everywhere scrubbed of the original free software ethos (I'm not too sure about that), a sensible move would be counter that by staking out a corner of "open source" and using it to promote ethical software. Chastising people for the way they speak just sows hostility among potential friends.

Stallman always talks about the importance of language, and Orwell's shadow is clearly visible over these rants. But "open source" isn't euphamistic doublespeak - it's not inherently more difficult to think about ethical software when you call it open source instead of free. From an outside perspective, the only difference is that "free software" has a confusing double meaning that "open source" doesn't. Free software (or whatever) already is fighting a battle for relevance. Why choose an uphill battle?

FOOTNOTE: The fact that Stallman's pet terminology is always linked to his personal organizations also damages his credibility. It makes it easy to dismiss him as sour grapes. I personally think he deserves recognition, but then again, there's no shortage of software named after GNU...

Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software

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