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>Everyone pretty much agrees that the QPL is not an open source license

Except RMS, who calls it Free Software. Try the occasional bit research once in a while. Or feel free to weasel out and say you were referring to QPL 1.0

I didn't say he wants to revoke ALL IP legislation.

Read Why Sofware Should Be Free and its pretty clear what his philosophy is. All software should be free, ergo, you should have no rights to your software.

However, according to RMS, the QPL (and the use of Qt) is in fact incompatible with the GPL. RMS is possibly a bit biased, but he did write the GPL, so either he's lying or at least the intention of the GPL makes it incompatible with linking to Qt. (This doesn't mean there aren't any unintentional loop holes). You claim that it is legal to distribute GPL'd programs that link to Motif (without adding an exception, I assume), do you have any examples? IIRC emacs (at some point?) was distributed with an added exception that explicitly allowed linking to Motif.

What I feel is most disturbing about your post is that you seem to imply that the Debian developers are using the legal (non)issue just as an excuse for not distributing KDE, since they simply hate KDE for some unspecified reason. This sounds more like a conspiracy theory than reality to me. Debian is the most open and democratic open-source project I know of. Anyone can join Debian -- just say "Hi, I want to package foo", and you will be given one vote like everyone else. If Debian is excluding KDE driven by hatred, that means that a majority of Debian developers either share these feelings, don't care or simply aren't aware of it. What makes this even more unrealistic is the fact that AFAICT Debian is the distro that has the largest variety and alternatives of packages. Just look at the list of texteditors or window managers in Debian. It seems more likely that the evil Debian developers you discribe would say: "we will only include $MY_FAVORITE_EDITOR. All other editors have broken licenses.".

As I said earlier, I can't really tell if distributing KDE is legal or not. But I think it's pretty clear that your description of Debian is unfair and untrue.

Note: I am use Debian, but I'm not a developer, and I neither use nor develope KDE or Gnome.

Actually, to be picky, RMS doesn't have anything to do with Open Source if he can help it. Read the Philosophy section of the GNU web site. He's got some good reasons for disliking it. However, you are basically right. RMS' criteria are very systematic and fairly clear and distinct.

> Thus, the GPL is compatible with a number of licenses, including (I believe) the new BSD, X, Apache, and Artistic licenses.
According to the FSF, the Apache license and the Artistic license are incompatible with the GPL. Perl is available under both GPL and Artistic, so it is common to think the Artistic License is GPL compatible, because there are no problems with Perl. The QPL is the only GPL-incompatible free software license for which a sort of "legal hack" is provided by the FSF to remove icompatibility. This hack is :
As a special exception, you have permission to link this program with the Qt library and distribute executables, as long as you follow the requirements of the GNU GPL in regard to all of the software in the executable aside from Qt.
This is equivalent to what Guenter Bechly propose.

Hmmm...

Why you shouldn't use the Library GPL for your next library
"by Richard Stallman
This article was written in February 1999."

Draw your own conclusions.

He does have a bit of a point that Linux has mostly been about copying others.

I'll drink to that. Linux's supposed crowning achievement -- GNOME -- is very nice but deep down it's just a clone. It just looks prettier than what it's cloning. I got all excited about Evolution a few months ago; then I went and looked at it when Helix did the PR. I'm thinking, ``wow, look, Helix is porting Outlook to GNOME.''. Not exactly exciting or innovative.

I wondered in a thread back when the Beanie Awards were announced -- where's the category for best new thing in the open source world? All I see are reimplementations. Then again, I guess that's what GNU always did -- take existing stuff, rewrite it, and bloat it.

Check this page out:

http://www.gnu.org/p hilosophy/license-list.html#SoftwareLicenses

I think this is more or less what you're looking for. There aren't numeric ratings, but rather there are descriptions of each license, and exactly how free it is, and in what ways.

Does anyone know of a non-GPL based product ... under an acceptable license?

Yes, plenty of them qualify as free software licenses, in RMS's/FSF's opinion. You see, RMS applies his criteria and priorities consistently, which is something most people can't do (and are jealous of), which is probably why so many trolls can't stand him.

Sreeram.
----------------------------------
Observation is the essence of art.

You're not making any sense here. How can any license prevent an other person from selling "your own creation?" Through your written words, you've completely reversed the meaning of the thought you seem to be trying to convey. The GPL does not, and can not deprive one from selling one's own creation. It can do even less to deprive a third party from selling your creation--those GPL simply does not recognize those situations. In fact, the GPL allows, and the Free Software Foundation's The GNU Manifesto encourages you to sell your free software.

If you had any clue what Stallman has done for "alternative technologies" as well as technologies that could only be described as utterly mainstream (text editors, hyperlinked help systems, compilers, source code-level symbolic debuggers, rule-based expert systems like "make", etc.), you would have respect for the man's opinions, if only in light of his wealth of experience. I think it's unfortunate that promising alternative technologies are saddled with the appearance of self-important gas bag detractors who can't be bothered to read publically available documents and always seem to find their way to Slashdot.

--

You can't link GPL'd programs to closed source libraries, except when the closed library is an integral part of the operating system, as explained in the following clause of the GPL:

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

1. IBM, SGI or .... One of the bigger companies who can afford it as a publicity issue.
2. Microsoft. They could do it so that they can use qt work etc on windows but let's face it this is unlikely
3. Gnu, FSF. A fund-raising campaign to put this to bed for once. Could they have the readies in time for QT2?
4. Us. Anyone have any ideas for a real way to collect money online so that it can be bought buy the people for the people?

If you want to try it on a boot partition, don't try to use LILO, use GRUB. If you have a complicated booting situation, you probably should be using GRUB anyways...

Cheers,
Ben

I agree fully. The Internet needs to be accessible to the masses, and countries like Costa Rica implementing projects like this is a good sign that they "get it" with regard to Internet communications. In the future, people will rely heavily on information to get things done, speed of information will dictate the effectiveness of businesses and individuals.

More CCIE's are the solution, some people would say, but the fact is that the CCIE qualification, while good, ties people down to one vendor - Cisco, which will create a kind of Microsoftian situation, except with networking equipment and protocols (ever hear of the Cisco Properietry protocols? Ayup.)

The ZIE (Zebra Internetworking Expert) course will also be amied at educating more people, even though it will be fairly expensive at first, it will be priced reasonably once it reaches a certain level of acceptance by the business community. Their will be 3 exams. 2 written, and one lab. The 2 written will consist of Linux basics and Networking, (which will include both Networking basics, in the Linux module, intermediate Networking and advanced Networking in the Networking module). In the lab, the candidates will be asked to simulate a real working eviroment and interface with other hardware and software, using the GNU/Zebra technology.

Availability: These exams will be available through various LUGs around the world, eventually. At first they will probably only be available through a few centers in major areas in the US and Europe.

It's the hope of the organizers of this qualification that it will encourage the use of non-propreitry solutions for networking in mainstream organizations, and promote the use of Open Source technology in general. It's believed by them that the Open Source methodology will not only lead to technical benefits, but will allow communications to go to the next level by bringing back the cooperation of old that started the internet and allowed it to grow, in short: the hacker and scientest and military cooperation of the 60s, 70s and 80s., without which such innovation would have been impossible. Thanks,

Charles Balthazar Rotherwood

This argument, too, has already been disproven. A COMMERCIAL distrubution CANNOT satisfy Section 3 of the GPL simply by linking to GNU's website. The GPL says this EXPLICITLY in Section 3(c):

Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.) ( bold is mine )

They need to use sections 3(a) and 3(b) which to paraphrase state:

3a. Put the source code in the distrubution
3b. Make a written offer, good for a min. of 3 years saying you'll give them the source code, at a price no more then it takes to distribute, in a way commonly used for software interchange.


Linking to gnu.org's website falls under 3(c), which is invalid for them, putting source on their site follows 3(b) which is what they need to do. Specially since there is no gaurentee that they have not tampered with source code.

It's a common misconception.

AFAIK, 2.95 also does not have the new i386 backend yet. However, I've seen no benchmarks on that, so I really don't know how it does.

According to the egcs/gcc news page from 2Sep99: Richard Henderson has finished merging the ia32 backend rewrite into the mainline GCC sources. The rewrite is designed to improve optimization opportunities for the Pentium II target, but also provides a cleaner way to optimize for the Pentium III, AMD-K7 and other high end ia32 targets as they appear.

That was post 2.95, and post 2.95.1, but before 2.95.2. Looking at the article it was using 2.95.2, so I assume it has the new x86 backend.

2.95.mumble-mumble also lacks most of the (deemed unstable or too hackish) optimizations from pgcc.

I think the issue they had with pgcc was it did a lot of x86 things at the machine independent level of gcc, and a lot of machine indepenedent things were in the x86 code (like branch prediction). A lot of the pgcc optimasations are in the new x86 backend, or were properly added to the machine independent code.

That is to say a lot of the stuff pgcc did someone re-did and put in gcc. Not all of it. And gc now does stuff I don't think pgcc does.

I don't know which is faster at this point, but I could beleve either. After all egcs got a whole lot of MI speedups that pgcc hasn't.

The pity of it is that the Java VM is not quite general enough to cleanly and nicely support all kinds of programming languages. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't _have_ to use the Java language to take advantage of all the work put into the VM and libraries? Not that Java stinks that much, but lets face it, there are better things out there for sure.

Well of course you can, you can use Kawa for example to write Scheme, but there were a lot of hoops to jump through to do it and even then there are difficulties.

I guess Sun couldn't care less about this. Probably they actually consider it a feature. It would be great if the open source community developed a competing VM specification that is designed to support pretty much all languages equally as well.

This reminds me of a story by RMS.

Literature on it:

If you don't use napster now, but you don't like what's going on, you can help.

D/L Napster and install on a machine you don't use (or one that can handle the increased net trafic) and then grab RMS singing from here

work magic (to convert to MP3...some pls post if there is a way to do this) and rename the file numerous times to the name of various copyrighted works. Do this as many times as you can (don't we all have a couple of 2 gig drives lying around?)

That way...if the use this search, their results will be skewed. No I realize that there are some problems with this for the intelligent, but I figure if the rest of the ppl suing napster are half as clueless as Lars proved he was, then we're home free.

-fp

Why, the first sentence of the second paragraph of section 3 of the GPL, of course:

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.

Right on! Every true free software monk knows that money is the root of all evil. Let's break down how the evil has grown over the years.

Linus Torvalds, cute, cuddley, penguin-looking fellow. What does he want? World domination. What does he wish have said domination? Linux[tm]. What's that "tm" stand for? Transmeta, which is a company. World domination will only benefit Transmeta. Linus is but a pawn. Boycott Linux.

Richard Stallman, a lovely character with a front as high priest of the Order of Free Software. He has been known to take donations. What do donations consist of? Money. What is the most evil substance on this planet? Money. This high priest is a charleton, I say! He is as evil as the rest!

Apache, everybody's favorite open source web server. What is the Apache Software Foundation? According to their FAQ, a "not-for-profit corporation." What do they d? Take donations. Another group whose purpose is not to make quality free software, but to create DonateWare. This, my friends, we do not need. With 60+ percent of the web server market, I fear them more than Transmeta.

Sendmail, the ever popular mail transport agent with an odd name. Right on their front page, it says "sendmail[tm]." (Sorry, Slashdot doesn't allow the SUP tags like the page has.) Obviously they are in cohorts with Linus and his merry band of power-mad mind controllers. What do they do on the side? Sendmail Pro. Which this create to bring in what? Money. Tell me once again what is the most evil substance on this planet? Money.

Can I get an "Amen!?"

Miguel de Icaza, creator, dictator, and zoo keeper of many GNOMEs (you know who you are). Why did he create them? Hatred for KDE/Qt. What's he turned the crusade into? Helix Code. (What's up with the first sentance on that page, "leading open source desktop company?" I'd like to see the study that concluded that. Why does ever company have to declare themselves the leader of a one-contestent contest? I'm the leading free software development specialization operation in my apartment, who the heck cares?) What did he create Helix Code for? So people would "Buy Helix GNOME".

I could go on and on. But my point is all software we once thought would be pure has gone the way of the dollar. It truely saddens me to see this happen. Therefore, I call upon all true free software artisans to join me on a tiny desert isle to be named shortly where we will grow our own food, choke our own chickens, and code pure free software. You see, living in places like the United States, Europe, Germany, there are just too many temptations that require money, houses, cars, beer, women. Therefore we will do away with all these in the name of pure free software. Only then can we be one with the computer. Who's with me?

are you aware of the governm,ent conspiracy relating to tinfoil hats you see they supposedly cover the mind conrtol rays from the secret death satalites but they actually amplify the secret telsa death ray so that the government can kill those that know the truth while leaving their servants like katz and taco to rule the world without the tinfoil hats because the government is actually conspiring to create an anti-conspiracy conspiracy advocating the tinfoil hats as a means of mind control because instead of takeing wawy the mind contorl rays the tinfoil hats actually amplify them so that thje government can peer into your mind and make you work in line with them and control all that they hold sacred so that you will simply become a mindless drone of the worldwide government conspiracy yes that's what the UN is a worldwide governemnt conspiracy designed by monica lewinsky who is actually a secret cia officer designed to steal missile launch codes from bill clinton so that the cia will be able to have control over the us nuclear missile aresonal so that the un and the new world order headed by the us nsa and cia will be able to hold control over the world via a long range interncontrinental ballistic missile range specifically designed to oppress the peoples into creating a workforce so that the rich shall prosper and the poor shall be forced into nazi-style deathcamps for trying to expose the truth and you will be send to the end of the world and back to expose the truth and nobody will listen because of the tinfoil hat conspiracy and the amplified government mind control rays from the secret nasa death satalites.

Oh man, that was some bad $3 crack.


------------------------------------------------ ------------------------ ----
Join the cult. Now. Destroy the new economy.
The time is now. Rise up from our trenches, our bunkers, and fight the great war against the mortal enemy.You. Now. Fight!

There are a lot of things that X just does better than the console, though. Netscape, LyX, TiK, licq, xmms, dockapps, and just the general ability to have sooo many things on one screen at once is very useful. And besides, what use is a big monitor without lots of things to put on it? ;P
---

http://www.g nu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Intellectual Property

Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is

How about "Unauthorised copying"?

I have not updated this in a while, and even though it is a 0.9x release, it is really the same as the 1.0 that I will release soon. (I need to re-compile kerberos for my system, so I can check in several patches and contributions that have been submitted, then we'll have a 1.0 release.)

GNU Robots really is simple to learn. You'll have to pick up a book on Scheme, though, so you can figure out how to do the "if" constructs, and other stuff that your program will need to do. But Scheme is a good programming language to learn from.

At one point, someone was going to write a programming interface for this, so you could construct a robot program by dropping in these little computer chips with the action represented by a little icon. For example, you'd have a "move forward" icon and a "turn right" icon. But the person who was writing this fell out of touch with me. So maybe someone else will volunteer to help me.

The growing number of illeagally traded MP3's is evidence of a much larger problem. The people who do this aren't "Internet Extreamists", they are just ordinary people who have realized that paying $16 for one CD is rediculous. They are not trying to "fuck with you", they just want to listen to music without throwing away this week's paycheck.

This is a rebellion, not against the artists (as most of the traders are fans of the bands whose music they are trading), but against the recording industry. Wake up. The RIAA is a monopoly. There is no free enerprise or competintion in the music industry. A band can't make it without signing with a label that is a memeber of the RIAA, and people can't buy music from anyone but those affiliated with the RIAA. You, yourselves are slaves to the RIAA until your contract runs out.

Now, do people have the right to trade illegal MP3's? Probably not. And you are probably justified in this particular case in wanting to stop these illegal distributors, but I advise you to be more careful in the future. As more and more people get computers and become wise to MP3's, Napster, and gnutella, the rebellion will only get stronger. You say you like to act independantly from the industry; that is a good thing. But unfortunately, you appear to the public to be acting on behalf of the industry. If I were you, I would work now to begin seperating yourslef, at least in the minds of your fans, from the industry.

It is time to chose sides. Are you for the empowerment of both the artist and the consumer, or are you going to defend the RIAA and the profits they are making from your music?

People are just now waking up to the fact that they are being screwed by the industry. More and more of them are realizing that if they don't want the situation to continue, they have two choices: an all out boycott that would be very diffucult to organize, or resorting to trading illegal MP3's on the internet. They usually chose the latter. They have no other alternatives; there is no compertitor. The artist can not sell his music to anyone but the person he signed with. What is needed is for someone, preferably someone with power and influence, to take a stand against the industry and cut out the greedy middle-man. Seriously, if CD's were sold for $5 instead of $15 dollars, I'm sure most people would drop thier MP3 collections in a hearbeat.

You do make a valid point in that many bands need the record labels to just get off the ground and into the public eye, but I would much rather see it in the form of smaller talent-hunting agencies than huge corporations that seem to have a stranglehold on popular culture. I really am tired of the MTV phenomenon where they seem to have the power to tell you what is good, popular, and what you should listen too. I think we would all benifit form a system that responds more to what the public really wants.*

Now, people will say that this whole MP3 problem would go away if the RIAA would just embrace the internet and start selling their music online. I don't agree; I think the problem would only get worse. I don't want the music industry, or for that matter the entire entertainment industry as it exists today, to try to move into the information age. For as they do, they will bring with them an increasing number of draconian copyright laws and the power with wich to enforce them. How would they go about implementing systems that authorize the use of their intellectual property? I really do fear futures like this one.

Also, I must ask that you do not refer to copyright infringement as "theft", "stealing", "piracy", etc. These were terms invented by the industry to help ailienate those who infringe upon their profits from the sympathy of the general public. You cannot equate those who trade illegal MP3's to common theifs, and I encourage you not to use terms that would suggest such a relationship. Removal of physical property that does not belong to you is not the same as unauthorized copying. I am not trying to justify the actions of illegal MP3 traders, but I do think that the label should fit the crime.

I belive many future battles will be fought against the recording industry, and it's power will sharply decline. But as they go down, they will take with them many bands who either depend on them or tried to defend them. Make sure that you are not one of them.

most people that are Christians are not true Christians. They do not attend Church twice a week and pray every night

A 'true Christian' (your term, not mine) would go to Church more frequently than twice a week (how about twice a day?), and would pray more regularly than every night. A true Christian would praise God with everything he says and does.

A place where Christianity is taboo has a much larger proportion of programmers than almost any other website I know of.

Christianity is not a taboo on Slashdot, what rubbish. However, Slashdot is a Linux website and discussions of Christianity would be off-topic. In fact, Slashdot gives a free platform from which Christians (such as myself) are able to air our views. Try Advogato and The Stile Project for even less coverage of Christian issues. You will then realise how tolerant Slashdot is to the discussion of Christianity and Christian issues.

Fourth: a farmhand is likely to have grown up in Middle America, a place of strong moral fiber, and to be free from many of the evil influences that the city brings.

Utter nonsense, trollboy. Middle America is a place of very poor moral fibre - it is an inherently racist region and a region ruled by violence. Guns (the tools Satan uses to turn man against his fellow man) are widespread in America, and the majority of Americans worship the ideals of consumerism rather than God. It is down to individual choice whether or not to follow Evil, and in this respect no region is better than any other. As far as "evil influences" of cities, surely cities have more churches per area than small less densely populated villages, therefore cities are intrinsically holy?

Most people with a Computer Science degree are lucky to remain with the slightest few sheds of religion that have not been indoctrinated out of them.

Hello? Computer Science degrees make no attempts influence people's religious views. While they may indoctrinate people that Python is better than Perl, Solaris is better than BSD, vi is better than EMACS and Microsoft is better than everything put together, these are not religous arguments. They are trivial.

Please, think before you post next time.

*Converts all old materials created with older versions of HSS to the new formats to ensure maximum reliability.
*Increases stability of communication and transfer between all versions of HSS
*Adds an enhanced filtering system to prevent entry of unwanted matterials *Corrects bugs limiting COMMON_SENSE values.
*Increases brain cappacity by up to 10%!
*More emotional settings for incresed customization
*and much,much more!

> And if you ignore the monetary bit, I'd say Codewarrior is probably the best IDE for code-developing there is.

Foolish mortal! Your Integrated Development Environment cannot defeat my Graphical Debugger! My structures are beyond your imagination!

I disagree. Encryption, even non-hardware assisted, is easy to have setup.

Look at theTEA project (Transparent Encryption Agent), or look at the methods for transparent PGP of mail I outlined in Gnu Privacy Guard tutorial, part 2 towards the end of the document.

So, unlike your tank cars, this can be implemented easyily and quickly -- with no extra material cost. Replication of software and data through computers is essentially cost free, which how the GNU project can get away with giving away free [libre, beer] software :-)

I'd prefer constant, perversive encryption to having someone listen into even the most insignificant private conversation I hold any day.
---

Taken from the GNU website:

``Piracy''

Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.

If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''

No, I do not copy illegally or advocate such (nor does RMS, BTW). But I resent the insidious implication that publishers are getting away with here--even Linus uses the term! This is just one more reason to boycott even beyond MSFT.

What? Proprietary software is the most effective way to make money? I think I've heard that before... from RMS. Sorry, but you've completely missed the point of everything the FSF has to say. Check out their website and do some reading. Maybe you will figure out that selling proprietary software has consequences for everyone's freedom. And how exactly are free software advocates denying you the ability to exploit copyright law for your own profit? Presenting you with a potentially pursuasive argument and some high quality software is a little different from putting a gun to your head.

Meyer states "The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software." (Section 4)

This is totally incorrect!!! On the web page http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml, Richard Stallman writes:

"[W]e encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can."

"Except for one special situation, the ... GPL has no requirements about how much you can charge for distributing a copy of free software. You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars. It's up to you, and the marketplace... The one exception is in the case where binaries are distributed without the corresponding complete source code."

Chris Dolan

You're quite right that they're not the same, and I don't think RMS has ever claimed that they are. I think RMS would object strongly to Meyer's attempt to confuse commercial software with proprietary software
--
Martin

3. THE ECONOMICS OF FREE SOFTWARE
... In practice the only possible cases are the following:
- The software developer may have a personal fortune ...
- The software developer may have other sources of income, paid by an employer or client as compensation for services unrelated to the free software. ...
- Many public institutions such as universities will release for general use most of the software developed by their employees (although, as universities around the world are being pressed by the purse-string holders to enhance their economic value, and recognize the economic potential of the software they develop, this generous attitude is not as universal as it used to be).

Interesting mistake here - the economic potential of the software developed is usually _reduced_ if it is distributed in binary form, to only a small number of people. It would be more economically useful if everyone could use and improve it. There is the situation where a third party might have the money to improve the software and 'productize' it, but that does not require that the third party need be given a monopoly on the software. Economically, it would be more useful to release the software under a BSD-type licence and get some competition among the companies building on it.

I expect that rather than 'economic value of the software', Bertrand Mayer means 'monetary value to the university', which is not the same thing. Anyway, let's go on:

- Companies may find it beneficial to release some of their software products without asking for a fee. ...
The categories identified here -- donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded, taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored -- seem to exhaust the economic possibilities;

I think a category has been left out. This is the case where companies develop software and sell it for a fee, but decide to make it free software. There are plenty of people doing this - Red Hat is the most obvious example, they charge for their Linux distribution.

Then there are the cases where the company makes money from technical support, rather than selling copies. Cygnus was for many years the prime example of this, now they're owned by Red Hat. People like AbiSource or Helix Code intend to make money from custom enhancements to the software they write.

Many of the contributions of the free software community are admirable. Highly disturbing, however, is its widespread slander and hatred of the commercial software world.

One man, however high-profile, is not the same as 'widespread'. Most free software advocates do not agree with RMS, as far as I can tell. Indeed Eric Raymond, mentioned at length later on in the article, explicitly rejects Stallman's views on this. But anyway, RMS would reject your view that free software is anti-commercial per se, eg in this LinuxWorld interview:

When people said, "Don't pour poison in the river," they were called communists. But they didn't want to abolish business. They wanted to abolish pouring poison into the river. The free software movement is a lot like that. It's a lot like the environmental movement because the goal is not to abolish business, the goal is to end a certain kind of pollution. But in this case, it's not pollution of the air or the water, it's pollution of our social relationships.

Note again that when RMS says 'the free software movement', he doesn't refer to everyone who supports free software. Back to the article:

Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of GNU and FSF literature is there any serious explanation of why it is legitimate, for example, to make a living selling cauliflowers, or lectures (as a professor does), or videotapes of your lectures, but criminal to peddle software that you have produced by working long hours, sweating your heart out, thinking brilliantly, and risking your livelihood and that of your family.

There are plenty of explanations of the FSF's view on this. For example, see Selling Free Software. The idea is that when selling cauliflowers, you don't impose restrictions on what the purchaser can do with those cauliflowers. You don't make them give up any freedom (in the GNU sense). If you buy potatoes, you can plant them and grow more potatoes. (The closest analogy to the way you're not allowed to copy proprietary software is a genetically modified crop where the farmer is forbidden from saving some and planting it next year.)

To take your professor analogy, it would be okay (in FSF terms) to charge money for a lecture. But it would not be acceptable to stop your students passing on the knowledge they had learnt. RMS has said as much:

We see programmers as providing a service, much as doctors and lawyers now do--both medical and legal knowledge are freely redistributable entities for which the practitioners charge a distribution and service fee.

So the objection is not to 'selling' but to stopping the purchaser from changing and sharing what he has bought. The question then becomes, what if copyright is the only way to ensure a reasonable selling price for the author? RMS would prefer that the software never be written at all (work as a waiter instead), but personally I cannot agree with that. More from the article...

The only stated justification for the indictment of commercial software [apart from nostalgia] - is that software is different from other wares since it can be reproduced so easily. But this does not stand a minute's scrutiny. The difference is a matter of degree, not nature; software reproduction always costs something, even if it is as little as a dollar for a CD, ten cents of network connection time for an Internet download, or the marginal cost of using up more memory. With a good scanner or photocopier, you can reproduce a book, too, for very little money these days.

As the FSF site says over and over again, price is not the issue. Of course zero marginal cost is not a good enough reason for zero price - not in a capitalist society anyway. Have you seen the prices that the FSF charges for its software? It's bloody expensive. The question is - does the extra benefit to users from copyright on software outweigh the disadvantages? Fifty years ago, copyright on books was not a major restriction on people's actions, since copying a book would be difficult anyway. But for something that is naturally easy to copy and change such as source code, the restrictions placed by copyright law are more onerous. I think the loss of freedom is worth it in order to get more software produced, but it's not an open and shut case.

The article then goes on to criticize RMS for a 'skewed moral perspective', use of extreme analogies, and accusing the free software movement of hijacking the word 'free'. But this is a little unfair. Since the FSF concerns itself only with software, it's not surprising that the word 'freedom' on their pages is used only as it relates to computers. RMS is the first to admit that proprietary software is not the only problem the world has, or even the most serious. If every FSF page were prefixed with a disclaimer saying 'this is less important than other moral issues in the world', that would avoid accusations of a 'skewed moral perspective', but what would be the point? It's a mistake to assume that somebody concerned about one issue is a single issue proponent. It might just be that they don't have time to deal with everything, and have decided to focus on one specific area. (I do agree about the analogies getting a bit out of hand sometimes, but most of them work quite well.)

And the use of Eric Raymond to try to criticize free software proponents as a whole is even sillier. He may be a bit of a nut, but remember that unlike RMS, ESR is _not_ in the business of making moral proclamations, at least not in the software area. He does his best to make a practical case for free software - or 'open source software' as he calls it to avoid frightening managers. Bertrand Meyer seems to be arguing:

• Eric Raymond supports free software
• Eric Raymond supports gun ownership
• Gun ownership is a bad idea
• Therefore, the whole free software movement is a bit wacky

The article asks:

Is it right, one might ask, to make a connection between Mr. Raymond, who is only one person, and the rest of the free software community? The answer is yes, for at least three reasons:
- His propaganda is prominent in his Web pages ...

And? That still doesn't mean that it represents the whole free software movement. ESR doesn't even claim that his 'Open Source' writings represent the whole free software movement, let alone his barrel-of-a-gun writings. Some free software advocates support gun ownership, some don't. (I don't.) The fact that one person has written a web page and managed to get a large number of hits on it is neither here nor there.

- Eric Raymond has been one of the most visible proponents of the Open Source movement ... his views, unless disavowed strongly and publicly, inevitably commit the rest of the movement.

That is a bizarre statement. This is not a political party where people are expected to follow the party line. It's not some corporation where any press release represents official company policy. The 'movement' is a lot looser and a lot harder to pin down that Mr Meyer seems to think. There is no requirement on somebody who supports free software to publicly disavow anything that ESR says. His gun ramblings should be treated as what they are, a quaint irrelevance.

Given the choice between
- a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures would be in place preventing (for example) a disturbed white supremacist from buying a police gun ...
- a society where all software would be free and Mr. Raymond's views on gun "freedom" were fully realized,
any ethically-conscious person would choose the former.

I don't see how this has any relevance. Especially since ESR does not want to remove copyright on software, and since the free software movement has nothing to do with gun advocacy - a couple of oddly-placed links on one guy's Web page notwithstanding.

we have had to cancel one major project, and reengineer a product completely, after wasting many person-months and disappointing customers, because of the deficiencies of two separate GNU products (the GCC compiler for Windows and the editor under GTK). In both cases the scenario was the same: fixes to well-known bugs being promised and promised again; everyone waiting for months and months, until it becomes clear that nothing will happen; in the end, having to write off all the affected developments. Since no one is in charge, and you didn't pay for the products, there is no one to blame.

But 'nobody in charge' and 'didn't pay' are not consequences of the software being free. There are companies more than willing to take your money in exchange for providing a guaranteed response to bug fixes. The difference is that with free software, you can shop around and get the best deal for such support, rather than being limited to the company which owns the copyright.

Even though the GNU products are often good, the licenses which accompany them are no better, in the warranties (or rather absence thereof) they offer to the user, than commercial software.

Of course not. Would you expect the FSF to become liable to warranty claims from someone who downloaded the software gratis from an FTP site? However, the GPL explicitly allows someone distributing the software to 'offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee'. It's up to the free market to provide this service for those who can pay for it.

Warranty provision has nothing to do with 'freedom' - unless you count as 'freedom' being able to drag a software author through the courts because you downloaded his software and it didn't work. Again, if you want to provide a warranty for GCC as a profitmaking business, go ahead and do so. But saying 'use this at your own risk' is very different to saying 'you may not change the software; you may not copy the software'. One restricts what the user can do; the other is just an arse-covering legal measure - unfortunately necessary in today's litigious world.

Product F is free software. It comes with the standard no-warranty warranty.
Product P is proprietary software. It costs $50 for the binary-only version. [and comes with a full and comprehensive warranty]
... I would consider the second solution more ethical

I don't see how the first is unethical, provided it is absolutely clear about there being no warranty. Making false claims would be unethical of course. I don't see how you can expect Product F to provide a warranty if you did not pay anything for it - the author could be bankrupted by lawsuits from users who downloaded a copy or got one from you. There is a third option of course, Product F for $50 _with_ a warranty provided by the author.

I think the point is that the GPL doesn't _automatically_ grant a warranty. But it does provide a base on which you can provide warranties to specific individuals, if they pay for it. That seems sensible to me.

The free software axioms hold, as we have seen, that although charging for software is wrong it is all right to charge for services associated with the software, such as maintenance and training. The risk here is that such an attitude may lead to products with known deficiencies, giving the provider a ready-made source of juicy service contracts.

I don't think that any company could get away with this - how would the product establish itself in the market if it were broken? Don't forget that this problem exists with proprietary software too, if it has a support contract. Do you think that Oracle insert bugs so that their customers will subscribe to the most expensive support contracts for guaranteed fixes? It's all rather far-fetched. If you have the source, you'd probably be able to spot if something fishy were going on.

The article continues by accusing free software advocates of character asassination towards proprietary software developers. Again it makes the mistake of equating RMS with 'the free software movement'. There is no collective view on such things, any more than on gun ownership.

Finally, I think that most free software projects do indeed acknowledge where they have used ideas from other programs, free or proprietary. The GIMP's credits section describes it as a 'Photoshop-like' program, and that's about as clear as you could be. Similarly it is obvious where GNUstep, bison, less and so on got their inspiration.

3. THE ECONOMICS OF FREE SOFTWARE
... In practice the only possible cases are the following:
- The software developer may have a personal fortune ...
- The software developer may have other sources of income, paid by an employer or client as compensation for services unrelated to the free software. ...
- Many public institutions such as universities will release for general use most of the software developed by their employees (although, as universities around the world are being pressed by the purse-string holders to enhance their economic value, and recognize the economic potential of the software they develop, this generous attitude is not as universal as it used to be).

Interesting mistake here - the economic potential of the software developed is usually _reduced_ if it is distributed in binary form, to only a small number of people. It would be more economically useful if everyone could use and improve it. There is the situation where a third party might have the money to improve the software and 'productize' it, but that does not require that the third party need be given a monopoly on the software. Economically, it would be more useful to release the software under a BSD-type licence and get some competition among the companies building on it.

I expect that rather than 'economic value of the software', Bertrand Mayer means 'monetary value to the university', which is not the same thing. Anyway, let's go on:

- Companies may find it beneficial to release some of their software products without asking for a fee. ...
The categories identified here -- donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded, taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored -- seem to exhaust the economic possibilities;

I think a category has been left out. This is the case where companies develop software and sell it for a fee, but decide to make it free software. There are plenty of people doing this - Red Hat is the most obvious example, they charge for their Linux distribution.

Then there are the cases where the company makes money from technical support, rather than selling copies. Cygnus was for many years the prime example of this, now they're owned by Red Hat. People like AbiSource or Helix Code intend to make money from custom enhancements to the software they write.

Many of the contributions of the free software community are admirable. Highly disturbing, however, is its widespread slander and hatred of the commercial software world.

One man, however high-profile, is not the same as 'widespread'. Most free software advocates do not agree with RMS, as far as I can tell. Indeed Eric Raymond, mentioned at length later on in the article, explicitly rejects Stallman's views on this. But anyway, RMS would reject your view that free software is anti-commercial per se, eg in this LinuxWorld interview:

When people said, "Don't pour poison in the river," they were called communists. But they didn't want to abolish business. They wanted to abolish pouring poison into the river. The free software movement is a lot like that. It's a lot like the environmental movement because the goal is not to abolish business, the goal is to end a certain kind of pollution. But in this case, it's not pollution of the air or the water, it's pollution of our social relationships.

Note again that when RMS says 'the free software movement', he doesn't refer to everyone who supports free software. Back to the article:

Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of GNU and FSF literature is there any serious explanation of why it is legitimate, for example, to make a living selling cauliflowers, or lectures (as a professor does), or videotapes of your lectures, but criminal to peddle software that you have produced by working long hours, sweating your heart out, thinking brilliantly, and risking your livelihood and that of your family.

There are plenty of explanations of the FSF's view on this. For example, see Selling Free Software. The idea is that when selling cauliflowers, you don't impose restrictions on what the purchaser can do with those cauliflowers. You don't make them give up any freedom (in the GNU sense). If you buy potatoes, you can plant them and grow more potatoes. (The closest analogy to the way you're not allowed to copy proprietary software is a genetically modified crop where the farmer is forbidden from saving some and planting it next year.)

To take your professor analogy, it would be okay (in FSF terms) to charge money for a lecture. But it would not be acceptable to stop your students passing on the knowledge they had learnt. RMS has said as much:

We see programmers as providing a service, much as doctors and lawyers now do--both medical and legal knowledge are freely redistributable entities for which the practitioners charge a distribution and service fee.

So the objection is not to 'selling' but to stopping the purchaser from changing and sharing what he has bought. The question then becomes, what if copyright is the only way to ensure a reasonable selling price for the author? RMS would prefer that the software never be written at all (work as a waiter instead), but personally I cannot agree with that. More from the article...

The only stated justification for the indictment of commercial software [apart from nostalgia] - is that software is different from other wares since it can be reproduced so easily. But this does not stand a minute's scrutiny. The difference is a matter of degree, not nature; software reproduction always costs something, even if it is as little as a dollar for a CD, ten cents of network connection time for an Internet download, or the marginal cost of using up more memory. With a good scanner or photocopier, you can reproduce a book, too, for very little money these days.

As the FSF site says over and over again, price is not the issue. Of course zero marginal cost is not a good enough reason for zero price - not in a capitalist society anyway. Have you seen the prices that the FSF charges for its software? It's bloody expensive. The question is - does the extra benefit to users from copyright on software outweigh the disadvantages? Fifty years ago, copyright on books was not a major restriction on people's actions, since copying a book would be difficult anyway. But for something that is naturally easy to copy and change such as source code, the restrictions placed by copyright law are more onerous. I think the loss of freedom is worth it in order to get more software produced, but it's not an open and shut case.

The article then goes on to criticize RMS for a 'skewed moral perspective', use of extreme analogies, and accusing the free software movement of hijacking the word 'free'. But this is a little unfair. Since the FSF concerns itself only with software, it's not surprising that the word 'freedom' on their pages is used only as it relates to computers. RMS is the first to admit that proprietary software is not the only problem the world has, or even the most serious. If every FSF page were prefixed with a disclaimer saying 'this is less important than other moral issues in the world', that would avoid accusations of a 'skewed moral perspective', but what would be the point? It's a mistake to assume that somebody concerned about one issue is a single issue proponent. It might just be that they don't have time to deal with everything, and have decided to focus on one specific area. (I do agree about the analogies getting a bit out of hand sometimes, but most of them work quite well.)

And the use of Eric Raymond to try to criticize free software proponents as a whole is even sillier. He may be a bit of a nut, but remember that unlike RMS, ESR is _not_ in the business of making moral proclamations, at least not in the software area. He does his best to make a practical case for free software - or 'open source software' as he calls it to avoid frightening managers. Bertrand Meyer seems to be arguing:

• Eric Raymond supports free software
• Eric Raymond supports gun ownership
• Gun ownership is a bad idea
• Therefore, the whole free software movement is a bit wacky

The article asks:

Is it right, one might ask, to make a connection between Mr. Raymond, who is only one person, and the rest of the free software community? The answer is yes, for at least three reasons:
- His propaganda is prominent in his Web pages ...

And? That still doesn't mean that it represents the whole free software movement. ESR doesn't even claim that his 'Open Source' writings represent the whole free software movement, let alone his barrel-of-a-gun writings. Some free software advocates support gun ownership, some don't. (I don't.) The fact that one person has written a web page and managed to get a large number of hits on it is neither here nor there.

- Eric Raymond has been one of the most visible proponents of the Open Source movement ... his views, unless disavowed strongly and publicly, inevitably commit the rest of the movement.

That is a bizarre statement. This is not a political party where people are expected to follow the party line. It's not some corporation where any press release represents official company policy. The 'movement' is a lot looser and a lot harder to pin down that Mr Meyer seems to think. There is no requirement on somebody who supports free software to publicly disavow anything that ESR says. His gun ramblings should be treated as what they are, a quaint irrelevance.

Given the choice between
- a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures would be in place preventing (for example) a disturbed white supremacist from buying a police gun ...
- a society where all software would be free and Mr. Raymond's views on gun "freedom" were fully realized,
any ethically-conscious person would choose the former.

I don't see how this has any relevance. Especially since ESR does not want to remove copyright on software, and since the free software movement has nothing to do with gun advocacy - a couple of oddly-placed links on one guy's Web page notwithstanding.

we have had to cancel one major project, and reengineer a product completely, after wasting many person-months and disappointing customers, because of the deficiencies of two separate GNU products (the GCC compiler for Windows and the editor under GTK). In both cases the scenario was the same: fixes to well-known bugs being promised and promised again; everyone waiting for months and months, until it becomes clear that nothing will happen; in the end, having to write off all the affected developments. Since no one is in charge, and you didn't pay for the products, there is no one to blame.

But 'nobody in charge' and 'didn't pay' are not consequences of the software being free. There are companies more than willing to take your money in exchange for providing a guaranteed response to bug fixes. The difference is that with free software, you can shop around and get the best deal for such support, rather than being limited to the company which owns the copyright.

Even though the GNU products are often good, the licenses which accompany them are no better, in the warranties (or rather absence thereof) they offer to the user, than commercial software.

Of course not. Would you expect the FSF to become liable to warranty claims from someone who downloaded the software gratis from an FTP site? However, the GPL explicitly allows someone distributing the software to 'offer warranty protection in exchange for a fee'. It's up to the free market to provide this service for those who can pay for it.

Warranty provision has nothing to do with 'freedom' - unless you count as 'freedom' being able to drag a software author through the courts because you downloaded his software and it didn't work. Again, if you want to provide a warranty for GCC as a profitmaking business, go ahead and do so. But saying 'use this at your own risk' is very different to saying 'you may not change the software; you may not copy the software'. One restricts what the user can do; the other is just an arse-covering legal measure - unfortunately necessary in today's litigious world.

Product F is free software. It comes with the standard no-warranty warranty.
Product P is proprietary software. It costs $50 for the binary-only version. [and comes with a full and comprehensive warranty]
... I would consider the second solution more ethical

I don't see how the first is unethical, provided it is absolutely clear about there being no warranty. Making false claims would be unethical of course. I don't see how you can expect Product F to provide a warranty if you did not pay anything for it - the author could be bankrupted by lawsuits from users who downloaded a copy or got one from you. There is a third option of course, Product F for $50 _with_ a warranty provided by the author.

I think the point is that the GPL doesn't _automatically_ grant a warranty. But it does provide a base on which you can provide warranties to specific individuals, if they pay for it. That seems sensible to me.

The free software axioms hold, as we have seen, that although charging for software is wrong it is all right to charge for services associated with the software, such as maintenance and training. The risk here is that such an attitude may lead to products with known deficiencies, giving the provider a ready-made source of juicy service contracts.

I don't think that any company could get away with this - how would the product establish itself in the market if it were broken? Don't forget that this problem exists with proprietary software too, if it has a support contract. Do you think that Oracle insert bugs so that their customers will subscribe to the most expensive support contracts for guaranteed fixes? It's all rather far-fetched. If you have the source, you'd probably be able to spot if something fishy were going on.

The article continues by accusing free software advocates of character asassination towards proprietary software developers. Again it makes the mistake of equating RMS with 'the free software movement'. There is no collective view on such things, any more than on gun ownership.

Finally, I think that most free software projects do indeed acknowledge where they have used ideas from other programs, free or proprietary. The GIMP's credits section describes it as a 'Photoshop-like' program, and that's about as clear as you could be. Similarly it is obvious where GNUstep, bison, less and so on got their inspiration.

I also think the Eiffel design contains some serious technical blunders. Within the Eiffel family, I'd say people are better off using GNU Sather.

The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software.

This is just plain wrong. RMS supported himself financially by selling tapes of Emacs for a while. The man must know he's confusing (deliberately?) "speech" and "beer" here.

The unquestioned assumption running through this McCarthyite diatribe is that investors of money are entitled to rights that investors of work are not.

At the risk of sounding (gasp! swoon!) socialistic, the authors of commercial software in most cases don't sell their work, they sell their labour. They get paid a wage, and benefit not one whit from the monopolistic control over the use of the product of their labour that is granted to their employer.

Okay, maybe you can formulate an argument to support this. Maybe the work just wouldn't get done if there aren't benevolent capitalists donating money to worthy causes like Windows 2K. I think not. On the most obvious assumptions about how the world really works, commercial software fails any sane test of efficiency you can dream up:

• Decisions on which commercial software projects are to be funded are based on expectations of future return on investment, not on the needs of users.
• The cost of distributing free software is virtually nil (even physical copies can be shared around, reducing the cost of distribution). The cost of distributing shrink-wrapped license agreements, plus CD, plus inadequate "Quick-Start" documentation, plus cataloges of other products you might like to purchase, is high and almost totally waste. Even the administrative costs alone of running a for-profit organisation are huge, and add nothing to the value of the product.
• Commercial software marketing is market-distorting. Decisions on which product to use may ultimately rest on which publishing house has the most money to spend on promotion. An adequate product with a huge marketing budget will outsell a good product with no marketing budget. If you've got deep pockets, you're in a good position to control de-facto standards, and enhance your return on investment still further, to the detriment of the community.
• Commercial software is taxpayer funded. The profit margin on commercial software is a tax. It just goes to Redmond or wherever instead of Capitol Hill. Complaining that RMS used public money to develop Emacs, therefore Emacs is rightfully the property of MIT (although not, interestingly enough, the property of all taxpayers) is a load of piffle. Any software is publicly funded in one way or another.
• And on, and on...

As a system for generating public good, commercial software is hopelessly inefficient. However, as a system designed to increase and concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, it works fairly well.

The challenge for software developers with an intrest in seeing that their work is self-directed, in harmony with their talents, their interests, and their concern for the broader community, is to develop and disseminate an alternative view of society which recognises the true costs of totalitarian control of software and the benefits of freedom.

Matthew.

• Free Software: http://www.gnu.org
• Free Work: http://www.iww.org

1. Regarding the Cost of Reproducibility and Open Source
"A copy of a program has nearly zero marginal cost (and you can pay this cost by doing the work yourself), so in a free market, it would have nearly zero price." (Stallman, Richard "Why Software Should Be Free" http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shoul dbefree.html)

This is a particularly common argument amongst followers of Stallman's "all software must be free" dictum. It also displays an appalling lack of economic understanding (or an equally appalling willingness to disregard economics in favor of rabble-rousing). The refutation goes something like this: the marginal cost of a product is not the only input into a product's price. Any work -- software, audio track, movie, novel, etc. -- has a creation cost equal to the investment in capital goods, salaries, raw materials purchasing, foregone opportunity cost, and so on. This creation cost must be exceeded in order for the creator to turn a profit. In a free market with perfect information, there is no microeconomic incentive to create a product that will not recoup that profit. Stallman's later assertion that it's morally acceptable to add development costs on top of marginal costs bends the economics backwards and misses the point: the marginal cost of a product is secondary, not primary, to the sales price; the creation costs are spread out amongst the number of products expected to be sold.

2. A Consideration of the Notion of Software Agreements as Psychological Assault
"Signing a typical software license agreement means betraying your neighbor: ``I promise to deprive my neighbor of this program so that I can have a copy for myself.'' People who make such choices feel internal psychological pressure to justify them, by downgrading the importance of helping one's neighbors--thus public spirit suffers. This is psychosocial harm associated with the material harm of discouraging use of the program." (Vide Stallman)

This is a remarkable conjoining of two unrelated arguments: "Software agreements are bad" because "We should help each other."

Again, Stallman disregards the cost of producing software in favor of the cost of copying it. What he does not ask is the question: "Should a software developer be obliged to help a software user's neighbor?" In a world ruled by Stallman's precepts, software would have to be completely paid for by the first copy (in which case one can assume that, in most cases, the software would never be purchased at all).

3. On the Psychic Rewards of Software Development
"Programmers also suffer psychosocial harm knowing that many users will not be allowed to use their work. This leads to an attitude of cynicism or denial. A programmer may describe enthusiastically the work that he finds technically exciting; then when asked, ``Will I be permitted to use it?'', his face falls, and he admits the answer is no. To avoid feeling discouraged, he either ignores this fact most of the time or adopts a cynical stance designed to minimize the importance of it." (Vide Stallman)

Here Stallman ascribes his own personal views to other developers. When presented with the fact that many developers are not, in fact, discouraged by the fact that other people will pay for the software they develop, Stallman quickly claims that, yes, those developers say that, but they're either "ignor[ing]" the issue, or they're simply adopting a "pose."

This is an argument that requires no refutation, because it barely registers as an argument at all: Stallman cannot know what goes on in the minds of others, therefore the foundation of his argument is nonexistent.

Addendum: On Guns and Code
Bertrand Meyer's ad hominem attack on Eric Raymond is unconscionable, and an appeal to base emotions in lieu of his otherwise quite sustainable arguments. Having said that, I find that I am of two minds regarding ESR's beliefs (which, by placing in public view, he has opened to public debate): on one hand, his Wagnerian paen to firearms is almost a parody of the most virulent NRA propaganda; on the other, it's hard for me to forget that Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested for essentially being poor minorities (Italians then being a despised underclass) who habitually carried firearms. As Italians and political anarchists, they had a fear -- quite understandable in light of later events -- of police power in America.

However, I do wish to turn that favorite Heinlein quote of the NRA around: an armed society is not a polite society, but only a polite society deserves to be an armed society.

Illustration of this is precisely in his response to ESR's gun advocacy. As seen from this (Eastern) shore of the Atlantic, of course, he's perfectly right that ESR's views on guns are unethical to the verge of sociopathy - but this is precisely because he's wrong to claim that there are moral absolutes, ethical prinicples which are culturally independent. There aren't. Ethical views are at least to some extent culturally determined, and ESRs must be judged within the context of the culture of which he forms a part.

Those people in the southern United States and in South Africa who in the early part of this century passed laws against 'miscegenation' did so for reasons which they viewed as moral - just as significantly moral as Meyer's (or Stallman's) view their arguments on free software.

Whether or not one views ESRs advocacy of gun-ownership as repellent (and I, being a normal European, naturally do), they are logically independent of his views on free software. Of course one could argue that because ESR's ethical judgement on guns is unsound, therefore his ethical judgement on free software must be viewed as suspect. But in this argument 'unsound' simply means 'different from mine', and, more probably, 'different from my unexamined social prejudices'.

However, the ad hominem argument against ESR falls for a more significant reason. Contrary to Meyer's assertion, ESR makes no claims regarding the ethicality or otherwise of free software, merely about its relative efficacy. Even if the argument that ESR was a poor judge of ethics succeeded, it has nothing to say about ESR as a judge of efficacy.

Which leaves, centrally, Meyer's attack on Stahlman. I found this vituperative, spiteful, and full of half truths and distortions which seemed to me deliberate. The third hand, partial and unverifiable account of the dinner party demonstrates spite.

For an example of half-truths, consider the passage in which Meyer states:

It also criticizes many providers of free software such as Apple... the Berkeley Unix Software distribution ... and Netscape for not observing the exact GNU definition of "free", or using license terms different from those of GNU.

This passage is, I believe, deliberately misleading. In the document to which Meyer refers, Stallman's only significant objection to the BSD licence is that if a software product makes use of many BSD-licensed modules from many different providers, the concatenation of the advertisement lines may becomes unwieldy; a simple, pragmatic objection, not, as Meyer implies, an ethical one.

What Meyer demonstrates is that his ethical judgement is different from Stallman's, and, separately, from ESR's. That's fine. He is (like everyone else) entitled to his ethical judgement, and he is entitled to try to persuade us to agree with him. Having read his argument, however, the conclusion I reach is that his (Meyer's) arguments are intellectually wanting, his conclusions untenable, and his own intellectual stature (on this evidence) slight.

I suspect (and hope) that he is by now ashamed of this piece. If he isn't, then I'm sorry fo him.

The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software.

His claim is wrong.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

Although the free in the question is really concerned with software where the binary (without source code) is distributed free of charge to the user. The definitions being confused here are :

Free Software defined by GNU
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
here

``Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer.''

``Free software'' refers to the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

Open Source (according to the Open Source definition - http://www.opensource.org/osd.html - here)
doesn't just mean access to the source code.

there are anumber of qualifying factors which i wont repeat here
.oO0Oo.

Energy moves in waves. Our biosphere is sustained by the cycling energy of daily rotations and seasonal shifts. Each member of the food chain reciprocates what it gets with what it gives. But what is given back in free beer software?

The credo of those opposing Free or Open Source software movements is usually TANSTAAFL. As mentioned in this article, software from a business can be free to some (such as non-profits) while its net pricetag is subsidized by others. Yet, the GNU project and the standards of Internet weren't built by businesses as much as they were built by individuals, each taking the personal cost of contributing. (For instance, HTML was largely inspired by Ted Nelson's early quest for Xanadu.) Some are paid back in microcelebrity or even better jobs and grants. Others have given unconditionally without reward. These pioneers made the effort, not so much for money, as for the personal empowerment of software.

Love really does make the world go around: The thing that best guarantees success is for human attention and concern to be lavished skillfully on a goal. Sometimes it seems that corporations will totally rule the world... until the court of public opinion turns the tide against them. These are like yin and yang cycling over one another: Propriety-mindedness and control versus personal liberty.

We're seeing a turn of this cycle happen when businesses turn to businesses (B2B) in a trend away from catering to consumers (B2C). Consumer backlash sometimes sparks this trend. Still, consumers have little use for computers without personal empowerment, so they will empower their own. (C2C?)

Free Beer Software will flourish just out of the human attention it gets. One day, the wireless web will be so pervasive that we can call out URLs like incantations, summoning any manner of program to be carried out. Such a post-scarcity world will be glorious!

...I don't see RedHat releasing a "Unofficial RedHat CD" for $5 to help Linux reach more people.

--

Darwin, the kernel of Mac OS X, is open-source software, but RMS doesn't think it's free enough.

and second, they shouldn't be doing it for business reasons, since there already is UNIX on os/390

Meaning a native port of some flavor of UNIX, or S/390 Open Edition? If the latter, then you may already have given the reason:

It is very, very strange as UNIX goes.

meaning it may be easier to put Linux on an S/390 (or in a virtual machine or logical partition on an S/390) than to put some New Economy Dot Com applications on Open Edition.

Unfortunately, none of the architecture dependant GNU utilities will compile on this beast, since the hardware isn't even similar to anything unix boxes are used to running on.

General-register-based architecture, 16 general-purpose registers, 4 (or is it 8 or more, now?) floating-point registers, memory-to-register and register-to-register arithmetic instructions - not all that different from VAXes, 68Ks, x86's; it's just another general-register-based CISC box. (Yeah, it has specialized instructions, but so do the other CISCs for which GCC generates code; you don't necessarily have to use them.)

The relatively short offsets in instructions may be the biggest problem.

If suse is going to port linux

Linux has already been ported; presumably SuSE and TurboLinux will be integrating the kernel, glibc, GCC, binutils, GDB, etc. changes into their distributions.

they may encounter the hardest part in porting things like gas and gcc, since AFAIK they don't know how to spit out binary for this CPU as of now.

There's been S/370 support in GCC for a while,a s I remember; the S/3x0 config directory of the EGCS source includes notes and checkins that suggest support (e.g, the 1.3 version of the README file says that it currently "supports three different styles of assembly", including MVS using the HLASM assembler, S/390 Open Edition, and "ELF/Linux for use with the binutils/gas GNU assembler".

There's also, in the GAS CVS tree, tc-i370.c and tc-i370.h files (which are for S/360 and S/390 as well as S/370, according to the comment).

and second, they shouldn't be doing it for business reasons, since there already is UNIX on os/390

Meaning a native port of some flavor of UNIX, or S/390 Open Edition? If the latter, then you may already have given the reason:

It is very, very strange as UNIX goes.

meaning it may be easier to put Linux on an S/390 (or in a virtual machine or logical partition on an S/390) than to put some New Economy Dot Com applications on Open Edition.

Unfortunately, none of the architecture dependant GNU utilities will compile on this beast, since the hardware isn't even similar to anything unix boxes are used to running on.

General-register-based architecture, 16 general-purpose registers, 4 (or is it 8 or more, now?) floating-point registers, memory-to-register and register-to-register arithmetic instructions - not all that different from VAXes, 68Ks, x86's; it's just another general-register-based CISC box. (Yeah, it has specialized instructions, but so do the other CISCs for which GCC generates code; you don't necessarily have to use them.)

The relatively short offsets in instructions may be the biggest problem.

If suse is going to port linux

Linux has already been ported; presumably SuSE and TurboLinux will be integrating the kernel, glibc, GCC, binutils, GDB, etc. changes into their distributions.

they may encounter the hardest part in porting things like gas and gcc, since AFAIK they don't know how to spit out binary for this CPU as of now.

There's been S/370 support in GCC for a while,a s I remember; the S/3x0 config directory of the EGCS source includes notes and checkins that suggest support (e.g, the 1.3 version of the README file says that it currently "supports three different styles of assembly", including MVS using the HLASM assembler, S/390 Open Edition, and "ELF/Linux for use with the binutils/gas GNU assembler".

There's also, in the GAS CVS tree, tc-i370.c and tc-i370.h files (which are for S/360 and S/390 as well as S/370, according to the comment).