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The really fascinating part of the story is the inner workings of a subtle campaign to defang the Free Software movement of its social component: meme engineering, "education", and publisher-Wikipedia feedback loops: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/....

A long read, but worth every minute.

> "gratis" rather than "libre"

Yeah, that's the usual excuse. Paradoxically, I do hear this excuse over here in Germany too, dutifully translated into German *although the german "frei" doesn't have the English second meaning of "free of cost"*

There must be other forces at work here. And yes, "free" in the sense of e.g. the FSF is downright scary for the software industry and the Web 2.0 industry, because it means *freedom for the users*

If you want a good (albeit long) read on that: The Meme Hustler. How a group of people around O'Reilly publicized this open source thing (and how O'Reilly does meme engineering in general).

Fascinating

I think it has been said there were a few fake ones in between

Probably it has been said by the likes of you. Everybody else knows that all the emails published by Wikileaks are authentic.

but the breaki.n happened and was done by russians was never disputed.

It was disputed since the beginning that a breaking happened and it was disputed since the beginning that Russians had something to do with it. Even the "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear" names that pop around are just marketing names by Crowdstrike (the cybersecurity firm that got rich with the DNC hack investigation): "Unfortunately, there were big problems with CrowdStrike’s account. For one thing, the names of the two Russian espionage groups that CrowdStrike supposedly caught, Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, were a fiction. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear are what cyber monitors call “Advanced Persistent Threats,” or APTs. [...] Depending on the cybersecurity firm doing the analysis, these two APTs have been called by all sorts of names: Pawn Storm, Sofacy, Sednit, CozyCar, The Dukes, CozyDuke, Office Monkeys."

From the same article, "From Russia, with Panic" by Yasha Levine: “You don’t know there is anybody there. It’s not like it’s a club and everyone has a membership card that says Fancy Bear on it. It’s just a made-up name for a group of attacks and techniques and technical indicators associated with these attacks,” author and cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr told me. “There is rarely if ever any confirmation that these groups even exist or that the claim was proven as correct.”

Tim O'Reilly was heavily influential in switching momentum from what was known as "free software" to "open source" (see The Meme Hustler.)

The "community" aspect of the first was centered around empowering users, making sure that the four freedoms described by the FSF were defended to the end. The shift to "open source" meant that project efficiency was valued over user freedom.

This brought us to the current status, where young developers share their code on github without ever worrying to stamp a license on it, and permissive licenses are preferred to protective ones. We'll never know whether free software would have become the default, or dissappeared almost entirely, had this shift never occurred.

Perhaps Stallman and company could be forgiven for initially choosing a misleading term, but why haven't they made any effort to correct their terminology over the years?

Ehhhhh no, it was kind of the other way around. Here's a good article about the rebranding of "Open Source" away from "Free Software."

In the Beginning, everybody understood the "free as in beer and free as in speech" thing. To be honest, it's a wonderfully geeky nomenclature. Free has two (primary) meanings, both of which apply to our software! Using that one word saves bandwidth! But geeks are very poor at branding, or expecting other people to understand their precise use of words.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Tim O'Reilly and pals redefined "free software" to mean what you think of today as "open source." They kept the "free as in beer" (design methodology) bit but jettisoned the "free as in speech" (social movement) bit because all that commie talk doesn't fly when they're trying to make a buck.

The FOSS community is not unaware of this, and has tried to counteract this with the word "libre," meaning "free as in liberty." But the damage is basically done. And besides, they were the Free Software Foundation first. Why should they have to change? They're not the ones who suck.

Note, in contrast, how vitally important precise and explicit terminology becomes to these folks when they want to receive what they believe to be adequate credit for "the GNU/Linux System". In that case, sloppy terminology like "Linux" simply cannot be tolerated.

No, like I said, the initial naming was good. It was Free. Free as in beer, free as in speech. That one word worked perfectly. Again, this is before the words were muddied to appeal to business interests.

They only call it "GNU/Linux" when you're talking about...GNU/Linux. Again, precise definition. You call your system "Linux" but all those commands you're typing, cp, mv, grep, are GNU. Linux is just the kernel. Android, however, is...the Android variant of Linux, and GNU makes no claim on it and doesn't expect you to call it GNU/Android because there's no GNU in it.

To me, their reaction to LLVM is the most telling sign I've seen yet of what's really important to them. It's all about ego.

No, absolutely not. What's really important to them is the principle of copyleft. That no, they will not compromise when it comes to the principles that free (libre) software must stay free (libre). Today candy, tomorrow shackles. In this world where freaking everybody compromises their principles, it's nice to see somebody who says "nope. Nope nope nope. This is what we believe, and we're sticking to it."

Did you read the rest of what I said about "embrace, extend, and extinguish?" Stallman takes the long view. I honestly have no idea what you're going for with the Apple bit. Apple closes their shit off, won't let you install what you want on your device, spies on you, hands that info to the government...they can take their "benefits" and cram them right up the ass of Steve Job's dessicated corpse.

Hard to imagine so little real discussion on this on Slashdot if this article had been posted ten years ago. So much has changed in some ways. For an alternative view of what happened that blames Tim O'Reilly (perhaps too strongly?), see this long article by Evgeny Morozov, a part of which is below:
"The Meme Hustler: Tim O'Reilly's crazy talk"
http://www.thebaffler.com/arti...
"While the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are "disrupting" whatever industry is too crippled to fend off their advances, something odd is happening to our language. Old, trusted words no longer mean what they used to mean; often, they don't mean anything at all. Our language, much like everything these days, has been hacked. Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency. Complexity, as it turns out, is not particularly viral. ...
However, it's not his politics that makes O'Reilly the most dangerous man in Silicon Valley; a burgeoning enclave of Randian thought, it brims with far nuttier cases. O'Reilly's mastery of public relations, on the other hand, is unrivaled and would put many of Washington's top spin doctors to shame. No one has done more to turn important debates about technology--debates that used to be about rights, ethics, and politics--into kumbaya celebrations of the entrepreneurial spirit while making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject. As O'Reilly discovered a long time ago, memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.The Randian undertones in O'Reilly's thinking are hard to miss, even as he flaunts his liberal credentials. "There's a way in which the O'Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world," he wrote in 2012. But it's not just the hacker as hero that O'Reilly is so keen to celebrate. His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword. Hiding beneath this glossy veneer of disruption-talk is the same old gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism that we associate with Randian characters. For Silicon Valley and its idols, innovation is the new selfishness. ...
It was the growing popularity of "open source software" that turned O'Reilly into a national (and, at least in geek circles, international) figure. "Open source software" was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O'Reilly. This is where he tested all his trademark discursive interventions: hosting a summit to define the concept, penning provocative essays to refine it, producing a host of books and events to popularize it, and cultivating a network of thinkers to proselytize it. ...
Underpinning Stallman's project was a profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity. Perhaps inadvertently, Stallman also made a prescient argument for treating code, and technological infrastructure more broadly, as something that ought to be subject to public scrutiny. He sought to open up the very technological black boxes that corporations conspired to keep shut. Had his efforts succeeded, we might already be living in a world where the intricacies of software used for high-frequency trading or biometric identification presented no major mysteries.
Stallman is highly idiosyncratic, to put it

Steve Albini wrote about this about twenty years ago. Some things just never change.

"Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end, holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed.

"Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says, “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim it again, please. Backstroke.”"

Courney Love read that article and wrote a rambling summary of it in 2000, and I would like to thank everybody here who for not referring to her version first.

Harper’s (not to be confused with Harper’s Bazaar, which is an especially boring fashion magazine,) The Believer, and The Baffler all have good literary and art coverage as well as long-form lefty political journalism. The New Yorker is good too, and not as New York City centric as you might think, aside from the theater/music/event listings, but it’s weekly, so kinda expensive and easy to fall behind on. There’s some good stuff in Rolling Stone and Playboy from time to time but I wouldn’t keep either one on the coffee table where people could see them.

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

Want to do actual good with code? Write free software then. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler

Here is a nice article that includes a historical writeup by Evgeny Morozov on how the concepts of Open Source and Free Software ended up meaning something different (and fas less interesting and progressive) than initially. Warning: It is a long read.

This might also explain why so many of them watch Fox News and buy stupid things on TV. In fact, the association between right wing causes and commercial scams is well known.

Jon Stewart? Left wing? Hardly. He's a court jester who's careful to suck up to the powerful.

here is why they done make anything on cd sales.
http://www.thebaffler.com/albiniexcerpt.html
by steve albini, best known for recording nirvana's in utero

I've been curious why it costs more to buy an entire album via download, than it does to buy the cd

Since when can you buy a CD with more than 10 songs for less than $9.99? Because that's the most it will cost you on iTunes. If the album has fewer songs, it's $.99 * # songs.

There are exceptions, where they've priced 15 minute tracks higher than $.99, and there are multi-CD albums, but those are sensible exceptions, not the rule.

If you ask me though, .99 is still highway robbery. My download has no overhead other than iTunes bandwidth fee, which is pennies per sale.

If labels wernt so busy throwing money at studios and into advertising so they can get the band into debt, then they would only have to sell a few thousand tracks to break even. Most bands with any talent at all can sell that much in less than a year, and nationaly known band will make that back in the first day.

Of this, major label artists will end up with only 8 to 14 cents per song, depending on their contract. Many of them will never Artists Get Ripped Off. even see this paltry share because they have to pay for producers and recording costs, both of which can be enormous. Until the musician "recoups" these costs, when you buy an iTunes song, the label gives them nothing.

Apple has been better than most other online stores to include independent labels. Merge, Sub-pop, Matador, Kill Rock Stars, and Thrill Jockey (to name a few) all have recordings on iTunes. If indepents' contacts for digital music are comparable to their other contracts, then the artists should do considerably better.

However, I think your answer points out a big problem with the major labels - they have a hard time complaining about being ripped off from file trading, when they're actively ripping off artists. The problem with file trading is that it still hurts the musician - they certainly have less of a chance of paying off their advances if people are trading their music. Personally, I would like it if online music sales allowed musicians to bypass the recording industry. I agree that iTunes isn't quite there, but frankly, it's closer than most of the competition.

FWIW, there's always this article on the pitfalls of signing to a major label. Yes, I know, it's 11 years old. Yes, it's been posted to hell. But it's a good reminder.

The classic informed rant against record label greed was written in 1993 by Steve Albini.

Required reading for anyone angry at the RIAA.

Why have record labels?

It used to be that when I saw a record on Touch & Go (or Lookout!, or Dischord), I'd buy it, because all the other bands on Touch & Go were great. This worked because T & G signed bands that they liked, some of whom were great, some less so. Everyone got a fair shake, usually a 50/50 split on profits, IIRC.

Labels will hopefully become smaller and more focused, like the independents from the Golden Age. Fewer bands will end up millionaires, but it's likely that the greater majority will do much better for themselves. Little known fact: Green Day made more money from their Lookout! back catalog than the zillion copies of their major label releases. Illustrative:

Steve Albini's "The Problem With Music"

'jfb

Don't forget to get "The Baffler" which is produced quarterly. Their latest issue is called "The God that Sucked". It's full of great articles, written by "Gen Xers", who don't quite agree with the way things work. It's a great read, if you can get it, I recommend it. You can also go to The Baffler.

Oh yeah, Thomas Frank is the editor.

In the same vein as Courtney's post, I'd like to point out Steve Albini had some nice things to say about this topic in 1995. It's a classic article from the Baffler.

More than that, there are labels that manage to put out multiple albums every year, pay the artists higher royalties, and still make a buck. Touch & Go's royalty rate is around 50%; I believe that of DeSoto and Dischord sits at around 40%. The entire feast-famine business model of the major labels is essentially flawed; a band on an independent label--or making professional-quality music themselves, a la the Poster Children--and touring frequently (but without putting out a video or sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into studio time) can make a living where most bands playing the majors' game can't. It's that simple. Steve Albini broke down the numbers in an essay for The Baffler, and for all his personality issues, I'm inclined to trust his numbers.
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