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Bertrand Meyer's "The Ethics of Free Software"
Jarle Stabell writes: "An interesting article titled "The Ethics of Free Software" by OO guru Bertrand Meyer is available online at Software Development (Meyer has IMHO written one of the best OO books. " Warning: Meyer questions some assumptions of open source, so if that's going to offend you, don't read it. *grin*
Hey Bowie,
:)
Nice to see you decided to stick around Slashdot. You wrote a few days ago:
After submitting this post, I'll be nuking my Slashdot bookmark and switch over getting my daily fodder from GeekNews.net.
(What can I say, after your tizzy with VA Linux you're famous now. Congratulations.) Anyways.
Personally, I agree with most of what Meyer points out in his article. It's never been fully explained (at least to my satisfaction) why attempting to make money off your own work (and exclusively your own work) is taboo. I've heard people scream bloody murder at me for years for simply trying to sell various little odds and ends i've made, rather than just declare it public domain and give it out for free.
The thing is Meyer misrepresents ESR and RMS's views. They never said trying to make money is wrong. In fact they say quite the opposite. (see www.gnu.org or www.tuxedo.org/~esr) He intentionally made his definition of free meaning free beer, then used that to attack our definition of free meaning free to improve are share with your neighbor.
Ford isn't "depriving" people of transportation by demanding that you pay money for one of their cars.
Once again, wrong "free." You fell for his redefinition of terms techniques. It is a common technique used often, oddly enough, by cults.
For the record I don't think it is fair for anyone to ask that you release your work as public domain.
Have a nice day.
A Father was explaining ethics to his son. "Ethics is about doing the right thing. Let's say someone comes into my store and I mistakenly over charge them by $20 for something they purchase. The question of Ethics is:
Do you tell your partner?"
[bada-boom-tssss]
___
Previously ([37], [118]) I thought his ethics was just confused, but as I read further through the article I realise that Bertrand has completely lost it.
Eh, yes, but what does that have to do with anything? There are always more important issues, but that does not make all issues unimportant.
And what does gun control have to do with free or open source software!? Beats me. But even if we try to follow his thread of thought we end up at:
A couple of points are in order, lest anybody should be persuaded by Mr. Meyer's ravings:
Enough! of this madness. Next subject, please!
Hi!
OK, I wrote a long rant but deleted it on second thought :-) I just wanted to say a few things:
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
There seem to have been several comments along the lines of "Meyer doesn't get it - it's free as in speech, not free as in beer".
Actually I think he does get it - he's just addressing another issue. He's looking at whether it is a valid thing for a software developer to make money out of the software he develops.
Whether we like it or not one of the most effective ways to make money out of software - is to make it closed source and sell it. Yes you can make money sell services - support etc. Yes you can make money distributing software. But you can also make money selling the software itself.
There is a fundamental irony in the use of the word freedom in all the GNU/FSF advocacy texts. I am a programmer. They want to deny me the freedom to choose the way in which I make money from my skills. I can be paid for writing software provided it is Open Source, I can be paid for supporting/fixing Open Source software. But I cannot be paid for writing closed source software.
Presumably the same people believe that no actor should receive payment unless his work will be free to view. Or that a writer can only receive money for his work if he writes for a free publication
This attitude is even more remarkable when you consider that certain pieces of software are extremely unsusceptible to the Open Source model. Don't forget that much bespoke business software has in effect, business process logic embedded into the design. Such business processes might well be part of the competitive advantage one company has over another. Opening up your source in a case like this could be highly damaging. In short there are situations where Open Source is the wrong choice for software.
Such a radical restriction of freedom - requiring that I only write OSS - requires very good justification. Unfortunately I do not believe that such a justification can be found. None of the benefits which come from Open Source Software are lost if it has to co-exist in a world which also allows Closed Source, Copyrighted software.
Perhaps its because Copyright has always been the dominant model that OSS has had to assert it's opposite characteristics strongly in order to make itself heard. But hopefully this won't obscure the fact that both models can and should continue to live cheerfully side-by-side
RatFinkYou know, I've always wondered why open source software is always assumed to be free-gratuit, and why software sold for money has to be shipped bereft of source code. I suppose the argument is, if the developer ships his software with source code then users will be able to compile unauthorized copies. But obviously it is just as easy, no, far easier, to simply copy the binaries than to compile new binaries from source.
Conversely, suppose I am a software developer and I want to release an application with the usual license restricting the buyer, if he wants to install my application on N computers, to pay me for N licenses. If, like the great majority of commercial PC software, my program is not "protected" by some elaborate copy-protection scheme, then basically the only thing that prevents a buyer from distributing "bootleg" copies of my program is his respect for the license agreement, or at least his fear of being caught violating it. The U.S. software industry is doing quite well, despite such a flimsy protection for its products. Why couldn't I rely on the same thing to protect my copyright and my profits if I released programs with source code?
As a commercial product, software complete with source might, for some users at least, be a valuable convenience - one which might attract customers and win extra market share - if they had the ability to add site-specific hacks to my code, or if they could recompile it to work around bugs and security holes, or merely so they could see what is going on inside the program. In that last consideration, I'm thinking about end-users who generate data files in specific formats that are generated by proprietary programs, such as MS Word .DOC files or AutoCAD .DWG files. My employers have millions of dollars invested in AutoCAD .DWG files. Suppose Autodesk goes out of business five years from now, how are we supposed to get our information out of these files? As customers, we would be a lot happier if at least the .DWG format was specified somewhere, but it is not. So a competing CAD software vendor would have a selling point if he could say, "Our data format is openly documented, so your data can't be orphaned" - in fact, Bentley, which makes Microstation, does make such an argument in their sales pitch. And they'd have a yet better sales pitch if they could say, "Our software is open-source, so neither your data files nor your application itself can ever be completely orphaned. Even if the OS vendor somehow breaks something so our compiled code doesn't work any more," (but what OS vendor would ever do a screwed up thing like that? it's unthinkable, really ;-)) "you could still port our source code to the new OS of your choice."
When you add something to a GPL program, the copyright holders retain their rights to your "derivative work." Similarly, if I were to sell a commercial, licensed application complete with source code, I shouldn't lose my copyright to my proprietary program just because an end-user has modified it and made his own "derivative work" from it. So why does everyone take it for granted that open source == zero cost?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Trust me, I know. :) Meyer's sixth recommendation:
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
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:
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Perhaps not, but people will say that without a corporate vendor to fall back on, you could lose thousands waiting for the patch, if it ever comes...
I've waited five years for MS to fix some bugs in Win95, they haven't. Likely never will. They're still in W-ME from what I've heard. That's not a great track record as far as product support goes. And I'm representing a company with over a hundred licenses who has complained many times, by email, fax, phone, and snail mail. I doubt any open project could ignore me more thoroughly.
But, if we had the source, I'm sure in five years I could have tracked some of the bugs down, or, if nothing else, spent some of our budget to hire a consultant to do so. It'd be money we wasted writing our software to avoid the bugs, and in dealing with incompatibilities.
I'd much rather spend a few bucks contributing to a worthy open source project than sitting on a phone, racking up the charges, waiting to talk to a tech who'll assure me that the next release will fix it, if I pay for the upgrade...
I agree entirely. He wants a world where nothing is free - well I hate to dissapoint him, but often, OSS is not free - and the price you pay is to fit the OSS product to fit your needs (a cost in programmer time) and preferably to fold those changes back into the pool. you do *not* stand about and snivel that the other developers haven't fixed the problem yet - they may have things they need to work more than whatever bugged you.
The problem seems to be he is working from a set of preconcieved results as definite as the ones he claims for Eric and RS - who he immediately demolishes for their personal behavior (by anecdote for RS, though probably true, and because Eric is a self-confessed gun nut, and DARES to be pro-gun on his own, personal website, suddenly everything he has said about OSS is worthless....)
He claims there exists an Absolute base moral code, when in fact all such things are established by the society they exist in (his main example is that killing a innocent man is morally wrong - and indeed, most acceptable societies agree with him; however, it all depends on who gets to define "innocent". if I am "guilty" of holding certain beliefs, refusing to do certain things *I* find morally unacceptable, having certain deformities or genetic abnormalities, I may well be sentenced to death in some societies, who would believe they were doing what was morally right). Second, he states the ONLY reasons free software is free: that it was developed at public expense, that it was given away by a company, or that it was developed by someone with no other monetary concerns. (I am forced to assume here he got so distracted by Eric's gun essay that he forgot to read the OSS stuff on that page). Apache is the prime example here - it was developed by a group of people who, individually, needed to write a webserver, and decided one really good one between them would be easier than one mediocre one each.
ok, to get back to the plot. He then comes up with a mythical Closed Source product, so good that its manufacturer is willing to indemnify the users for loss due to its use, rather than the standard "loss limited to purchase price of goods" deal. Can I have one of those? All I can seem to find on MY shelves are products of the latter kind - whose bugs take months to fix, and often the newer, less bug-ridden package requires you repurchase, rather than get a free update. Most of the rest of this piece seems to be of the same quality - generate a straw-man that can be easily attacked, then attack it. I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website, and can't imagine having it in a nationally-distributed magazine.......
--
-=DaveHowe=-
I'm not sure Bertrand Meyer is someone we should be listening to on matters of ethics. In his book Object Success Meyer expressed what I find to be an extremely unethical position when he expressed the opinion that C (and presumably C++) programmers, having learned too many bad habits, shouldn't be considered for "real" OO development projects. Hiring managers should look on them with suspicion, he suggested. In spite of his weasel words about "human betterment", I find this to be little more than an expression of prejudice about C/C++ programmers, and I find it unethical in the extreme.
Robert Martin, of Object Mentor, wrote a nice rebuttal to Bertrand Meyer, which he posted to comp.object and comp.lang.c++, among other Usenet groups.
--Jim
So what you are saying is that nobody should bother to write a criticism of something they don't like? The author of this piece has some excellent points to make on both sides of the argument and although he does seem to come down quite hard on RMS and the FSF notion of free software he has reasons which he states quite clearly.
I personally found this a very interesting article with a lot of thought-provoking points. I don't really have much of a stake in free software myself at the moment, and not being biased in one way or the other I found this a worthwhile read about an issue which a lot of /.ers seem to think is already decided.
And you'll be in luck soon - the UCITA will make it illegal to publish anything critical about software, so you won't be forced to listen to all of that negativity any more. Great, huh?
Well, as long as open-source should classify the support the programmers received how about proprietary software? Windows just used taxpayer-supported software when they rip^H^H^Hextended Kerberos. How many commercial products involve the taxpayer funded Internet in their production? Should businesses disclose their use of public highways?
Why is it ok for corporations to use public resources, but when individuals do it, it is disingenuous? By definition, public resources are available as part of the context of life and business. You don't have to apologize for using them.
I guess this is the position taken by proponents of Islamic law: the relligious law is the whole of the law.
I'd be interested to know if the readers of slashdot agree with this statement of Bertrand Meyer in the article.
Hi!
I think the following paragraph sums it up; Meyer writes:
Obviously, he doesn't understand that free software isn't a gift from God, it's a collaborative process. Rather than cancelling his projects, he should have fixed whatever he perceived to be wrong with those tools and submitted the fixes to the free software community. Whatever he thought was wrong couldn't have taken his people more than than a few months.
He says he is looking for someone to "blame". He gets that with commercial software. Other people, however, want to get a product out and are looking for an opportunity to fix things, and that's what open source software gives them.
An interesting essay, but he repeatedly (shall I say, deliberately) confuses ESR's views with RMS's views, and vice versa, to the effect of discrediting them both.
... to become wealthy
"I expect to be quite wealthy once the dust from the Linux IPOs has settled." (http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/travelrules.htm)
There is nothing wrong with this --- except when commercial developers trying to "make a living" are accused of moral perversion because what they are really supposed to want is
From what I've read, ESR views open source development merely as a superior engineering method. I don't recall him having accused makers of proprietary software of "moral perversion" -- this is completely Stallman's point of view.
It is high time for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds to state publicly that they do not endorse the views of the gun lunatics, and that their cherished notion of freedom has nothing to do with the freedom to kill children and other innocents.
It's quite clear that there's a lot of disagreement between RMS and ESR, and it's quite clear that ESR's views on guns is controversial even within the community. I know this, you know this, and he knows this. Associating ESR's views on guns with RMS and Linus Torvalds is just a lame pot shot.
While I think the article had some good points (i.e. not all commercial software is bad), it was definitely skewed against the free software movement, beyond just being critical. One assumption that was made in particular sat wrong with me (and is conveniently quoted here):
The problem is that not only does most software include a heavy caveat emptor clause, all software includes it. The author goes on to ask how much would be too much for a product that was sufficiently warranted, and my answer would be quite a bit. Unfortunately, the question is moot. Has the author read some of the EULAs that are required for most software? Caveat emptor only begins to describe the restrictions placed on the purchase. And if you disagree with the EULA, most software retailers won't take the software back because it's been opened, and at most will allow you to exchange it for the exact same product.
When you start to add these factors into the argument, Product F starts looking a whole lot more appealing.
- "Stealth" Dave
Evil is as eval("does");
Ah, yes..another page is turned in the saga of Linux. People are beginning to catch on.
Personally, I agree with most of what Meyer points out in his article. It's never been fully explained (at least to my satisfaction) why attempting to make money off your own work (and exclusively your own work) is taboo. I've heard people scream bloody murder at me for years for simply trying to sell various little odds and ends i've made, rather than just declare it public domain and give it out for free.
Upon looking at Stallman's own views, I still fail to see how licensing your work "deprives" people. Ford isn't "depriving" people of transportation by demanding that you pay money for one of their cars. If you cant afford it, that's your problem, not Ford's. How is this evil? The whole thing smells a little weird. Quoting from the article:
"..And so on (there are countless other examples). These are extremely strong indictments, based on moral terms. They are morally unjustifiable. 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.
This absence of rational justification for the extremist view that all commercial software is evil is all the more striking given that some other parts of the GNU/FSF literature can be serious and reasoned. Its criticism of software patents, for example, is often cogent, and takes the trouble of presenting the opposite view to refute it. As soon as the discussion is about free software--and that's where it is much of the time--argument yields to irrational excommunication."
In a nutshell, Stallman's point of view is only truly rational if you accept his assertion that Free Software is good, and software licensing is bad.. That sort of thing is purely subjective, and more a question of ideology than anything factual. People need to pay their rent. I need to pay mine. Selling what I've made by my own hand doesn't make me a criminal.
My $0.02,
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
It gets worse. He charges ESR and RMS with "lunatic raving" within a page-down of this sentence:
"Perhaps the greatest tragedy of that country is that a minority of gun nuts [...] supported by an all-powerful lobby, the National Rifle Association, has managed to terrorize Congress into maintaining loose gun laws with no equivalent in the rest of the civilized world."
If the words "sky-high rhetoric" weren't themselves sky-high rhetoric, that's what I'd call this. Might as well do a point-by-point on this one, since I'm bored.
1) "greatest tragedy" -- The "perhaps" does nothing to modify a statement so outlandish. Supply your own list of greater tragedies. Mine would probably start with, oh, say, 70% functional illiteracy, or, uh, maybe slavery, or, er, the recent resurgence of parachute pants.
2) "all-powerful" -- The NRA does not get what it wants. It wants laws based on an original-intent reading of the Second Amendment. We have no such laws in the US, no matter which interpretation of the founders' original intent you're talking about ("militia" vs. "people").
Forget it. Can't go on.
The sad thing is, the point the guy pretends he's making is valid: Leading open source/free software advocates aren't sufficiently reflective, and they make inconsistent and/or nonsensical statments sometimes. True. Pot-kettle-black.
Your mouth is like Columbus Day.
Bertie also confuses commercial software with proprietary software. Redhat Linux is commercial software. They charge money for it. Nobody's upset with Redhat because they charge money for their distribution. Some people are upset because Redhat has too much market share. Some are upset because they think Redhat is technically flawed. In spite of this, Bertrand says that free software people hate commercial software. That's nonsense on stilts!
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Eiffel failed to catch on widely, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. Rather than insulting more and more people, it would be good for Meyer to go back and see where he didn't meet the needs of his potential user community. Unlike what he claims, people in industry are very concerned with quality and methodology. It's just that his tools and methodology failed to meet their needs.
As for open source software, that does have something to do with the success of new tools and languages: most people who make these decisions are simply not going to build a product based on a language that comes from a small vendor. They would be betting many man-years of effort on the success of that one small vendor and be at the complete mercy of that company's future pricing policies and responsiveness.
The two realistic options anybody wanting to popularize a new language has are to open source a usable implementation or to work early towards creating a standard and getting multiple vendors to provide implementations. Eiffel did neither, and so it wasn't a very attractive choice (the fact that many people perceived it to contain some real technical blunders didn't help either). That is perhaps the first lesson would-be language vendors should understand.
For example the GNU Eiffel compiler was developed at the University of Nancy by employees of that university who (in contrast with commercial Eiffel vendors, who need paying customers to survive) get every month a salary from the State, whether the users are happy or not with the product. This is a typical case of taxpayer-funded software.
The "commercial Eiffel vendors" include Meyers' company. He's got to compete with free software.
Ironically, a free Eiffel distribution is probably the best thing that ever happened to those vendors; it increases the population of Eiffel programmers, and thus, of the potential employees of projects that want to spend money on commercial Eiffel implementations.
(I hit return instead of tab, and posted an empty article. Please moderate that one down. Sorry and TIA. --PSRC
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