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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*
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.
You 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
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.
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?
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.
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