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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:
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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.
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.