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ESR Writes About O'Reilly and FSF Differences
dopplex writes: "Over here at Linux Today, Eric S. Raymond has written an amusing piece in which A.) He analyzes the way in which we use the word freedom, B.) Examines the point of view of both O'Reilly and the FSF on 'freedom' and C.) Coins the term 'flerbage,' which I hereby suggest be put into immediate use, just because it's a really cool word." It's cheesy but it is a good way for people to understand the difference between Open Source and Free Software. (Oh, and I figured I'd just mention that I'll never use that F word since I think its stupid)
When will we see the "analyization" of the common /.er vs. RMS?
Shouldn't that be "GNU/LINUX Today"...?
;)
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
Sounds like real trouble. You're going to need plenty of legal advice before this thing is over.
As your attorney, I advise you to rent a very fast car with no top. And you'll need the cocaine.
Tape recorder for special music. Acapulco shirts.
Get the hell out of LA for at least 48 hours.
If their answer is "no", then the dispute with Tim is over. Because that will mean they do recognize a right for developers to choose licenses as they will without being killed, jailed, or threatened for choosing the "wrong" one.
No I wouldn't, but I wouldn't pass a law that made abortion illegal either, even though I think its morally wrong. I just see the freedom to choose as outweighing the freedoms of those who lose out. That's also why I support the BSD license - I'm pro-choice.
I've always thought that the FSF should change their name to the "Foundation for Software Freedom" and stop using the "Free" moniker. They would *still* be the FSF, but we'd no longer have the confusion between "beer" and "speech".
Besides, although "free as in beer" is nice, and attracts the great unwashed hordes, "free as in speech" is going to determine whether we live or die. Patents, copyrights, the DCMA, EULAs, the UTICA, trade secrets, Congress, Disney, and an army of lawyers can't stop free... but their doing a great job of smashing our freedoms into the ground...
Time to write another check to the EFF.
...I disagree that open source developers should stop talking about freedom. We all accept that even though flerbage sounds nice, it will not go into the mainstream as a term. "Open source," as a term, is *far* more vague than "free software." Although the OSI defines Open Source in such a way that it's much like free software, the term itself is easy to use to describe entirely limited proprietary software where you happen to get to see the source code.
Although ESR makes valid points about the FSF perhaps going overboard in wanting to outlaw the use of proprietary software licenses, it is important to stress that freedom of use for the users is in fact what distinguishes non-proprietary software from proprietary software. For that reason, I agree with Bruce Perens that we need to keep talking about freedom-- even if we don't all agree 100% about exactly what it means.
-Rob
I think the author did that nicely himself; flerbage count in the article: fourteen.
He has neatly summarized my problem with Stallman, the FSF and the GPL. The big problem with Stallman is that he believes that users should have power over programmers, which I find absurd. The programmers are the creator of the work, and thus should have the "freedom" (there's that word again) to choose how their work is used.
It seems like the height of tyranny for an ungrateful rabble of users to in essence say, "Thanks for creating this product that we find useful. However, that's not damn good enough. It's not enough for us to have the freedom whether to use your product or not, you should be required to develop your software according to OUR requirements."
I hate to borrow from Libertarian philosophy, but a right is not a right if you require coercion of another person.
I also look forward to hearing Stallman's response to whether they would be in favor of laws enforcing software "freedom" GPL-style.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
What's the difference between O'Reilly and FSF?? Let's see, they are both probably communists, they both want to break up the most successful company in the history of the US and they both are fucking morons. So what's the difference??
ESR, RMS, That Cunt guy...who will carry on the torch when these guys are gone!
Their pubic hair is grey now i bet. We need to work now to ensure smooth transitions.
I nominate myself
I'm not normally on Stallman's side. I think he's a lunatic who wants to give Linux a less catchy name just to get his rocks off.
But I'm definitely on his side inasmuch as I don't think that there should be an information economy. Or rather, I think that all information of all kinds should be owned by all people -- and that nobody should be able to hide information of any kind for any reason. I know that there are a billion practical pitfalls (some of them very large indeed) for this position which makes it very dangerous, unprofitable, naive, stifling to innovation and any other word you might think of.
But in my gut, I know that not only does information want to be free -- it must be free, owned by all of the people everwhere, in order for me to feel at ease. Information is just too powerful to be controlled by the few -- and yet under our current system, the more powerful the information, the fewer the people who are likely to have access to it. Somehow I know this is bad. Rational, irrational, I don't care. I don't want flerbage (was that the word?). I don't want freedom for the information makers. I want freedom for all would-be information-users and for those who would be affected by such information. I want freedom for everyone to have and to hold any information made and to use it as they will.
Yes, yes, I know... But it's a very strong gut feeling that I'll never lose. It's almost what I'd call the sense of info-entitlement. Anyway, I'm putting my "logic cap" back on now that I've had my irrational moment of gut feeling, and I'm putting my flame-retardant suit on as well...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Isn't it a bit of a moot point? How in the heck could *anyone* realistically expect to "outlaw proprietary software licences"? Make them a bit less popular (eventually, more people will be clued-in to the fact that no access to the source-code and single-vendor-tie-in are bad), sure, but outlawed? That's ridiculous.
"Stallman" is starting to sound a little too much like "Stalin" for my tastes.
It is my property, I can and will choose a license that fits MY needs as a developer.
And like it or not, proprietary licenses DO foster innovation on a corporate scale. I'm not saying free licenses don't foster innovation - but they do so at a different level - the community level... and companies (and individuals) have to get paid. I gotta keep food on my table SOMEHOW! is RMS/FSF going to send me a check every month? Or is that the government's job? This is sounding more and more like communism/socialism.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
if in the world today a user wants to fix a broken software. he manages to reversengineer the program (e.g. by decmopiling it..) fixes a bug and gives a version of that to a friend who also wanted that bug fixed.. then in the world of today this would be illegal with proprietary programms: the police might come to your house and arrest you. then that
disturbs your "flerbage" as well. (besides the fact that for some reason you could only use the proprietary programm because it was the only one compatible with some proprietary hardware where no one had specs.. so you had do spend a lot of money even if you would have prevered to write the code yourself... so that also affectes your "flerbage"...) it seems ESR's comparission is seriously flawed because of his right wing attitude...
He seems to be making a big assumption that Stallman actually wants laws passed to make closed-source software illegal. Has Stallman actually said this? Is he actually lobbying for laws to be passed?
Here's the first and most important one: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
If their answer is "no", then the dispute with Tim is over. Because that will mean they do recognize a right for developers to choose licenses as they will without being killed, jailed, or threatened for choosing the "wrong" one.
This assertion is just silly. If you ask me if being a racist should be a crime, I will say no. But that certainly does not mean "the dispute is over." The fact that I think something should not be illegal certainly doesn't mean I can't dispute it or that I don't find it morally wrong. Give me a break; no one believes that everything which is morally wrong should be illegal.
I hate it when I make a stupid spelling mistake in the middle of my point.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This sentence has one nonstandard English flerbage.
Is there some deeper point I'm missing?
The author of the article happly ignores one monkeywrench: economics.
The rules of economics aren't "laws," just predictors of how people will behave to further their interests. Unfortunately, the predictions of economics imply a necessary reduction of our "flerbage" in the case of a monopoly.
Specifically, ESR carries the libertarian mantle blind to the "Network Effect" of proprietary software that makes the Windows Monopoly so powerful. By flouting standards Microsoft makes their proprietary software more valuable because there is no adequate substitute in the marketplace. They have an interest in breaking campatibility with all but their own products or those they sanction in order to maintain and strengthen their monopoly (ignoring government regulation or anti-trust lawsuits that modify their behavior).
The Network Effect means that my flerbage is certainly decreased in the case of proprietary software. Microsoft operates in their best interest to break compatibility, and in order to do business I am forced to purchase their product whenever they do. My choice appears "flerb," but is really "double-plus-unflerb" because of economics. Sure, I'm free to use linux, it's just that I have to expend by precious time and resources circumventing Microsoft's artifical barriers to compatibility. That's not flerb at all.
I'm not sure if this is endemic to the libertarian view, but from my standpoint being forced to do something by the market is just as bad as being forced to do it by the government. Sure, the market can't put me in "prison" with "guns" but it sure feels like it when I don't have any *actual* choice.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Towards the end of the article, Raymond attacks RMS and the FSF saying "Hypothetically, if they could pass a law that would make proprietary software illegal, they would". A hypothetical condition which has never even been discussed before being the basis for discrediting what they have to say???
Also, let's even say that such a law was passed. He doesn't address the moral idea of whether or not restricting other people's freedom to software is a bad thing or not. He just says it doesn't affect his "flerbage" because nobody is going to kill him because of proprietary software. The reason a law against proprietary software (if it ever happened - which it won't) would happen is because restricting other people's freedom is bad. You have the freedom to do what you want, but you don't have the freedom to restrict the freedom of others.
For Raymond, it seems like everything is framed in a nonsense libertarian world where the primary fear is of getting your ass kicked, shot, and thrown in jail. He makes up the term "flerbage" which no one has agreed to, yet assumes the reader implicitly agrees to it and uses it as a basis to attack others. If I were to come up with a new term and attach something that I liked to that term, would you think of it as a valid arguing style if I were to then use that term which no one necessarily agrees with to beat my opponents over the head?
This essay was just silly. Talking in the end about whether or not the FSF are "safe neighbors". Before considering issues of intellectual property law, it sounds to me like Raymond needs to consider things lower in Maslow's heirarchy of needs, since he seems overly concerned with hypothetical laws beating, shooting, and imprisoning him.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Eric writes:
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal. We are now in the world of the FSF's premise.
As a user, my flerbage doesn't change. I never wanted to issue software under a proprietary license to begin with, so the new license doesn't touch me.
But as a developer, things are very different now. If I walk up to someone and offer them the same proprietary license that I did before the law was passed, police may come to my house to drag me off to jail, or kill me if I resist arrest. My flerbage has seriously decreased.
This rhetoric misleads people. I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know, an illegal contract is simply unenforceable. That means that if someone does not satisfy some illegal requirement in a contract, all that the government will do is ignore you when you come to them trying to enforce it.
Think about it this way. Suppose I agreed to a contract with someone that said that in exchange for him giving me a pen that I would pay him 10 dollars and convert to his religion. Suppose then that he gave me the pen, and I gave him the 10 dollars. But two weeks later, he sees me walking into a temple, rather than his own exclusivist church. He may be mad, but he has no legal recourse. If he tried to enforce the illegal term in the contract (the part about converting to his religion), the court would probably just say that an illegal term is not enforceable. We have the freedom to practice any religion we choose, even if we claim to have agreed to another one.
Would cops come to my door to force me to go to his church? No. Would cops go to his door and arrest him? Not unless he tried to threaten or mislead people into compliance with his illegal contract. They'd probably just laugh at the guy.
So in Eric's example where the unalianable right to distribute copies is explicitly recognized by statute, the developer who offered the proprietary license (presumably something which included a non-distribution clause) would just be laughed at if he tried to enforce this contract in court. Nobody would drag him off to jail.
No loss of flerbage here.
I've been getting those for a couple days, too. I switched from Opera to Netscape, and it seems to work okay.
But, as always, YMMV.
(Your Mileage May Vary)
"But someone's mere act of issuing software under a proprietary license doesn't change my flerbage."
Dear Eric,
No it doesn't. Unless they:
a) sell it with your PC and you have to AGREE with the LICENSE by default and pay for it even if you don't want it.
b) they force on you upgrades that you do not want
c) they might be sending your personal details to XYZ and there is nothing you can do about it - you cannot even legally reverse-engineer it to see what the particular piece of software is doing.
Now you'd say, but we got alternative OS. Where would that OS be if not RMS and those who wrote it in the first place?
Please. I am getting tired of things being taken out of context and presented in a "would-be" ideal world.
--- "There is no such thing as an insignificant contribution."
Here's another parable. Some time ago, there was no such thing as copyright. If I, as a musician, say, createda song (no doubt based on the art of my time and culture) and sang to you, It would then be your song as well. You could base another song on it, or sing it to your friends. If you were nice, you might mention you heard it from me.
There was a time when we knew that no one owned the earth, that we were merely stewards of it. There was a time when we knew that no one owned ideas, we were merely their conduits.
Then some greedy bastard figured they could apply the meme of 'ownership' (which previously meant something like 'something you are carrying or sleeping in') to land. Some time later, another greedy bastard figured it could be applied to the realm of ideas.
Each time, the rest of our flerbage decreased, as a previously shared resource was made private by emminent domain. Now, the greed-mongers would have us believe that we would be decreasing their flerbage by putting things back the way they were.
Or you can just wait until MegaConglomoCorp owns all the air and charges you a fee to breath.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
If you are developing software for general distribution, wouldn't you accept suggestions for improvement? I think it is perticularly libertarian to view a suggestion as a coersion.
Now, if you wrote some code, and I thought I could use it somehow else, we'll I'd like to see it changed. I might do it if the source were available and I could leave you alone... but if the source is closed (under NDA, shielded by the DMCA), then I have no recourse but to ask you to make the changes for me.
It just smacks as selfish that you'd write some reasonable code for public use and then keep the source all to yourself, not even letting me modify it for my purposes for no other reason that "gee that's coersion, somehow."
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Sorry, ESR, but the flerbage nonsense is stupid. There's already a perfectly good word for that, it's called Liberty.
Proprietary software may be able to coexist with Liberty, but it will certainly take some work. The whole trend since the beginning of closed software has been for it to threaten Liberty, to eliminate it bit by bit, as quickly as it's producers believe they can get away with. The pace is ever increasing, and every time a draconian measure is abandoned because of public backlash... it returns with less fanfare a little later on.
And no, I'm not in favour of criminalising the offering of software under proprietary licenses. I don't believe the FSF is either - in that respect this article is simply an audacious straw man.
When the government uses my tax money to buy proprietary software, when it publishes public information which I am legally entitled to access, but in a form that is useless to me unless I pay microsoft their monopoly rent, my liberty is under assault. When they grant artificial monopoly privileges (software patents are one excellent example of this) and enforce them via law, this is no better than enforcing one particular license on developers would be.
Under no circumstances should tax money ever be spent on proprietary software. Under no circumstances should public information be published locked in a proprietary format. Instead of trying to break down monopolies with anti-trust law, the government should quit creating them and nurturing them in the first place.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
What the FSF would argue is, to quote Star Trek, 'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'. Thus, whilst stopping people from publishing software under a proprietary license does, to some extent reduce the freedom of that induvidual (or corporate entity, etc.), it does so only in order to stop the rest of the world from having their freedom violated, namely the freedom to alter said software as one wishes.
Personally, I'm inclined to agree with the FSF; I believe it is more important for everyone to have freedom, even if it does reduce individual freedom.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between the 'Free Software' movement and the 'Open Source' movement, and the reason RMS and co get so uppity when the two terms are used interchangably.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
I can not think of any other reason why he would use a confused and twisted rethoric like that.
A law that would guarantuee software users certain rights, no matter what is stated in the license, would not imply that people who try to take away those rights from the users by releasing their software under restrictive licenses must be thrown in jail. One could compare his argument to saying that Free Speech is bad because Free Speech means you must thrown anyone who says 'Shut up!' in jail.
I have not heard of any media producer being jailed over these kinds of licensing issues even though most commercial movie and music releases here in Europe have been accompanied by notices that try to restrict the use of the media further than the fair-use provisions of our laws allow.
Here's the first and most important one: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it? If their answer is "no", then the dispute with Tim is over.
I think there's another option that ESR ignores: Kuhn and Stallman would probably want proprietary licenses ruled invalid as opposed to illegal in the "haul you off to jail' sense. This ensures that no one has power over anyone else because there are no restrictions on anyone's use of any ideas. You can still offer people the license, but it would be just as valid as a contract that offers them $1,000,000.00 for the right to enslave them when they turn 30. Some "freedoms" are not worth protecting, and some contracts should never be valid.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
What about looking at some cases in real life? Proprietary licenses. Say.... Windows. Very successful. Likley due to cost, marketing and standardization of a chaotic platform long in the past. Solved a lot of problems with proprietary platforms only running 1-2 applications you needed, so you almost bought one machine per application in some situations. Seems OK for the time. Now, however, with viable alternatives, there are some things like open sourcing (NOT GPL) that may be useful if the modifications could be redistributed, but MSFT still owned the rights to the parts they feel they need to. (Asbestos enabled)
Why not GPL? Enter point number 2. BSD/Mozilla/Extend and contribute like licenses. The SCSL from SUN. Specifically, Java. If this thing was GPL'd off the bat, it would be another fragmented, proprietary implementation of a screwed up standard left in the past not unlike CDE, or even C++ in it's early life. With SUN owning a brand, and enforcing a standard that they don't actually unilaterally define, it's a workable, reliable, and standardized open platform.
Those two cases in point, one must ask WHY the GPL seems to have such problems creating the defining third case study where GPL is the only thing that worked. Well, maybe it has. Let's take Linux. If it was proprietary, it would likely be as big as CP/M about now. If it was SCSL, the buy-in by the GPL crowd would be nill, (err... null, err.. nevermind) and the corporate adoptions to the benefit of the community wouldn't have occurred.
So, we've got three broad and incomplete categories of license, and three broad and incompletely analyzed case studies showing success in each case, and why in those particular cases that license modality was the correct choice for the goals.
So bascially, I would side with Tim on the side of choice, and promote the said flerbage as the yardstick. Evolution finds optimal solutions through excessive choice. Seems to have worked out fairly well. Odd that it still resulted in the occasional individual that opposes the primary mechanism that gave rise to them. I savour the irony.
I'd love to hear why the power of choice would be a bad thing, even if you choose a proprietary license. Try and write a cheat-resistant multiplayer game with open source on both client and server, and see just how far you get before the cheats make the game unplayable except among friends. Lots of papers and discussions on that as well.
And don't raise the "web of trust" and such there RMS and cadre. Defintion of trust on that level would have removed the success of the GPL in the case of Linux, as there could be code in there that trusted people back-doored, but no one has bothered to review. Trust is perception, and perception is in it's very nature incomplete.
Sometimes you just gotta say no when someone wants your recipe. :-)
Respond with thought or not at all if you please.
I think a lot of people commenting on this discussion need to be reminded that patents and copyrights are NOT fundamental rights of creators and inventors (at least, according to US law; sorry, I do have a USian bias since I don't know the laws of any other country that well). They are granted these priveleges for the sake of promoting (sorry) innovation and progress in the sciences. It's a compromise -- the people giving up some of their freedom to promote progress.
However, many people feel (myself included) that these "Intellectual Property" laws are no longer promoting anything but the continued rule of large corporations like Time-Warner, and stupidity on the part of smaller ones like Amazon. It may no longer be in the peoples' best interests to allow these patent and copyright monopolies.
When viewed from this point of view, I think ESR's argument takes on a whole new flavour. When you don't consider having a copyright on your code a fundamental right (that copyright being the basis for software licenses of all kinds, from the GPL to a MS EULA), licensing isn't even a question. It simply becomes "here's some code".
I don't know if this is a fundamentally better situation than what we have now. I do suppot the FSF rather than Open Source because I believe that promoting the idea of Freedom is more important than just getting useful software. But I think these are questions that must be considered, and I wanted to present another angle on this argument.
ESR: if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
The answer is yes and no. But there could be many reasons for saying yes/no and the reasons do not have to be these two from ESR:
If their answer is "no", then the dispute with Tim is over. Because that will mean they do recognize a right for developers to choose licenses as they will without being killed, jailed, or threatened for choosing the "wrong" one.
If their answer is "yes", then there are many, many other moral questions we could ask them -- and should, if only so that we can get some idea if they're too dangerous to have as neighbors.
I would say "no" if the law is created by FSF and not the consents of the people and "yes" if everyone argees that this is the right(tm) thing to do. Kuhn and Stallman wants people to use GPL. It is their ideals. ESR's question and answers above make it sounds like Kuhn and Stallman force people to use GPL, which is not ture.
The only thing that was left unanswered in this story is which is more important?
The rights of a person who writes software to impose law and rules on the people or the rights of the people to impose law and rules on this person.
I think both rights are important and they need to be balanced. Tim wants more rights to the person and Kuhn and Stallman want more rights to the people. ESR's arguement is just one-sided.
Raymond essay is disingenuous in that he evades the whole point of Kuhn and Stallman's essay. Kuhn and Stallman clearly are talking about freedom for the user. Raymond begs the question by addressing freedom for the programmer. Ultimately, which is the more important?
One delusion that some programmer's often operate under is that they are creating a work in isolation from everybody else's contributions. Most of what we leverage in our creative works has come to us for free, under the principles of academic freedom. In many ways, RMS has simply reformulated these principles into a binding form specific to computer software. I agree with his effort to eliminate the free riders that would attempt to appropriate the vast body of prior art for their own personal gain.
Why does this just degenerate into the same tired argument of "giving you freedom A takes away my freedom B"? Of course that will always be true, for any argument about freedom. My freedom to walk on the street without getting hit conflicts with your freedom to hit people on the street.
Of course, being able to choose any license is a freedom. But that's not the freedom the FSF stands for, don't we know that already? The stand for other freedoms, namely the freedoms described in the GPL.
What exactly do all these people (and sometimes the FSF does it too, I know) hope to gain by fighting over who's freedom is best?
Society, free markets, etc., those mechanisms will pick what's best for society.
Unfortunately, the way copyright law works for software, the power is automatically in the copyright holder's hands. You have to agree to an arbitrary contract-like agreement to have a copy at all! Sometimes you actively read and agree to the contract, sometimes it's imposed on you without your knowing by some other action (buying a new computer). Imagine if everything you bought had a contract you had to read and agree to. Free markets would be impaired (think "transaction costs" from economics).
So when TOR (Tim O'Reilly) says we should be able to choose any license for software, I think he is implicitly supporting the tilted playing field of the status quo, so it's no surprise that the FSF would not agree with that standpoint.
And to suggest that the FSF would want to pass a law to make proprietary licenses illegal is silly! Pass one law, to counteract the effects of another? ESR is starting from the viewpoint that software should have a license in the first place. He should know by now, the FSF doesn't agree with that. Why not just remove the law that lets copyright holders enforce their contracts. Then the GPL would be pretty much unecessary!
RMS has never suggested many of the things people always ascribe to him. ESR is simply inventing things that he thinks RMS might want or say. It would be like RMS arguing that ESR wants to pass a law that makes it illegal not to carry a gun. Since ESR supports our freedom to carry guns, it's only logical that he would be against a freedom NOT to carry a gun, yes?
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Contrary to ESR's assertion, government laws disallowing proprietary licences simply would not violate flerbage.
Let's back up: Copyright is an entirely statutory grant. It simply is not a fundamental right that you can legally exclude others from reproducing your speech. For example, Congress could abolish all copyright protection if it chose. Congress has been delegated, and justly so, the power "to promote the arts and sciences" by creating statutes (not rights) that secure authors their writings for "limited Times". Copyright is a loan from the public domain. Loans are a granted priviledge and Congress may secure the loan with restrictions aimed at promoting the ends desired by giving the loan.
It would also a coherent policy view to say that the best way to promote computer science is by demanding as part of the quid-pro-quo involved in securing copyright that source code be released and be modifiable. Can anyone argue that a reasonable man might believe this would advance the progress of computer science? If majoritarian forces in Congress were able to implement this policy into law, then I believe the answer to the question of what should happen to you if you were to release under a proprietary licence anyway is not as ESR asserts that you should be arrested, but rather that the principle of "misuse of copyright" should be applied, whereby you would not receive the governement's assistence in enforcing your copyright.
Trying to licence software under a proprietary licence in the hypothesized scenario simply would not lead to your arrest. It would lead to others violating your licence and the government refusing to help you enforce it.
"The protections afforded by copyright law are completely statutory" was the holding of the Sony Betamax decision, and traces back to the earliest Supreme Court cases. Thus, you have no rights to exclude others from your work unless those statutes recognize them as such. The public owns the public domain and tasked Congress with optimizing its expansion by choosing the most appropriate statutory scheme. If Congress decides that everything you write instantly enters the public domain, then too bad -- you have no injury under the US Constitution. Similarly, they can condition your grant of protection by requiring you to meet criteria the people deem helpful to the end of promoting science and arts.
So now ESR has taken to bashing Free Software huh? Sounds like somebody has sour grapes becuase their stock is worth 1.75$ intead 175$. Lik ESR ever write anything that important. Wooo fetchmail, gee that amazing feat of programming non-talent really holds up against all the FSF has done.
Copyright is nothing but a government granted monopoly. Wake up! If the government does not coerce people *not* to copy your stuff, then copyright doesn't exist.
Libertarianism requires government non-interference into the marketplace. Copyright is a direct intervention into the marketplace. Despite the fact that its intentions are good, it does not work, and it causes a whole heap of coercion along the way.
Property rights make some sense when they are attached to items that are scarce. Information, however, is not naturally scarce (although the ability to create it may be). Would libertarian ethics allow other sorts of interventions into the marketplace to guarantee innovation? For instance, what if it was found that better music would be created if only people with masters degrees in composition (or licensed students) were allowed to create music. Think of how much crappy music wouldn't get made if you needed 6 years of school and a license before you could strum an A chord! Is this a legitimate type of coercion? Think!
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
While I respect ESR, in this case he could not more perfectly fail to grasp the point.
Proprietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage". (Or "freedom", if you prefer.)
Maximum "flerbage" would be the absense of copyright - not passing new restrictions on proprietary licences, but rather removing the exisitng restrictions that make proprietary licences possible.
(I'm not - for the present - arguing for or against such a change. Just arguing that outlawing certain uses of photocopiers, tape recorders, computers, etcetera, is not moving in the direction of maximum "flerbage".)
I'm disappointed that a self-described anarchist doesn't understand the difference.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
How about this one: if you could repeal the laws that prevent you from copying software, would you?
In the absence of copyright law, I can copy Sicromoft's operating system. Copyright law removes that right/privelege.
ESR is also extremely disingenous when he says these things:
and then . Now you see, this isn't part of his flerbage, by his definition. If he can't make this trade, has he lost any time? his life? his (non-intellectual) property? No. This is not part of his flerbage, as he defined it. "my software" is an interesting word, if he has not, as he claims, prejudiced the argument by assuming the software he creates is property. Nor is his flerbage decreased (unless we make the additional assumption software is property, if the government copies his software, and gives every single person on the planet a copy. He didn't lose the time he spent making it, he had the option to do something else.so his moral committment is he's pro-flerbage. Well, the debate is flerbage-neutral. flerbage doesn't, as far as I can tell, enter into it at all. Unless, of course, you want to prejudice the argument by claiming the programs you write are your property.
Wow, I'm kinda shocked. I never expected the next wave of anti-GPL FUD to come from ESR. Man that's messed up.
Gill: If you could get a law passed making open-source licenses illegal, would you do it?
That's what I thought. Fair is fair.
I love ESR, but... Microsoft views this as WAR. We normally do not. But that WILL NOT prevent us from being exterminated by Microsoft if they are able. With the GPL applied to probably far less than 5% of all the world's code, ESR shouldn't be worried about Stallman banishing proprietary software, but about Microsoft banishing Free Software. While we try to decapitate our own people, Microsoft, the 800lb. gorilla that *never loses*, is focused, tireless, and efficient in their behind-the-scenes work to discredit the GPL, Linux, and Free Software.
There's only one thing Microsoft is good at, and that's destroying their competition. And from the looks of this article, there's only one thing ESR is good at, and that's destroying Microsoft's competition. Without the GPL covering us, Linux would be BeOS. Except that BeOS is technically better than Linux.
And Linux growing to 95% market share doesn't matter, if it means we have to become the next Microsoft to do it. Selling out is a slippery slope that starts one step at a time. It's time we stop this lame infighting and get to work on our code. Everyone's fighting to control Linux, but there will BE no Linux if we don't stop fighting. I love Linux, but I'm scared as hell of Windows XP. If we don't work fast, we're dead, and all our best coders are fighting about hypotheticals.
Good word on ESR part? Sounds like flame+garbage.
And defines well this article of his. Stallman did not argue for outlawing propriatary licences... This whole article stinks...
I had no idea ESR was nutty like Magnum and Moses. Up until I saw his guns page, I actually respected him.
Face it man, the FSF are the only group really dedicated to freedom. Everyone esle is in to make buck or for some fame. Why do i suddenly get this feeling the Open Source movement is ready to do some serious selling out.
I cannot legally do the same with a piece of GPL software.
Thus, the FSF restricts what other people do with its software, in ways that the authors of Apache do not. That's fine with me, because the FSF can choose any license that they want for their own software.
But now Bradley Kuhn is moving into a position of forbidding other people from doing what they want with the software they create.
Specific question:
Does the FSF want to make the BSD license illegal?
Actually, that's not true. There are many licenses that you can not choose no matter what your twisted needs are. Perhaps you are Vincent VanGogh and you feel a deep need for each user of your software to mail you one of their ears before using your software. I am no lawyer, but I would dare say that this license would be invalid.
So the real question is, what makes a license a valid restriction on someone else's behavior? Answer: the law. What part of the law are we talking about? Copyright. How should copyright work? Well, you've begged the crap out of this question. Whether it's your property depends on whether the government grants you a monopoly on the information you've assembled into a finished work. I think the FSF folks are saying that locking up information and giving somoene a monopoly on it should be invalid because it creates an impermissible monopoly on information which is not scarce.
To put it another way, it's not your property just because it came from your mind. If you thought up RSA encryption independently, too bad, it's already been patented (and expired, hooray!). So what's really at stake is not "whose idea was it" but "who got there first". With scarce goods this is an ok compromise, maybe. With non-scarce goods, we don't have to divy up the spoils, we can make an infinite number of copies.
You just want to get paid because you work, not because you are creating something that has value outside of a government granted monopoly. Who's the communist now? Stalin indeed.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
This is more standard libertarian rhetoric. Consider: If I "choose" to work a low-income job, and therefore "choose" to live in a high-crime area, men with guns will occasionally forcibly divest me of my property. Or, as happened to a friend of mine, they won't have guns - they'll just have lead pipes, and instead of just taking my property, they'll beat the shit out of me, putting me in the hospital for weeks and *then* take my wallet.
That's what I call freedom.
Sure, I could choose to live on Monaco, were there's virtually no crime as much as I could choose to build a rocket ship and live on Mars - that is, sure in an ideal fantasy world, but not in reality.
Raymond is comparing his ideal world, in which I would have the flerbage not to use Microsoft products, to the real world in which I have the choice of significantly fewer jobs if I make that choice. If I were a secretary, I might have the "choice" of using Microsoft products or finding a new profession, probably at lower wages.
Anyway, even if he weren't an adherent to a utopian philosophy, it's not the case that being disallowed from releasing proprietary software reduces my flerbage.
Here's what Raymond says:
"If I walk up to someone and offer them the same
proprietary license that I did before the law was passed, police may come to my house to drag me off to jail, or kill me if I resist arrest. My flerbage has seriously decreased."
And here's the definition of flerbage:
"I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent."
Well, obviously that doesn't include acts which are illegal - you can't expect to kill someone and get away with it. So, if you say "My flerbage is decreased because I can't break the law", well, tough. Or you might say "the law is bad because it decreases my flerbage," well, that's what all laws do - but we pass them to increase the sum flerbage of each person more than it decreases your flerbage. So, you're back in the same situation where flerbage means freedom. Oops.
Here's an interesting commentary on libertarianism:
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
From: Gregory Maxwell
To: esr@thyrsus.com
Subject: Flerbage
After reading your article about flerbage on LinuxToday, I came away
thinking that your analysis was overly simplistic on one point to such a
great extent that it was totally handicapped by this 'over sight'.
I believe that one of the FSF's primary arguments against the *existence* of
proprietary software is that it's ill effects go well beyond the people who
choose to use it, especially in the case of popular proprietary software
(such as Microsoft Windows).
By ignoring this point, you have forced a particular conclusion: I seriously
doubt that the FSF would try to say that no one should have the right to
create proprietary software if in fact it could be shown that proprietary
software harms no more then it's users.
It would have been much more enlightening for everyone if you had followed
through enough on your article to suggest that 'flerbage compliance in
Tim/FSF world reduces to the question of the harm of proprietary software to
non-users'.
In my view, the FSF already has a strong case: The dominance of Microsoft's
proprietary OS and office productivity software have caused *me* significant
direct and indirect harm. It has made my decision to not use their software
significantly more difficult. Because I have chosen to obey the often ignored
and selectively enforced copyright laws in the context of computer software in
an effort to highlight one of the intrinsic weaknesses of proprietary
software, I have, to some extent, alienated my coworkers and family (why
won't you copy that disk for me? Don't you like me?).
I could go on, but the point is: There is a potential for the mere existence
of proprietary software to cause harm to the rest of the world. We can
prevent that harm by removing the power/freedom of the small group we call
developers to remove power/freedom from everyone else. What we must answer
is 'What is the right balance', and it may not just be as simple as
no-proprietary software or developer chooses his license.
I believe that you did a great disservice to the discussion with your
oversimplification. In the future, I hope you have more respect for your
position in the community and write a more fair and insightful analysis.
Thanks for your attention,
Greg Maxwell
The bottom line is this: It's Linus Torvald's OS and he can name it whatever he likes. If the FSF wants credit for everywhere their stuff is included, they shoulda put it in the GPL. Technically, you can say Linux is just the kernel, but it's really hard to split hairs like this to laypeople. They'll just call it whatever they feel like and no amount of whining and complaing about fairness and credit will change this.
In this case, arguments for "proprietary" software licenses are arguments for the use of government force on the behalf of copyright holders. I mean, all this talk about "intellectual property" is eventually backed up by state power (with guns as the final resort), right?
That's not to say that I think enforcement of copyright and contract law is necessarily or entirely a bad thing. In fact, we get a lot of good out of copyright. But I think we need to look at actual causes, effects, benefits, and costs when discussing these issues rather than taunting each other with "look, I have more liberty than you!"
Maybe this is too obvious to point out. But
:)
say I do any of the following:
I violate the DMCA, get an "evaluation" copy
of win2k from my friend (without stealing anyones
_physical_ property), or violate M$'s license by disassembling and publishing a portion of their OS and publish it on my web page.
Then the police knocks down my door, tries to arrest me, or kills me if I resist arrest, thus seriously decreasing my flerbage
After he wrote these tips ?
ESR is just spouting mouldy old Ayn Rand rubbish. For some reason, it appeals to the infantile American (mine! mine!) liberatarian mindset.
When he stops recycling old shite, stops claiming to be an anthropolgist and stops being a tireless self-publicist... then maybe I'll listen to what he has to say.
They all believe in freedom by their own definition of such. They're like the religous right who want to legistate how everyone should think, read, or act. There is no ONE correct way. Freedom is simply freedom of choice. There are plenty of computers and users in this world for proprietary, non-proprietary, free, and commericial software. Nothing wrong if you like GPL or ESR, Stallman, or MS just don't insist everyone else has to.
FreeBSD fan
Do we as a community really want this man speaking on our behalf ?
What are his credentials anyway ? Has he contributed much to the world of open source ? (Apart from the ghastly fetchmail?)
Who appointed him as our spokesperson ?
Is it not time he took some lessons in marketing and tidied up his act ? At least losing that disgusting moustache would be a start.
By the way Eric, if your reading this, don't even think about coming round and shooting me, as I have several firearms, including but not limited to glock, Mac-10, H&K MP5, Spaz, Tec, Armalite and many many more. I will not hesitate to defend myself. Pre-emptively if necessary.
Thank you
this is why you PAY for an education
You're paying for the medium (textbooks) and support (professors).
this is why you PAY for software
When you buy a copy of Progeny (a version of Debian GNU/Linux), you're paying for the medium (CDs and books) and support.
newspapers, etc
You're paying for the medium (paper).
Yes, copyright is a government-granted monopoly. The United States Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8) recognizes copyright as existing "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." Anything else is not constitutional. But somehow, the courts think that perpetual copyright[?] "promote[s] the progress of science and useful arts" and that because it's effectively limited to one day less than the lifetime of the Universe, it counts as "limited times."
Will I retire or break 10K?
OMFG he even writes lame poetry
"criminologist Gary Kleck is a card-carrying ACLU"
Oh so ESR thinks being a member of the ACLU is a bad thing?
I can legally take a piece of BSD software, make binaries of it, and share the binaries with my neighbors.
I can legally take a piece of GPL software, make binaries of it, and share the binaries with my neighbors, offering in the README to sell them a CD of the source code for the price of media, duplication, and postage (GNU GPL section 3b).
What do you have to hide today?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Why should "monopoly maintenance" be the sole motivation for flout standards? Adhering to standards is costly, and it can also prevent innovation (when the standard is sub-standard, so to speak). This is just like the difference between making changes "within a module" vs. "in the interface". "Flouting standards" can be re-spun as "disputing where the interfaces should be".
If you want to make an improvement, but that would break compatibility and you don't own the standard, what are you supposed to do? Sit in committee meetings arguing about the next standard while some other company establishes their own? MS isn't the only company that can "establish" standards.
Of course, I'm not saying that it always is this way - I don't have the necessary information. But neither do most of yall.
I wrote this on the linuxtoday talkbacks:
Ok. I think that ESR is a very good writer, and I enjoy what he wrote... BUT I want to argue the other side of the coin just to see where it leads. Forgive me, if my arguments are not entirely clear. I'm not sure I agree with them yet. Just trying them on to see if they make sense.
Ok. So ESR says that what we ought to be talking about here is flerbage. Tim's premise is that a developer ought to be albe to license his/her code under any license they choose. And that if you take away that basic right, then the flerbage of developers decreases. I think that's the only possible conclusion.
But by enabling that sort of thing, you also enable a monopolistic developer to basically control your life. Which means that the flerbage of users decreases. Let's suppose that I release a piece of code and I say, "If you want to use it, you have to let me have sex with your wife." It's a relatively simple thing for you to say, "No thanks, I don't need your code." But say Microsoft does something like this? In some cases, there is simply no way that some organizations or individuals can say no. (If there were a case where every organization could simply say "no" to Microsoft, then Microsoft would *not* be a monopoly.) Well the answer is, of course, that there is legal precedent (sp?) that prevents unreasonable contract terms. A contract that requires you to become a slave in order to fulfill your part of the contract is null and void on its face.
Soooo.. Tim's freedom zero already does not exist. Developers can *not* currently release their software under any license they choose. The license has to pass some level of "reasonability". The only question now becomes what is reasonable? What limits should licensors be under when licensing their code? And where should those limits stop?
I think that RSR & FSF are trying to set a different standard for where those limits should stop. They think that it should be unreasonable to license software that doesn't include the licensee's right to modify or fix the software, and then to release those changes and fixes. Do I agree with the FSF's position? I dunno.
The point? There already are limits on how developers can license their software, and those limits are good. Reasonable people may disagree on how far those limits should go. But to say that there should be no limits, is short sighted (IMHO). And I think that Tim's "freedom zero" basically says that there should be no limits. That may not be what he intends to say. I certainly hope not. But it's not impossible to see how RSR & the FSF might interpret Tim's statement as unlimited power for software developers... especially those with a monopoly.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Ahh, but you can run a system on gnu software.
There is emacs, and ed, and I think gnu has an vi
clone.
Yes there is good non-GNU free software, but GNU is the heart of a system running on Linux or HURD
and perhaps even this caldera hybrid.
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Larry Lessig once admonished ESR for what Lessig described as ESR's advocacy of "warmed over Ayn Rand". I would describe flerbage as "a moldy and rotting 'Ayn Rand'-like substance".
The problem with flerbage, is the "without my consent" part. Essentially it claims an individual right to veto laws that protect more than life and personal property. Ironically, given ESR's position, Copyright violations don't qualify as life, property, time deprivations so I don't know why or if ESR would support the government depriving software pirates of flerbage when they have not deprived him of it.
Like most radical libertarianism, flerbage simply misunderstands the role of public policy in recognizing property and trade. Neither property nor contracts exist outside of a context of government because both involve a concept of government force being used to redress transgressions. You do not have property or a contract unless the public, through it's agent the governement agrees to enforce it. This involves the public use of force that requires resources and the public has the right and the power to expend its resources in a way that is consistent with the heirarchy of legal principles established by a Constitution and due process of law thereunder, which includes some majoritarian lawmaking processes that predictably may occassionally result in rules that fail your personal "without my consent" test.
Enough people consent to the process to call it consensus, and you are never offered freedom from attack by the delegated power of the people if you don't consent to a particular rule and ignore it. Nobody really cares if you "never signed no steenkin social contract". If you don't consent to the process then you've declared anarchy and rebellion, so don't come whining when bad things happen to you such as your flerbage being violated. The Declaration of Independence states the principle that if the government becomes destructive to the will of the people that the people may overthrow it. Civil disobediance, peaceful or violent, is sometimes the morally correct thing to do, but nobody ever said it doesn't come with great peril precisely because it is outside of the rule of law.
"Flerbage is good."
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Somehow, simply because the nutjob spewed forth so mightily, his work is deemed "+5, Insightful" and he's granted some sort of honorary leadership role and the respect of clueless mass media. Nevermind that he's never provided actual leadership, or that we (if there truly is a "we", which is debatable) don't need it anyway...
For years this blowhard continues to churn out misinformed tirades, neatly wrapped in stale, holier-than-thou libertarian rhetoric, against all sides of every significant non-issue that raises its ephemeral head in the press.
For some reason, people still listen.
Finally, the tide begins to turn and people begin to discount his decreasingly credible writings. The fact that his every reaction can be easily charted in advance on a table of libertarian philosophy is increasingly pointed out, boredom with him and his writings and even anger that somehow this fool is considered to represent "us" finally sets in.
And yet, we're still talking about his latest rant. Why?
From the GNU Manifesto
---------------
All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax:
Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development.
But if the computer buyer makes a donation to software development himself, he can take a credit against the tax. He can donate to the project of his own choosing--often, chosen because he hopes to use the results when it is done. He can take a credit for any amount of donation up to the total tax he had to pay.
The total tax rate could be decided by a vote of the payers of the tax, weighted according to the amount they will be taxed on.
The consequences:
The computer-using community supports software development. This community decides what level of support is needed. Users who care which projects their share is spent on can choose this for themselves
-----------------and------
What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
-I added the bold-
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
First, let's look at the definition of flerbage:
"I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent... I am pro-flerbage."
Copyright law is inherently anti-flerbage. If I buy a copy of Dinwoes, licensed under some proprietary license, I cannot copy it without the threat of the police coming to my house and dragging me off to jail. This is a result of copyright law, NOT contract law (IANAL). Even if you accept shrinkwrap licenses, I have not agreed to the license upon buying it; I agree upon installation. If I used Nulix to copy the Dinwoes CD, I haven't agreed to the contract provision of not copying it.
In a completely pro-flerbage world, this restriction on copying would be enforced in contract law: Sircomoft (or ESR) would say "I'll trade you this software for some money, and if you copy it, you're liable to me under contract law, and I can sue you for damages."
Unfortunately, most people don't have enough money to actually pay the damages that would be incurred if a copy of Dinwoes leaked into the marketplace without the contract-law protection against copying and redistribution. As a result, we have copyright law to allow people to sell copies of easily reproduced things, because protection against copying is enforced in criminal law, not in contract law. The theory is that this increases value: the US constitution gives the legislature authority to "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" (Article I Section 8).
While I agree with ESR's conclusion, being pro-flerbage effectively means favoring abolishment of copyright law and replacing it soley with contract law, in which case only people who are extremely rich will be able to post enough bond to buy popular digital content. The street-artist's model would then prevail.
No, this debate doesn't sound a bit like the Communism vs. Capitalism arguments.
There's not a perfect mapping between Trotskey, Lenin, and Stalin and this Tim, Eric Raymond, and Richard Stallman. But once again we see the problems when people form around a cult of personality. The empowerment of freedom becomes the proscription that you must be free exactly my way or else.
Okay, I'll play the role of Churchill: Propritary software is the worst software development methodology in the world, except for everything else that's ever been tried.
I think that Eric Raymond is setting up a bit of a straw man here. This can be exemplified best by peeking at the analogous discussions about Napster et al.
What the FSF is advocating, as far as I understand, is the philosophy (or rather, tagline) of "information wants to be free". That is, conventional contracts can be entered, but as soon as the information is out there, it will be nearly impossible to police it, and ensure that it stays within the select circle of those-who-bought-it. If someone outside the circle is found possessing a copy, and using it, they cannot be dragged to court - only the person who leaked it outside the select circle is liable, and they will be almost impossible to identify. This is very similar to the MP3 discussions, and also opens a new can of worms: underage persons cannot enter legally binding contracts. So it you want to remove the "blanket" protection for information (i.e., software, music, literature, etc.) the way it is in place now, to protect the information contractually, you'd have to have every buyer, worldwide, enter a valid, binding contract in which they promise not to pass it on. Kids and teenagers would no longer be allowed to purchace muzak or gamez without becoming instant automatic leaks outside the select circle. Kind of messes it up for an industry which has best success rate telling people what is cool when the people are teens, doesn't it?
In short: the spirit of what the FSF is standing for is not a mandate of the types of contracts which can and cannot be made, but merely the concept of what constitutes a crime. The way it is now: you see something, chances are you'll get your pants sued off it you use it. What they want: it's there, you can use it. If you can sell something and ensure that your rights are policed, bully to you - but chances are it'll end up in the public domain without you being able to identify a culprit. There is simply no blanket protection anymore enabling you to go after every Joe Average with whom you never entered any contract in the first place.
I.e. (provocativly) only innovations will be worth anything anymore...
yes, we have no bananas
I am dyslexic and it wasn't until I re-read the op-ed peice that I realized ESR was talking about made up people and software.
Raymond makes a big assumption - that users get to choose what software they run. Profit maximizing companies don't let their users choose - not if they can help it. (And sure, if you don't like the oxygen tax we've just put in, you can always choose not to breathe. Can't take that "freedom" away, no no no. ;-)
;-)
Now, I have real doubts that what the FSF wants is practical or even good. But I like that they're willing to be imaginative about what sort of intellectual property regimes could be put in place.
Until people start seeing *all* IP structures as artificial constructions - things that have to be designed and that have real-world consequences, we're going to end up with the software/entertainment industry equivalent of California utility deregulation. I.e. whatever benefits the most rapacious corps - and screw the public and the less rapacious companies - which unless your employer is a member of the RIAA probably means *you lose*. And yes, that means even MS. (Looked at the PC growth curve lately? Think how much better it would look if PC's ability to edit, preserve, and communicate video and sound hadn't been crippled by the entertainment companies. We crippled the telecomm, software and hardware industries all to protect a lousy couple of billion of entertainment baloney? Where the hell were our lobbyists?
Attempting to identifying an individual's primary freedom is something that is not unique to the field of software engineering. Philosophers have been arguing over such questions for thousands of years, and I'm not sure they have reached a consensus, so perhaps that is why I am skeptical of either side getting the resounding "last word" in this discussion.
To throw my two cents in anyway, though, it seems that both parties are working with coherent definitions of freedom. Under both definitions, one person's freedom is another's restriction. I don't believe there is an ethically "correct" answer to this discussion. Both as I see it, would meet Kant's categorical imperative test(in short, if everyone were to behave in this manner, would it be desirable/feasible), and it seems to me that it comes down to a matter of what we as individuals and as a group desire more.
In this way, this is sort of a classic public policy debate: valuing competing principles/priorities to shape law. We cannot have both freedoms utterly. We can have a little of both, or all of one and some of the other. I would both like to be able to have the ability to distribute my software under any license I choose, as well as to be able to take any one's source code and modify it to my own ends. Now, if I were to attempt to give these freedoms to everyone(not just myself), the result would be a violation of the categorical imperative. It would in fact be absurd.
So what it comes down to is us, as a group, deciding on which is more important. Realistically, the best I think we can hope for is that whatever laws are put in place our shaped by us, as a community of programmers, and not by a powerful elite. I believe this is the true freedom zero(at least with respect to democracy): not that either freedom should necessarily prevail, but that we, the programmers/people, should shape the rules by which we are governed. Though these rules may not be amenable to us all, they should represent the views of the majority of us.
The DCMA is a true example of a threat, in my view, to the freedom of you and I, and perhaps everyone would be better served, IMHO, to focus on this.
John
The OS camp likes to paint RMS as some sort of fascist/communist demon, but when you listen more closely there's an awful lot of shrill stuff in there. A few of the more extreme OSers seem to feel that we shouldn't even be allowed to GPL our own software.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
"Information wants to free" is a statement about censorship and secrets, not an invitation to end copyright.
If Alice tells Bertram a secret, Bertram may feel compelled to reveal that secret to Charlie.
Let us say that the secret is a stock tip. Alice and Bertram stand to make a lot of money, if they keep the "secret" to themselves. On the other hand, if the secret contains a bit of "juicy gossip", Bertram might be compelled to reveal it to Charlie, and so on.
Thus, the information content of the secret determines how fast (or how slowly) it propagates across society. In that sense, the secret can be said to have deisres and needs,ala "The Selfish Gene" (RDawkins), even though the secret does not have a "intelligence" of its own...
Unless legal/economic consequences to information transfer are embedded within that secret, the secret will propagate across society. To a certain extent, copyright embodies some of those consequences.
From this page:
http://www.xfree86.org/legal/licence.html
However, some other Open Source compatible licenses are considered too restrictive for XFree86 use. They include the GNU Public License and the Perl Artistic License.
Part of the motivation for our licensing choice was to carry on the original MIT X11 tradition of allowing the code to be used as widely as possible, including in both free and commercial products.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
While I will agree that flerbage is quite clever, and in fact very important. A complete analysis is of the full effects a single change in the world on a persons flerbate is completely beyond human capacity.
ESR has given a simple and incomplelete analysis of his thoughts about what are important to him about the effects of various laws being enacted.
There is a place for RMS, and as long as he doesn't try and coerce me into using the GPL he is fine by me. He can adovcate its use, and cite how useful it is, and how other license are bad. Just don't tell me I can't make one up on my own.
The FSF has made an incredible contribution to the world. I use FSF software everyday. I make a living using the GNU C++ compiler. I appreciate the tools they have provided me. My boss appreciate the fact that they are free, and he has no worries about the how many people are using it at once like we do with the Oracle Licenses.
That all said, I believe that if people agree on Licenses that is okay. The problem is that too many people blindly agree to a shrinkwrap license and are unaware that they could have just given up rights to their firstborn child. My hope is that all this debate is to make a broader set of people realize that the license is just as critical as features.
Oh now this is now getting too long....
Kirby
Unlike you, some people have to be worried about being beaten, shot, or imprisoned. The last century, over a hundred million people were killed by their government. Given that perspective, it's reasonable to worry about being beaten, shot, or imprisoned.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I believe it is more important for everyone to have freedom, even if it does reduce individual freedom.
Spoken like a true fascist. No, really, that's what they used to say. Go read about it if you don't believe me.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
'The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few'
If you are to assume that the highest good is the greatest good for greatest number, then we have an excellent argument for bringing back slavery. After all, the majority were well served by the institution, and the rights of relatively few were compromised. Indeed, those called upon to serve should recognize their civic duty and social responsibility to the greater good. So I'll submit the highest good is not the greatest good for the greatest number, the highest good is preservation of the rights of the individual. By your argument, we should be entitled to own slaves, because the good of all outweighs the good of a few individuals.
There is no "society", there are only individuals and families."
--Margeret Thatcher
Oh man the article is the most finely crafted piece of FUD I ever saw.
First. The author does not mention the current state of things. We have a PC software monopoly running gangster practices - a heavyweight that would not allow programmers to develop and sell their software anyway. There are very few successful software companies able to sell what they created, in a world where patents and copyrights and proprietary protocols will deny you every right at information. Hell, and even take away "consumer freedom" (think Microsoft again) by pushing their proprietary OS down PC users' throat.
Second. The author makes an alleged motive for the FSF which he cannot prove.
This distorts the whole picture - suddenly we are in an ideal world with the evil FSF to take away our "flerbage".
Congratulations to Eric for twisting the facts and letting the people see the "obvious answer"!
Now to RealityMaster's post:
Shall I say again, if you think corporations give a flying duck about you and your rights, you are stupid. Plain as that.
If you think a corp. would think before stealing your code if they had enough weight to crush you as an independent developer, you are stupid twice. The world is not the "ideal nice place" Eric wants you to believe. If you still believe Eric then go code your great little application which won't sell - or hurry up and go donate all your code to Sun. Or Microsoft. Or Adobe. I am sure they will pat you on the head.
I hate to bring this to you but writing software for sale piece by piece is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It requires a lot of inspiration, hard work, years of usability testing - during which you have to buy clothes, feed your family etc. If you think the only barrier to getting rich by selling packaged code is GPL then I sympathize. Really.
To me, the article seems to confuse the main issue. An example of the main issue, for me, is that if you use, or program for, Microsoft Windows, you are effectively a dog on Bill Gates' leash. Bill can do whatever he wants with you. He can refuse to support new hardware. He can decide that your copy of Windows is obsolete. He can decide that your old hardware is obsolete. He can, under the DMCA, remotely disable your entire OS. He can support U.S. spy agencies in a hidden way. He can avoid fixing bugs because he wants to save some so that you will be interested in buying a new release.
The GPL is a sophisticated way of avoiding being under the control of a dictator. That's where the word "freedom" applies.
Bush's education improvements were
Personally, I'm inclined to agree with the FSF; I believe it is more important for everyone to have freedom, even if it does reduce individual freedom.
But everyone does not have freedom if it is reduced for some, but not others. Forcing a person, corporation etc., evil or not, to pay to help their competitor's profitibility by virtue of a foreced software licence absolutly removes liberty. An example:
I own a company - Spacely Sprockets. I want a new some new software that will increase my efficiancy. This software does not exist, and there is no interest for development of this software outside of my industry. I can't code my way out of a paper bag. The only way to get this software is to commission it - either by hiring a development team, or by hiring an indepentant developer. Anyway you look at it I have to pay. Let's say for the sake of argument that the development costs are... one million dollars. OK. The numbers work out. It will pay for itself in a couple years. I sign the big check and my company can operate more efficiently. I bought the development of the software, but if I can't have a licence for it that allows me to control it, my competitor, Cogswell Cogs, will have all of the benefits of my million dollar project, without having to pay let loose of some serious coin. Cogswell can then have the increased effeciancy without the expense. He can sell his competing product for less than I can, and possibly put me out of business. All on my dime. If this licence limitation is there, I would never have the software developed.
My liberty to create the software is there, but the price of liberty is dear indeed.
i think he was trying to determine rms's position on things. i think the question would make more sense to you if he said:
hypothetically speaking; if it were possible to outlaw proprietary software licences would you?
the 'you' here being rms. this would establish rms's position on "free as in flerbage" software.
-- john
ROFL
Oh yes that just what we need is the goverment involved with software funding, which mean they will want to have a say in software technology. Open your eyes they screwed up the MS anti-trust case because they went after them on the browser not business practices. During the trial even the other anti-MS crowd like Sun starting seeing a possible problem with the goverment getting into the business of defining what software is. You can't say MS can't put parts of a browser into the OS, then say putting part of a web browser (Tux) is okay.
What you need is to get a Open Software governing body that all people and corporations can respect. In other words no Stallman or GPL. Then setup to be a charitable organization and start getting donations. Then publish policy on how developers qualify to receive funding, how projects are monitored, timeframes to expect the deliveriables. Setup standards for documentation and real QA testing. You get this established and then more important than users corporations would donate and fund open source.
We have stop-lights at intersections to ensure that dozens of cars will yeild for one or two cars wating to merge.
The needs of the many to be operated on for free outweighs the needs of the doctors to be paid...
I can go on like this for days, but the point remains the same... In a democracy, you get what you've earned, and not what someone else decides you deserve.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As I read it, they are pointing out that Tim O'Reilly's assertion, that
is, by a reading ESR says he agrees with, tantamount to saying that attempting to exercise power is a fundamental right.This is not a "fundamental logical reversal" at all: it's an accurate reading. The only fundamental reversal here is in ESR's hypothesis (that they'd want proprietary licenses outlawed), which he's making up.
I don't know many people who believe one can legislate morality, and none that I respect. But that's precisely the belief he's imputing here, and for a position they haven't taken. This is not good. Unless I'm missing something, he owes an apology.
I think he's so irritated he can't think straight, and I think the FSF's moralizing is the cause. He's trying to get free (he calls it "open", because "free" pisses off the suits) software into businesses, and having the FSF in the news with moral arguments in favor of freedom is, for his purposes, severely counterproductive.
A lot of people share those purposes -- me, too -- and his reasoning on what will convince bidness types seems rock-solid, so I can understand the irritation.
The FSF also wants free software used. Big surprise there, eh? They're just after the same ends for different reasons, and they're more interested in the reasons than the ends: using proprietary licenses is immoral, with the unstated (and perhaps un-held, this one's mine:) belief that immoral behavior produces undesirable results just by the nature of the beast.
So "open" is arguing for the demonstrable relative desirability of the results while "free" takes it as a premise.
These don't have to be at odds with each other. In fact, from where I sit, if either one is correct, they both are. But "free" says "open" is missing the point, and "open" says "free" is missing the prize. No point, no prize; no prize, no point.
Maybe. One thing's certain, though: if the squabbling keeps up at this intensity only M$ and M$-wannabes will look savvy. Someone's been looking for a wedge.
And, perhaps, both the free and the open "camps" (Lord, has it come to this?) have gotten a little greedy. Live and let live applies to the suits, too, guys. Let's focus more on the software, let that speak a bit louder. If it can't, what's the point or the prize?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Anyone using the term "flerbage" foolishly brands themself as a complete butthead, as overwhemlingly obnoxious as ESR. Don't do it!
I used to think ESR was an idiot. I think I have to revise that opinion: now I think he is a *dangerous* idiot. Or maybe it is worse still, and he actually -knows- how stupid his argument as, and he is promoting it anyway.
In what ESR writes about "choosing" a license, he brings in a huge range of naturalizing assumptions about the legal framework of intellectual property which give meaning to choosing a license. There is nothing natural or inevitable about all these laws. They can and should be changed.... and if the unfreedom of existing bad laws is removed, what we are left with is the FSF's vision (or something close to it).
Let's try an obvious transposition. I won't play with silly anagrams for names though. Suppose that in the future, a chemical company creates a substance that reduces the harmful effects of pollutants in the air. They release this chemical into the air of big cities. In the meanwhile, the "Big Chemical Company IP Protection Act" has been passed to "clarify" the IP rights of patent holders. As a matter of ESR's style of freedom (or cabbage, or whatever he wants to call it), the chemical company should be allowed to "license" the breathing of their chemical (which is in all the air) on whatever terms they -freely- choose. Obviously, violators of their intellectual property rights will be dealt with by the police and the courts and the prisons.
RMS--and the Free Breathing Foundation (OK, I can't resist one fictional name)--according to ESR are confused and misleading in advocating the "freedom" to breath the air. Actually, the FBF now threatens the poor chemical company with all sort of restrictions on the terms on which they can license breathing (says ESR). Surely -freedom- would let them license on whatever terms they want.
Back to the real world, away from ESR's. Being able to breath without facing criminal sanction is a basic matter of genuine freedom. Just because there are unjust laws, it doesn't mean acting within the law is real freedom--Kant's "arbeit macht frei" to the side. Actual freedom is not facing restriction and violence for doing what one should be able to do. Likewise--and in this very world--a law restricting my reuse of software code is an unjust law. Obedience to this law is not freedom, but exactly its contrary. In the FSF's ideal world, it is not that the GPL would be imposed, but that no license restriction would be allowed at all. That is, less restrictions rather than more, versus the current unjust and unfree system. As a strategy and a compromise, the FSF have made a "viral" license that turns copyright laws against themselves in a certain way. The GPL is better that proprietary licenses, but far worse than the world in which licenses on software would be considered as absurd as licenses on breathing.
Buy Text Processing in Python
Somehow I just can't imagine Mel Gibson in blue face paint and a kilt charging down a hill in front of hundreds of Scottish warriors yelling FLLLEEEERRRRRRBAAAGGE!!!!
The only problem with Python, is that ESR is a vocal cheerleader, which makes it look bad. I shiver in disgust whenever he says something I agree with.
I think he posted it wrong it should be read...
"I believe it is more important for everyone to have freedom, even if it does reduce individuals freedom."
power = freedom
Hitler certainly had more power to his individual self then any other individual. Is that a matter of hypocracy?
"They obfuscate more than they enlighten, they cloud the issues rather than clearing the air."
I say everything twice, repeating what I say a second time.
No. Both fascism and socialism believe that the needs of the society outweigh the individual. But socialism believes in equality, while fascism does not. Now try to find a society that never takes away some individual freedom for the interest of the society as a whole. Just because he's not a libertarian doesn't make him a fascist.
You can explicitly include language in your contract with the development company that they will not release the code to the outside world, and that the code will remain a trade secret of Spacely Sprockets once it has been developed.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Perhaps it is time to evolve beyond this very old argument. Others besides RMS and ESR need to define what opensource and free software is in addition to the current definitions. We need a bot/service provider to output stored definitions whenever multiple interpretations of a word come up. Print it as a local or global def. list. Wouldn't this be better then arguing about opensource and free software defs. over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over license arguments too and over and over and over ...
--ftide
I am surprised that ESR doesn't even understand the basis of the FSF's argument. The GPL and legal remedies are temporary solutions to a bigger problem, that the government allows people and corporations to "own" information. What the FSF is calling for, in the grand scheme of things, is a RELAXATION of regulations -- allowing users to copy and modify so-called intellectual "property" as they see fit, by removing the idea of a government-enforced ownership of information.
So, it is clear to me that the FSF is not asking for a law banning proprietary licenses; rather, they are asking that we do away with the idea of 'license' altogether.
If you want to start over analyzing things, how about this... do we `need' slaves, or do we `want' slaves?
on the planet and is a great example of why Linux is still a cute little backwater in the otherwise huge *desktop* software market. How many people outside of /. care enough about whether the software they are using is "free as in beer" or "free as in speech" or what license it is issued under that they would switch to a competing product? How many? 100 - 1,000 - 10,000? Laughable numbers compared to the installed user base of Windows. Look, most people view software as a tool. Think of it as a Craftsman wrench. They only get bent out of shape when it doesn't work and what happens then? You think your average Joe will fire up a forge in his garage to cast a newer, better wrench or repair a broken one? No, he's going to take it back to the store.
And now we come to the really interesting part of the argument: what happens when there is one store that sells that tool while their competition sells tools that, while workable, have to be assembled from their component pieces but are purported to be better as their designs are on the internet for all to see and copy? Joe average user wants to get the job done and the company that publishes their specs on the internet can take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut, he goes to the store that provides what he needs.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves. For all of this hoopla, the real problem of trying to build a product comparable to windows is being gradually tuned out. For the life of me, I can't seriously think that MS is "afraid" of any open source initiative with this kind of shit going on. I don't know who coined the phrase but "lead follow or get out of the way" applies wonderfully here. The open source community is like two birds fighing over a dead squirrel in the road with an 18 wheeler bearing down on them.
The only way that software would be released is if one of your employees or one of the developers gave it or sold it to cogswell cogs, do you think these developers will sell it for such a low price. Also why doesnt spacely sprockets offer to sell cogswell cogs for the software. Or better yet why cant all these companies work together funding research in making all their businesses more effecient? Why is it that one of them has to try this, I am sure they are all thinking about it at diffrent levels. It will even lower the costs, if each company put in money in this research. We are not talking about a new sprocket that could put cogswell cogs out of business, so this is not really that much of a competitive thing.
I'll be sure to pass on your name and address to the NRA. They will be thrilled to learn that only people who "earn" the right to bear arms should be allowed to have a gun.
Facism is more interested in outlining a group of people for preferential treatment, and de-humanising the rest of humanity. The second group are then used to serve the interests of the first.
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
While you spend your time arguing over nothing, Microsoft keeps improving thier software.
Argue over nonsense less, write good code more.
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
Of course that's exactly how it works in the real world. But if Spacely Sprockets owns the code as it's own copyrighted trade secret, there is absolutely no point in a GPL licence. If Spacely Sprockets later sells the product to Coswell Gogs, it will certainly be under a different contract.
The dev house could choose 'infect' the product with GPL code of course, but that means a bunch of additional verbage in the standard contract which would turn into an Open Source licence educational sit-in. If Spacely pays $1million for something, he'll want to own it. No dev house would risk blowing the deal because corporate lawyers have to come in and scratch their heads for $200/hour. That's not to say that OSS infrastructure like Apache or Postgres couldn't be used, tho.
Flerbage: I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent.
Make up any posistion, what so ever on copyrights, programs and freedom.
If you follow the rules according to that position, your (so-called) "flerbage" will not be affected in any way, what, at all.
So, you don't want to test what maximizes "flerbage", it's simply misleading to even enter that definition into the convesation.
What you really wan't to do, is list the requirements of the interested cotegories:
Helps "Use" the software
Helps pay bills
No two people work alike
Software should "just work", like lights and phones
Share producst from different software producers
Dont do work that others aready did
Ability to control your creation
Allows you to make monty
A wealthy country is a healthy country
Another term in power please!
At least in the US, they paid the campaign
Now all you have to do, is keep adding things to the list and maximize the "happiness". No wonder there are so many conflicting solutions to an equation without a single maximum in all the dimensions.
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?
The right answer is "no". But turn the question around.
If you two could get copyright law overturned, would you do it?
Here, the answer is an obvious "yes". Microsoft could still get people to sign licenses: after all, a contract is a contract. But then they have to follow the chain of contracts, and sue for breach of contract.
For example:
They sell you Windows 2007 and you sign a contract saying that you will not give it to anybody else. Then you give a copy to a friend, who gives a copy to a distributor who makes and sells millions of copies. Microsoft would have trouble suing the distributor: he did not breach any contract, and he did not deprive anybody of their copy. Microsoft could sue you: the court would probably restrict your damages to a small multiple of the purchase price. That's if they could find you in the first place.
On the other hand, your contract may state the penalty that breach of contract is the full development price of the product: say a billion dollars or so. So how is Microsoft going to get 1 billion out of you? And WTF were you doing signing that contract in the first place?
But we did not deprive Microsoft of any flerbage, did we? They could still sell under any sort of contract they want to. And they can enforce that contract.
Bryan
Not in FSF's Perfect World(TM). There is no such thing as a proprietary licence in utopia. Trade secrets sound suspiciously like IP if you ask me.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
The purpose of the word "flerbage" was to create a word with zero emotional connotations, so that the rights, privileges and permissions that pertain to software can be discusses rationally.
"Liberty" has just as much emotional connotation as "freedom". Perhaps more so.
When RMS says that Free Software gives people Freedom and Liberty, I get all choked up about it. Very emotional. My great great great grandfather died so that I could be free. My great great grandfather died so that I could have liberty. By God if they would wield muskets and flintlocks against King George, then I am justified in nuking Redmond, shooting Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison, and tar and feathering all the small shareware authors!
By using the word "flerbage", everything comes into perspective. My great great great grandfather fought and died because my great great great aunts, uncles and cousins were being hung, arrested, having their homes confiscated, their livelihoods taxed and their neighbors impressed into the British Navy. But when I decide to play the latest proprietary first-person shoot-em-up game, my Liberty and Freedom is intact. My life and well-being is secure. My property is undamaged. My freedom of action with regards to my person and my property is completely unhindered. And I am not forced to provide labor, services or skills to the games's author.
Using proprietary software is like walking into a closet and closing the door behind you. According to the dictionary definition, I would indeed be less "free". I don't have the freedom to flail my arms about. I don't have enough room to have the freedom to lie down. But I am not a slave. I am not subjugated or dominated by the closet. At any time I can simply open the door and leave. And should I decide that the use of a proprietary program becomes too onerous, I can simply and easily stop using it.
I may indeed be less "free" when I walk into a closet or use proprietary software. But my flerbage is intact.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There is a time and a place for all sorts of licences, even licences that some people don't like/hate. I will admit that Microsoft has become an Evil(tm) money grabbing corporation that should be dealt with rather severely for the wrongs it has committed.
but at the same time, it did standardize the desktop, introduce a GUI to the PC world, and provide some semblance of multitasking to the average household.
Other licences have their strength and weaknesses, their opportunities for exploitation, or limits on utilization etc. and there is a ploace for all of them in the software world.
Personally, "information wants to be free" "death to IP" type people really scare me. They are some type of tech-enabled anarchists, the same type of people that hate the record companies and steal CD's/movies/DVD's etc from stores, and at the same time would cry foul if the companies went under and no longer produced music for them to steal.
I'd love to hear why the power of choice would be a bad thing, even if you choose a proprietary license. Try and write a cheat-resistant multiplayer game with open source on both client and server, and see just how far you get before the cheats make the game unplayable except among friends
This is a brilliant example of why proprietary licences are useful/nessesary in some instances.
I say different strokes for different strokes, and eventually a licence, or (most likely)several will end up victorious. But in the end everyone wins.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
What history tells us must not be forgotten: proprietary software reduces the amount of flerbage everyone has. You may not understand why when you're sitting on a cloud and thinking, as ESR did, but when you come back to the ground and see the actual effects of proprietary software, you can't argue that proprietary software is good.
It's nice to be able to think, but it's even nicer when you have the experiment's results to prove that you were wrong. And then you know and you can't be wrong anymore, because reality is the only reference.
Does Georg C. F. Greve also have pre-IPO stock options in the FSF? sweet deal for him!
cpeterso
check it out: http://news.linuxprogramming.com/news_story.php3?l tsn=2001-08-16-002-06 (scroll down to "And now for some not so nice things..")
A few choice quotes:
"Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him. This attempt failed ... I hope he will now shut
up forever. The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a
control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon
as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back.
NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella ..."
Please realise that Eric Raymond is just plain lying. He suggests that Stallman asks for new laws that could put software developers into jail. The opposite is true: Stallman ask that copyright for programs be abolished, period. One law less, fewer people that will go to jail.
Programmers can still do whatever they will, the state just won't help them enforce their copyright.
The article contains more untruths. One is, that the existence of proprietary software does not restrict user's freedom, beacause he does not have to use it. The fact is, that people are ordered to use software by their employer and thus bound by the licenses if they like it or not.
Other example: Game developers are forced to spend their time helping MS since if they develop for Linux instead, they will not survive.
(They might choose to help Sony or Nintendo instead, but that is not much better).
ESR writes the following in his article:
From where is Raymond getting this? I have never read anything from the FSF or Stallman that advocates making proprietary licenses illegal or anything even morally equivalent to this position. Can anyone supply a reference to any statement from the FSF or Stallman supporting Raymond?
RMS: All your software are belong to GPL.
ESR: What you say !!
RMS: You have no chance to profit make your time.
ESR: Take off every 'GPL'.
ESR: For great flerbage!
.. Foundation for Software Flerbage
..right?
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Thanks, slashdot. I always enjoy reading a decent troll from ESR. He has got to be one of the last people in the world that is still defending Microsoft's monopoly.
Maybe RMS is talking about relaxation and stuff, but he is acting differently. If I try to use any bit of GNU code in the project that has license not seen as fit by RMS (like BSD license, for example) - he will crush on me with all power given to him by the evil law and government, and he will gladly use all the evil power of copyright to it's least bit to prohibit me from using this code. That's looks dangerously close to 'war for peace' and 'lying for truth'.
And mind that - the usage of that code in the non-GPL project won't devoid any user of any freedoms to use the code - it will be still available for anybody. But what RMS wants is to coerce me into going along his rules, using all those arguments that you just proved are evil and immoral. What does this makes about the whole concept?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
prietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage". (Or "freedom", if you prefer).R>
"flerbage" would be the absense of copyright - not passing new restrictions on proprietary licences, but rather removing the exisitng restrictions that make proprietary licences possible.
You really need to beware of excessive flerbage. If I had enough of it I could come oven and excercise my flerbage on your car, bed, shower, TV, etc. Flerbage is limited all around us. (just try running around your block several time naked and you will see what I mean) And you (and many others) happen to not like a certain limiting of your flerbage. And claim the moral high ground crying for "Maximum 'flerbage'", when all you want is maximum software copying flerbage.
The simple fact is, that software costs money to develop, and developers need to recover their development costs, and possibly (gasp) make money. If you remove the mechanism which guarantees them revenue, developers stop developing, and then (surprise) no more software (or at least a lot less). I know you don't want to pay for software, but I don't want to pay for my food, but that doesn't mean I break the law to obtain it without paying for it.
Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject
For those of you who want to call it Linux, try using it without plugging it in.
I believe it is more important for everyone to have freedom, even if it does reduce individual freedom.
There can not be any freedom but individual one. Read a history of any totalitarian state and see that they all asked people to sacrifice individual freedom for public good and at the end people got no public good and the worst coercion possible.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time without my consent. (Observe that I am not prejudicing the discussion by assuming that the software I write is my property.)
So far as the United States is concerned, this flerbage sounds like it was dealt with by the 5th Amendment and the 14th Amendment, to wit, no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Observe that the Constitution extends protection to all property, not just physical property, which would include software.
Since citizens elect the people who make the laws, due process is about all you can hope for. The alternative is anarchy where you defend your property as best you can with a gun. Anarchy is generally considered to reduce flerbage more than a constitution, elections, a judicial system and a police force.
But now let's suppose that, after years of lobbying, messrs Kuhn and Stallman get a law passed that makes proprietary licenses illegal.
In that case, the quarrel is with the legislators more than Kuhn and Stallman. Only the legislators have the power to expand or contract flerbage. Kuhn and Stallman have asserted some provocative rights, which are worth debating, but they have no more control over flerbage than any other registered voter.
Hey ESR, who's side or you on anyways? Looks like Big Businesses to me.
Me thinks you are just a suit diguised as a gun toting hick.
You mix that with nationalism or soviet bolshevism. The fascism is a totalitarian concept which says that the need of the society prevails on individual needs, and as such one can be coerced, jailed, deprived of property or life at will, if it benefits the society (or if the rulers of the society see the benefit in it).
Socialism is more economical concept of state property and state-controlled economics. It does not deal too much with individual rights and freedoms, though they are of course influenced by the economic model. For example, it is possible to have democratic socialist state or fascist socialist state.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Wrong, you pay pennies on the dollar
"Pennies on the dollar" can mean 99 cents on the dollar.
for the production of the textbook, and the rest is royalties to the publisher and authors of the book.
You're assuming textbooks can't be released under the GNU Free Documentation License after their first printing. (Why use GNU FDL?) At least in the print industry, the publisher is less likely to take all rights from the author than it would in the record or movie industry.
If people realized that the abolition of copyright
I'm not necessarily for abolition of the copyright monopoly. I'm for restoring it to its original purpose: promoting the creation of new works. Retroactive copyright term extensions do NOT promote the creation of new works; most works make most of their money by far in the first 28 years. I'm also for full disclosure of the terms of any license (especially fair use restrictions) BEFORE the license is bought: "This DVD contains CSS encryption and may be played only on players licensed by DVD CCA. You may NOT copy the caption text. You may NOT grab frames. You may NOT back up the video or audio. You may NOT skip the Special Offers that precede the program."
removes or squeezes the profit motive out of [the entertainment industry], and that such action then reduces both the number of suppliers and the quality and quantity of what is produced, it no longer sounds like a Good Idea(TM)
Even if the monopoly were abolished, there would still be people who create for the fun of creating. The love of money should never be a fellow's primary motivation.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The FSF has never advocated the passing of additional laws that regulate what programmers can or cannot do. On the contrary the FSF has specifically asked for the removal of a law, namely copyright for programs.
Nice try ESR. Trying to get yourself a place in hacker lore by coining a new term. Sorry noones buying it. We already have words for that, less stupid words. No ones buying it.
on the other hand, Apepyvignli doesn't sound very friendly. But at least no-one can go crying that they are left out...
Don't tell me, another license? :)
This sig is intentionally left blank
Isn't this also the idea of democracy? To take away "freedoms" from the government, as a means to give more freedom to the citizens?
Isn't this, in fact, the idea of any society? To take away from individual persons the freedom to do whatever they want (like owning slaves, killing people, raping women etc.), and force them to act according to laws, as a means to give more freedom to the public as a whole?
The difference between facism and democracy is not the existence of laws, it is who creates them, and it is if the individual restrictions of freedom are applied equally to all citizens.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Ya know, libertarians and socialists both call my views fascist... I guess that means I'm doing the right thing...
Raymond states his ethical commitment as "increase ferblage". I wish to argue that flerbage is an ill-conceived term.
My Ferblage, he defines, consists of three req's
1. Nobody shall kill me
2. Nobody shall rob me of my physical property
3. Nobody shall take my time without my consent.
Let us investigate whether these axioms are necessary and sufficient.
Obviously 1. and 2. are necessary and everybody will agree. However, 3. is quite difficult to enforce. Demonstrations cause traffic jams, traffic jams rob my time, should demonstrations be outlawed? Should the police be disallowed to question suspects and witnesses in a murder case, because it is taking up their time? Can we require citizens to wait at traffic lights? What about the draft?
Conclusion: Not being robbed of my time is very desirable, but hardly a necessary right.
Now for completeness. It seems to me that ERS should be quite happy living, for example, in China. They have some good facilities (e.g. Apple) where he could work. Freedom of speech, usage of the internet, freedom of movement, freedom to buy what you like all don't seem to matter to him. After all, these have nothing to do with flerbage.
Surely Raymond would not consider that his ferblage is reduced when he gets jailed for amusingly mangling the chairman's name. It would be his own fault, just like it would be my own fault if I got jailed for not properly licensing my software.
The proper word is "claim". Having liberty means having a prima facie right to happiness, e.g. nobody has the right to restrict your happiness without legitimately justifying it somehow.
On the other hand, having a claim against someone means that this other person has a responsibility to you. In this case the responsibility is to refrain from certain things to you that you don't want done.
Check out Norman Barry's Introduction to Modern Political Theory for additional information.
Why does O'reilly have any say into what's open source, free software, flabergiby, slavery or liberty?
Since when does a book publish call the shots for programmers? wtf is this?
Eric Raymond has inspired for me a new nickname that I will forever associate with him. And though it's not exactly a new term, it certainly seems to fit the person: CapMan. Actually, on the comic book cover where I see this flashing in colors of metallic red and copper, the full title reads "The Incredible CapMan". The question is--who, or more precisely, what, is a CapMan?
Simple, silly, CapMan is short for Capitalist Maniac. We could also precede that description with a few other modifiers, such as gun-toting, narcissistic, egomaniacal CapMan, and we would have a full description of the King of the Bazaar.
Up to this point in this post, probably as far as the moderators will read before modding this down, I've disparaged one of the gods of the Open Source Marketing Engine--literally, the High Priest himself--in a highly personal way. If you're still with me, allow me to elucidate exactly why this comic vision has risen in my eyes.
ESR is undoubtedly a talented individual, but his personal vision of unfettered, fully armed laissez-faire capitalism, is, like all proponents of the creed, self-contradictory, and, ultimately, selfish in the way that only readers of Rand can admire as a positive quality. What has always galled me about this unspoken but fully present theme in his discourse is the barely-veiled self-promotional qualities of it: what's good for Open Source is good for ESR, often VERY good for ESR; he's certainly improved his profile by his crusade. Beyond that, though, is the fundamental contradiction of anarcho-capitalist/right-libertarian "freedom" espoused by the tenets of ESR and his Open Source cronies. Though they talk about the "communist dictatorship" of RMS and FSF as if that will eventually cut into their profits (because such an anti-business model cannot be sold to the suits who throw them scraps from their tables), they have little problem using the software that allows them their little capitalist fantasies, and would, no doubt, pull a Bill Gates if the FSF released its wares under BSD-style licensing.
Simply, ESR's argument about a law for *any* licensing is a straw man. In a free world, there ARE no laws, because the individuals participating in such a mature society would not need to be told what to do like young children at the dinner table. I find it particularly interesting, though unsurprising, that ESR's "found contradiction" in the FSF model is viewed by him as a failing of logic; I'm sure that RMS can only be nodding somewhere, saying "precisely my point". The GPL is the ultimate software Leviathan: it is there until we're mature enough to not need it. (Besides, does anyone *really* believe a law against non-GPL licences would ever see the light of day? Perhaps in ESR's Form world, but like many things outside of that world, logical extremes to make a point cannot and will not ever exist: Plato sounds good in _The Republic_, too, but no one wnats that form of justice, either.)
Why is that when push comes to shove, capitalist arguments for or against laws always wind up being the equalavent of their communist counterparts? Shouldn't we look beyond the inherent statist principles of these two economic systems to a place where neither are necessary? *My* reading of the GPL is an attempt to do this--within the current paradigm of statist legalism. Perhaps if ESR looked beyond his own immediate needs, he might appreciate the long-range vision that the GPL represents.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Either that or it means you really are a fascist :)
I never realised hom much ESR likes spoonerisms[?]> . Gill Bates of Sicromoft, Stichard Rallman, and so on.
You mean like property rights?
To illustrate the doublethink...
ESR suggests:
But one could also say:
In fact, I find the counterpoints more logically consistent than ESR's points. If copyright or contract law was changed to disallow such restrictive licences, people wouldn't be punished for offering such licences, such licences would simply be unenforceable, and as it currently stands, actions (unauthorized copying) which by his own definition do not infringe on another's flerbage, can cause the state to infringe on yours.
Goddamn. Doublethink and newspeak. ESR has crossed the line with this one.
"Flerbage" is also the dumbest attempted coinage I've heard in a long time. He'll carry the embarassment of this to his grave.
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
Quoted from the last question in this web page: http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/info-press/2001/0000 06.html
QUESTION: If there was a button, that you could push and force all
companies to free their software would you press it?
STALLMAN: Well, I would only use this for published software. You know, I
think that people have the right to write a program privately, and use it.
And that includes companies. This is privacy issue. And it's true, there
can be times when it is wrong to do that, like if it is tremendously
helpful to humanity, and you are withholding it from humanity that is a
wrong, but that's a different kind of wrong. It's a different issue,
although it's in the same area.
But yes, I think all published software should be free software. And
remember, when it's not free software, that's because of Government
intervention. The Government is intervening to make it non-free. The
Government is creating special legal powers to hand out to the owners of
the programs, so that they can have the police stop us from using the
programs in certain ways. So I would certainly like to end that.
I happen to agree with Eric. Most of Stallman's actions boil down to forms of coercion. Read the GPL. The whole point is to enforce certain behaviors that RMS considers socially beneficiary. (Compare most other licenses, which primarily prohibit antisocial behaviors.) Review the history of the LGPL. Stallman tried, and failed, to force the GPL on anybody who used gcc. Look behind the scenes, study things like the glibc takeover.
Stallman wants to force his definition of freedom on you, whether you want it or not.
Of course software can't have liberty, it's not a person! So it MUST mean the software is free of monetary cost.
That's an extremely narrow definition of the word "free." I'm assuming that you're a Libertarian whose values are determined solely on economic terms.
How about a free cat? A cat cannot have liberty because it's not a person? I see plenty of feral cats that I'd consider "free" in my neighborhood. I assume that a Libertarian's first impression of that statement is "hey, someone's giving out kittens, free of charge!"
BTW, the rants on your website goes through great lengths on how FSF/RMS engages in deceptive "doublespeak". Now how do you reconcile "property rights", something Libertarians value above anything, including humanity? Can property have "rights"? It's not a person, no? Ah yes, property-owning peoples' rights, yes...
~ACwhen my RH stock soared.....
for a moment I was really living
none of this FSF crap
BMW,porsche,ferrari, yachts here I come
SNIFF BWAAH! BWAAH !
daddy gates!!
Make the bad freedom loving hairy man go away
Since all ESR really cares about is that no one threatens his physical person, property, or time; then he certainly won't object to my redefining the word "flerbage".
/his property/) definition of the word, then I have certainly stepped on his toes, haven't I? Gosh, I hope he doesn't come after me with his big pistol.
Entry: flerbage
Function: noun
1: the leitmotif of a pompous windbag
"...more flerbage from ESR".
Of course, if ESR feels compelled to spend time defending "his" (as in
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
You must cause any work that you distribute OR publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
If you read that slow 3 times you might become convinced that you understand what this crucial paragraph means. Do so now, before we proceed to test your Commie IQ.
Commie IQ Test Question #1:
You're an independent, sole proprieter, consulting programmer who obtains a copy of the source of a GPL'ed time-sheet application to which you add enhancements that could benefit a bunch of other independent, sole proprieter, consulting programmers. You give copies to a bunch of your business associates who are independent, sole proprieter, consulting programmers with whom you frequently collaborate. Are you required to license the enhanced time-sheet program, as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of the General Public License?
YES or NO
Commie IQ Test Question #2:
You're an employee of a Fortune 500 investment banking concern on Wall Street who, in that role, obtains a copy of the source of a GPL'ed time-sheet application which you enhance in a way that could benefit your employer if distributed to your fellow employees acting in their roles as employees. Being a good employee, you, in your role as said employee, proceed to realize the potential benefit to your employer by distributing copies of your enhanced program to a bunch of your fellow employees. Are you and/or your employer required to license the enhanced time-sheet program, as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of the General Public License?
YES or NO
Commie IQ Test Question #3:
You're a worker hero of the KGB during the Soviet Era who obtains a copy of the source of a GPL'ed time-sheet application which you enhance in a way that could benefit the workers of the world. Being a good worker hero, you, in your role as said worker hero, proceed to realize the potential benefit to the workers of the world by distributing copies of your enhanced program to a bunch of your fellow worker heros -- all within the Kremlin and its agencies world-wide. Are you and/or your glorious revolutionary withering-away state required to license the enhanced time-sheet program, as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of the General Public License?
YES or NO
Commie IQ Test Question #4:
Were Stahlman's parents members of the Communist Party?
YES or NO
Commie IQ Test Question #5:
Did Stahlman receive funding from the Soviet Union while establishing the General Public License?
YES or NO
Commie IQ Test Question #6:
Did a Jacob Schiff -- patrilineal ancestor of Al Gore's son-in-law and founder of major investment banking houses on Wall Street near the start of the 1900's -- finance Leon Trotsky's Bolshevick Revolution thereby starting the purges that Stalin ramped up to the extermination of tens of millions of people in eastern Europe just prior to WW II?
YES or NO
Commie IQ Test Question #7:
Does "distribute" mean the same thing as "publish" in paragraph 2.b. of the General Public License?
YES or NO
Answers:
- YES
- NO according to the FSF's lawyers & GPL FAQ
- NO
- YES according to folk-lore from Santa Rosa Hackers Conference
- YES according to folk-lore from Santa Rosa Hackers Conference
- YES
As for question 7, you'll have to take this up with the lawyers for the Free Software Foundation, because I've never seen a straight answer on what we are to make of the distinction between the terms "distribute OR publish" in paragraph 2.b. of the General Public License.One thing is clear, however:
The Free Software Foundation follows in a long tradition of hostility toward the original American value placed on independent innovation -- instead favoring large organizations, whether they be Fortune 500 Wall Street investment bankers or governments.
In other words, "Commie Hipocrisy" is redundant.
Seastead this.
Yes, I did include the ending hyperlink marker on the initial link to paragraph 2.b in the parent message to this one, and I did preview to ensure it came up as expected. It was only after posting the message that the run-away hyperlink appeared. The originally submitted HTML is available in the body of the html at this link.
Seastead this.
When did I say anything about a proprietary licence. If you don't want the code distributed, just don't release it.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I write software. For fun, and for money.
For fun, I write software I happen to need, or someone else happends to need. For money, I write software some company happens to need.
When I write software for money, I agree that the customer owns all rights I usually would own to software I write. I agree to many things, including schedules, quality of documentation and code, coding style, test procedures, acceptance criteria, and so on. All the usual contract stuff.
In the end, I'm paid pretty well. I produce code and documentation I can be proud of. I might not be a gee-whiz all-night coder, nor the zen master. But I still produce decent quality in decent time, pretty consistently. That's why I can do that for living.
However, if the customer would have to open the code to everyone else when they ship a product containing the code, my work would be worth less to the customer, and thus I would be paid less. When the customer chooses to open some of the produced code and documentation, that's OK, and I'm all the happier. But if they had to, always, all the code? To their competitors? Code that cost them quite a lot. And their competitors wouldn't need to pay a dime.
Of course things are more complex than that, and would be even if all code would be free.
I'd agree that some things (like the period for which copyrights and patents are granted) aren't as well as they could be, but abolishing copyrights is not the solution. Perhaps the rights granted to producers of immaterial goods should be rethought and remodeled, but taking them away completely isn't a good idea.
Spoken like someone who believes that government can do good, and that it is impossible for everyone to have total freedom. A compromise must be made somewhere. You and the FSF disagree about where.
So much for 'press' eh Eric?
Sorry I mistyped, Tux is a server, but my point stands.
I agree with you totally, but it's not even a matter of how much of the system (number of packages, bytes, whatever) is the product of the GNU project. Rather, of the contributors to your favourite Linux distro, who did their work with the intention of building a free operating system?
The Apache project set out to write a webserver, Larry Wall set out to write the "swiss army chainsaw" of programming languages, even Linus "only" intended to write a Unix kernel for the i386 architecture in the tradition of Minix. Only the GNU Project made it their task to build a complete operating system (using contributed components where possible of course, for obvious practical reasons).
Moreover, I use Linux because it's part of the GNU system; because it's free software. I would probably still be using Windows today (or maybe struggling with the HURD) if all we had was something called "Linux", available at no cost, but under a non-free license.
Then GNU/Linux came about, and millions learned about the free (as in beer) opereting system that was competing with Microsoft.
We should drop the F word, and call it Freedom Software. It may not sound as pure and snappy as free software, but it'll save us from having to explain this everytime somebody from the outside runs into Free Software. Freedom is a word that is harder to confuse with gratis.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I've got Nulix, a wonderful operating system developed by people who like to write code
He should have said NUG/Nulix. There he goes, denying credit the NUG project so richly deserves.
--Patrick
Oh, and I figured I'd just mention that I'll never use that F word since I think its stupid
More great editorial analysis and insightful commentary from the Slashdot crew. I'm not sure why I bother to think anymore, when I can always just say, 'I think its (sic) stupid.'
No suprise most of the comments here are on the third grade level.
Peace, or Not?
And I have to agree that their definition is better, as it is difficult for me to see how the "freedom" to have government authority impose your will on others who are not directly acting to harm you is important. This is like having the freedom to own slaves.
True idealism isn't the same thing as lusting after power to impose your philosophy on others (although many followers of various ideologies - the ones who make failed attempts at implementing them - forget this). It's a philosophical analysis and questioning of the underlying assumptions that everyone else is working from and trying to find a better overall solution, even if it isn't compatible with how lots of people happen to think at the moment.
Yes, I think there is a need for social change.
thank you. all of this angels on the head of a pin shit makes me puke.
So, if Microsoft asked you to sign (or click) away your mortgage for your home and the futures of your children and grandchildren just to use Windows, would you? Oh, you didn't know you signed your children away to Microsoft? Well, there's no excuse for not reading the click-through agreement. And that BSOD that you keep complaining about, well you're just SOL.
I admit, it's not the perfect analogy. But as someone else said, you're begging the question of what we want copyrights and licenses in the digital world to be in the first place. Personally I down't want to lease software. I don't want to rent it. I want to *own* it. I want to see what makes it tick. I want to fix it when it breaks, and I want to make it work in ways possibly unforeseen by the original author. That's what I want.
Honestly, the people who scare me the most are those that advocate the free market economy and then introduce corporate welfare initiatives so that struggling companies that should die, don't. If you have problems publishing your goods and services in the digital world, Then maybe you shouldn't be publishing them there in the first place, huh? (And yes, I would classify the DMCA as corporate welfare. It was one hell of a gift given by the Legislature.)
I just wanted to know when it was government's job to prop up failing business models with bad laws?.
Ever hear of a "trainer"? That's not a "brilliant" closed/open source problem. That's a problem with both open and closed source trusted clients. The poster even implied as much with the "among friends" phrase. Go read up on Schneier, the applied cryptography guy. He knows all about them.
He asks
But this could be worded rather differently. After all, proprietary licenses only exist because
of legal controls on freedom expression. So I ask ESR
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I see no boundry with "real" or "virtual" property. It is all the result of my volitional labor, to dispose of as I see fit.
There's the rub: As I see fit. Not RMS, not Bill Gatus of Borg, not the U.S. Patent Office.
If I rob another of their property to produce mine, it is no less theft than if I stole a tree to manufacture a chair.
Simple property laws have been in place for thousands of years. The idiocy of all these arguments is that they try to re-invent the wheel, to invent "new" rules when the old rules work every day just fine.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
you mean you missed the 'dancing leaves, pied-piper of hamlyn' page? or how about the 'power of positive thinking, leave little notes under your pillow' page?
No, the constitution lists the small number of inherent rights citizens have. That, which you took so broadly out of context, is the single exception.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
While I agree with your arguments, I do not agree with your conclusion.
The problem, as you said, is the libertarian approach to a monopoly. Without a monopoly, the proprietary software license is no threat.
Consequently I would say that ESRs argument is still valid, the proprietary software license alone does not lower his flerbage. Only when combined with a monopoly, but then it's the monopoly that should be outlawed.
But that is a different issue, please don't mix them up.
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
I don't think that ESR's article should be read without looking at AC's reply down the page.8 -17-016-20-OP-CY-0055
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-0
Meh
You are having a hard time, converting your customers from commercial alternatives to Linux, and then when they ask you what GNU/Linux means, you tell them.
"GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix GNU is Not Unix Slash Linux"
Good luck converting that customer.
In the article "Freedom, Power, or Confusion" Eric S. Raymond argues
that the term "freedom", which recently Bradley Kuhn with Richard
Stallman and Tim O'Reilly argued about, is confusing and should not be
used with regards to software. Since the term is not concisely
defined, the FSF and O'Reilly can have different concepts in mind when
they use the word.
To solve this problem and to show that the FSF is proposing
unreasonable restrictions, Raymond introduces and defines the invented
word "flerbage". His definition is:
I have the condition of flerbage when I can behave in the confidence
that nobody will take my life, my physical property, or my time
without my consent.
He then argues along the following lines:
(1) Suppose someone releases an operating system under a proprietary
license. Raymond's flerbage is not changed because he does not
have to use that piece of software, since he can use the Open
Source alternative "Nulix". (If he did use it and did not pay for
it, he might be imprisoned, taking his time away from him, thereby
taking away his flerbage).
(2) One way of taking away his flerbage would be for the proprietary
software company to have a law passed that makes issuing Open
Source software illegal, since then he could not use his "Nulix"
and would either be forced to use the proprietary operating system
and pay for it (taking away his money, hence his flerbage) or to
go to prison (losing flerbage).
(3) His flerbage as a software developer consists in being able to
offer people his software on the conditions that they pay him
money and don't give away copies (and not being killed, fined or
imprisoned for offering the software).
(4) Someone releases an Open Source product which is superior to his
proprietary product. The trade-able value of his proprietary
product might have decreased, but his flerbage is not affected
because he has lost neither life, time, nor physical property.
(5) Suppose a law has been passed that makes proprietary licenses
illegal.
(5a) As a user it does not change his flerbage.
(5b) As a developer his flerbage has decreased because he is no longer
able to offer people software under the same license he has been
before the law was passed.
Let us first examine (1) and (2). In (1) Raymond's flerbage is not
decreased by a proprietary license because he has a free alternative
to the proprietary operating system. In (2) his flerbage is decreased
because by taking away Open Source software this alternative is no
longer available. But has he not still the alternative of not using a
computer at all, thereby not having to pay for the software? One
could argue that he has not because he needs to use a computer for his
job, for instance. This argument is flawed (he still has the
alternative of quitting his job), but assume it is not. We can turn
this argument against him if we ask: what if he needs a special
feature which is only implemented in the proprietary software? With
no Open Source alternative, he has to pay (or go to jail). Again, one
could argue that if proprietary licenses were forbidden, the
proprietary software would not even be available. That might be, but
it might as well be that an Open Source implementation of that feature
would emerge, necessity supposedly being the mother of invention. But
let us take this argument even further: If there were no
implementation of that feature at all, how could his boss force him to
use a software package with that feature (imagine yourself in the year
1901; who at that time HAD to use an operating system?). Maybe it is
not his boss forcing him to use that feature. Instead assume the
software in question is a life support system to be employed in the
intensive care unit in which he is currently fighting for his life.
If there were only a proprietary implementation, he could either pay
for it or die, both ways decreasing his flerbage (the latter more, the
former less). Let us just hope that the software is inexpensive
enough for him to be able to afford it.
But the real core of the matter is contained in (3) and (5b).
Raymond's actual wording of (3) is
Now let's suppose I'm a software developer. I write open-source
software to have fun and make money. I write proprietary software
to have fun and make money. Part of my flerbage is that I can offer
people a license that says "I trade you my software on the condition
that you (a) pay me some money, and (b) don't give a copy to anyone
else." If they accept, fine. If they don't, also fine; I wander
off to find another customer, and they wander off to find another
developer.
First of all, let us note that copyright does not work that way. The
condition "don't give a copy to anyone else" does not just apply to
the person whom the trade is made with; it applies to every single
person living in a country with restrictive copyright laws
(i.e. pretty much the whole industrialized world). Hence if I
download a copy of some proprietary piece of software on the Internet,
I am acting illegally, even though I have never made a trade with the
author of that software and have surely not agreed to any conditions
regarding said software.
In (5b) we see that flerbage of a developer is harmed if he is not
allowed to issue his software under a proprietary license. But why is
a user's flerbage not impaired if he is not allowed to download any
software he wishes from the Internet (or copy it from a friend)?
Obviously there must be some higher principle saying that imposing an
arbitrary license should not be illegal but copying software without
the author's consent should be.
Where does this come from? Perhaps it is because an author's flerbage
is decreased if someone makes a copy without his consent. If I make a
copy of a proprietary software package and give it to a friend, the
author surely does not lose his life. Does he lose any of his time?
Let us assume that one copy makes him lose one minute of his time. A
quick calculation suffices to show that slightly over 50 million
copies would be enough to make the author lose 100 years of his time.
This is obviously laughable. Is it physical property he loses? Let
us assume that money is in fact physical property and the author has
stacked all his money in cash in his bedroom. Does some of this money
disappear if I make a copy and give it to a friend? That's at best
highly unlikely. No, obviously it is the market value of his software
that decreases. However, in (4) Raymond argues that the trade-able
value of an author's software has nothing to do with flerbage at all.
Maybe he is wrong. Could it be that decreasing the trade-able value
of someone's software should in fact be illegal? It might be, but in
that case the release of Open Source software must be illegal too,
since an Open Source alternative of a proprietary software package
surely does decrease that package's trade-able value. What's more,
even the release of a proprietary alternative to a proprietary package
must be illegal, at least if it's cheaper and/or better and/or better
marketed. Hence that assumption leads us to the abolishment of free
competition.
Having shown that the "righteousness" of imposing arbitrary licenses
and the "unrighteousness" of copying software without the author's
consent cannot originate in flerbage, we ask ourselves again where it
might come from. Obviously the FSF does not share this view of
"righteousness" with Raymond and O'Reilly. This implicit higher
principle is really nothing else than what Raymond wanted to do away
with: Freedom. Raymond regards the freedom of an author to impose a
license on anybody as more important than the freedom of a user to do
with a piece of software whatever he pleased. The FSF takes the
opposite stance. Raymond has invented a new term and with its help
tried to show that his priorities regarding freedom are the "right"
ones. However, he could do so only by implicitly assuming that his
priorities are the "right" ones to begin with. In other words, he
managed to state a special case of the tautology "A implies A" in a
rather awkward manner.
However, we can improve upon him, without resorting to an implied
definition of freedom. We investigate the effects of abolishing
copyright on Raymond's flerbage as a user and as a developer. As a
user, his flerbage increases dramatically, because he is now legally
able to use any software he wants without restrictions and without
having to pay anybody. As a developer, his flerbage does not change.
He is still able to offer people his software if they pay him money
and sign a contract saying that they will not give it away. What he
would not be able to do is to force this restriction onto more than
half of the earth's population. That does not mean that his flerbage
is decreased, however. It's not as if anybody would put him in jail
if he did that. It's just that, due to lack of a copyright law, doing
such a thing would be impossible, just as it is impossible for him to
fly to Alpha Centauri (and we haven't heard him complaining about that
yet).
schani
Copyright is a direct intervention into the marketplace as much as establishing legal ownership of any commodity is a direct intervention into the marketplace. Establishing ownership is something that takes place before the marketplace. A marketplace is where people who own something sell that thing.
If you twist hard enough, anything can be government intervention in the marketplace. Preventing murder for hire, stopping the slave trade, even the very existence of government is an intervention into the marketplace, because the government has to charge some taxes somewhere, and has to buy some stuff.
Libertarianism != anarchy or pure hippie-style "let's-all-share-everything" communism, which are the only two systems where the phrase "my idea" is meaningless.
While ESR is busy making new words such as 'flerbage', I suggest that we make a new word to replace pirate, so RMS will have to stop making pirate jokes. I'd like to nominate 'warez pup' to be that new word.
ESR's political views sometimes make it hard for him to understand certain situations, in this case the roles of state and law in deals.
His retorical question is: Would RMS support a law that made proprietary software licenses illegal?
The first problem with the question is that it is pretty far out, the first goal would be to soften copyright law. Copyright law restricts freedom by removing certain freedoms (to copy) without consent of the affected people. I never agreed that I can't use Mickey Mouse in my own work, nonetheless, so it isn't even a deal. No freedom (under any name) would be taken away by removing copyright law. It does have a set of different consequences I would dislike, though.
However, that is not his purpose either. His purpose is to paint RMS and his supporters as lunatics who will use guns to prevent people from making deal/agreements to their mutual benefits.
To do this, we enter the area of deals and contract law. A contract can be seen as a situation where two parties volunteerely give up a limited amount of their freedom, to the benefit of both parties. In an emplyement contract the employee give up some of his freedom to spend his time as he will, and the employer give up some of his freedom to spend his money as he want.
From a metalegal perspective, there are basically three types of agreements.
1. Legal agreements. These are agreements that are guarenteed by the state, through contract law. If the contract is violated, the state will intervene. Without a strong state to guarentee it, you would only be able to make agreements with people you for some reason would know would fullfil it. It would be impossible to make contracts with strangers, and progresss would slow much down.
Libertarians doesn't like the idea of the state as a necessary catalysator for progress, since the state is Evil in Libertarian dogma. So instead they tend to think of this type of contracts as some kind of natural force.
2. Contracts which the state will not guarentee. When a certain kind of contract is outlawed, it typically just really mean that the state will not put its weight behind them. This is ideally contracts which is known to cause trouble, for example a contract to sell your labour for the rest of your life, or a contract in which you promise not to take backup of a computer program.
You are still allowed to sign as many of these contracts you want, you just can't rely on the state to enforce them.
Libertarians tend to ignore this kind of deals, as it makes them uncomfortingly aware of the role played by the state in the first kind of deals.
3. Deals that are really illegal, ideally because they (substancially) damage a third party. Anti-trust law is the prime example of that. If you have a single competitor in a specific market, you are not allowed to make an agreement with him about dividing the market between you. Such a deal would benefit both of you, by bypassing the market forces and allowing higher prices.
Libertarians _hate_ this kind of laws. They see it as the evil state comming with guns[1] and denying the small man (often in the form of a large company) his freedom to make deals with whomever he pleases.
The second dogma of the libertarians is "the market is good". The apperent contradiction with the laws made to protect the market is solved by saying "only the state can stop a free market".
When ESR starts speculating about how free software fanatics would stop proprietary software licenses, he of course ignore the possibility of making it a "kind #2" deal (i.e. deals not backed by the law). Even though these are common, and fits the problem very well, he goes directly to the possibility "kind #3" deals, which are much easier for a Libertarian to relate to. Kind #3 deals are "men with guns", kind #2 deals are the state confusingly staying out of matters between privates.
[1] Even if the state rarely _literally_ bring guns in this kind of cases, they _could_ bring guns if, say, one company kept all their money in cash, and used their constitutional right to defend it with guns. _Then_ the state would bring guns, so the threat is there in the Libertarian mind. And the rhetorics is great.
Typical libertarian argument. Everybody is a free agent and the mysterious phantom hand of free will will eventually knock down, or relegate to irrelevance evil entities. WRONG. If we learn *anything* from history, free choice alone does not preserve a free society. Tell me this: when there is only a monopoly producing a given product or service what "choice" do you have? What if there aren't monopolies, but just many many companies who are all *equally* as bad? What if there simply isn't any choice at all? You can't merely wipe your conscience clean by naively saying "oh, we have CHOICE! I'll close my eyes now and just *assume* based on that premise that everything will work out OK". Well things don't work out OK. Bad people join together to screw the rest while the good blindly go about with their hands to their ears singing "lalalalala" comfortable thinking that the choices they make put them in control (we have always been at war with east asia). We need both free choice, AND fervent independent watchdogging. Given the state of the market, I think the FSF's "overzealousness" is not entirely uncalled for in this watchdogging role. We certainly don't need ESR bitchin about FSF.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The problem is not that copyright allows someone to sell information, software, etc. If that was all it was good for, I don't think, many people cared about it, but the current situation is that this is THE MOST USELESS part of what copyright and restrictive licenses accomplish.
Look at any software company. It always has a bunch of proprietary information that it does not want to disclose to anyone, including its customers -- I know because I work for one. What is that information, why is it valuable? Because it can be sold? No, directly most of it has use less valuable than a paper it's printed on, and companies almost never attempt to sell it unless when company is being bought outright. However it's tightly guarded, and is considered to be what makes a company profitable.
That information is usually related to the aility to interoperate with company's products and to make alternative versions of them. Usually it's some, often braindead, protocol, APIs, data structures, etc. -- things invented arbitrarily, and usually without the application of any mental effort whatsoever. However keeping customers and competitors unaware of those allows companies to keep selling their new products to old customers and prevent others from replacing company's products with something else, even if competitors would be perfectly capable of producing superior replacements if not customers being locked in by proprietary protocols, interfaces and formats.
So, this kind of proprietary information does not behave as knowledge, or even as a good that can be sold -- it's an instrument of power, the power that IMNSHO no one deserves to exercise, and copyright is merely a tool to protect this abuse of the customer. Compared to this power, actual ability/unability to make the customer pay for software, or only for service, is so insignificant in the modern software industry, no one in his right mind would think about it. This is what I find unethical about proprietaty software licenses, and copyright law that protects them.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
THE GNU SONG
A year ago, last thursday
I was strolling in the zoo
when I met a man who though he knew the lot.
He was laying down the law about the habits of baboons and how many spines a porcupine has got.
So I asked him:
'What's that creature there'
He answered: 'Oh, it's a h'Elk'
I might of gone on thinking that was true
If the animal in question hadn't put that chap to shame
And remarked: 'I h'aint a h'Elk
I'm a Gnu'
'I'm a Gnu
I'm a Gnu
The g-nicest work of g-nature in the zoo I'm a Gnu
How do you do You realy ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho's
I'm a Gnu
Spelt G-N-U
I'm g-not a Camel or a Kangaroo
So let me introduce
I'm g-neither man or moose
Oh g-no g-no g-no I'm a Gnu'
I had taken furnished lodgings down at Rustington-on-sea
Whence I travelled on th Ashton-under-lyme it was actually
And the second night I stayed there I was woken from a dream
That I'll tell you all about some other time
Among the hunting trophies on the wall above my bed
Stuffed and mounted, was a face I thought I knew;
A Bison? No, it's not a Bison. An Okapi? Unlikely, Really. A Hartebeeste?
When I though I heard a voice:
I'm a Gnu
I'm a Gnu
A g-nother gnu
I wish I could g-nash my teeth at you
I'm a Gnu
How do you do
You realy ought to k-now w-ho's w-ho's
I'm a Gnu
Spelt G-N-U
Call me Bison or Okapi and I'll sue
G-nor am I the least like that dreadful Hartebeeste
Oh, g-no, g-no, g-no,
G-no g-no g-no I'm a Gnu
G-no g-no g-no I'm a Gnu
It's very G-nice of you.
"Information wants to be paid"
Subject: Re: FRED: Corrections about WPA?
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 10:15:18 -0400
From: Fred Langa
A small number of writers have argued that I'm misrepresenting WPA, because it's not really "registration." They point out that the mandatory "product activation" is step one, but that it involves no personal information. Step two is an optional formal "registration;" you may skip this step if you wish.
But I think this argument lets Microsoft get away with some Clintonesque semantic games. To me, if you have to contact the vendor to unlock your software, that's "registration" even if Microsoft calls it something else.
As for the personal nature of it, I stated in the original article ( http://www.informationweek.com/851/langa.htm ) that Microsoft has a good track record for not collecting inappropriate data via reg/update wizards and such. But in this case, by generating a hash based on your CPU's unique serial number, your network card's unique MAC address, etc., it gets *awfully* specific.
Calling that level of detail "impersonal" is like saying, "I've developed a unique identifier code for you that's based on where you live, your shoe size, hat size, the type of car your drive, and the brand and size of your spouse's underwear; but because I never actually asked you for your NAME, it involves no personal information about you." Riiiiiiight.
Yes, Microsoft says the 50-digit hash cannot be deconstructed to reveal your system information, but I have to wonder. At the very least, the potential for abuse is enormous, both on the data-collection side, and on the de-hashing side. (Want to bet that some cracker, somewhere, figures out a de-hash algorithm?)
In short Microsoft can call it what they will. I call it "registration."
_____________
This is my message to Fred:
At 06:53 AM 8/20/01 -0700, Michael Jennings wrote:
Fred,
Response to your statements about WPA is below.
Who is right?
(I posted your comments to a Slashdot thread, with your web site address.)
Regards,
Michael Jennings
Bush's education improvements were
You are right. Windows 98 will not stop functioning. But the lack of support will begin to make it difficult. New drivers won't work with old operating systems, for example.
You can program for Windows 95 now, too. But there have been so many changes that it not something that makes sense in most cases.
When Microsoft made Windows 98, they apparently deliberately broke some of the DOS functionality. I know DOS is a joke, but it is the only common scripting language for this OS. I use it for important work. When Microsoft decided to remove features, it caused a lot of problem for me: I lost hours.
My idea is that this just would not happen under the GPL. At the very least, if I saw that functionality had been removed, I could post a bug report. If there were no good reason for the change, probably someone would fix it.
In actual practice, my experience has been that I have a response within hours, and a fix within a day. The people who write free software are often wonderful people, in my experience.
Bush's education improvements were
The argument for the GNU/Linux nomenclature is perfectly valid. "Linux" is the kernel. And as such, it's really the kernel code. It's worthless until it's compiled. Right now, with every distro that I can think of, that's happening with gcc. So much for stripping your system of GNU tools. Ok, so suppose someone decides to make a Linux version that is completely GNU-free at every step of the process. Say, oh... SUN. They use their versions of everything, compile the kernels with cc, etc., and put out a version of Linux.
Does anybody think for a second they wouldn't call in SUN Linux?
How about IBM?
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
Raymond exposes his typical narrow capitalist-libertarian concept of freedom with his flerbage definition.
Should people be allowed to sell their organs?Should they be allowed to sell themselves into slavery? Should people be allowed to discuss and plan
pricing of their products with competitors? Should people be allowed to sign away their fair-use rights? Should people be allowed to bribe officials?
All of these increase the affected people's flerbage.
ESR argues against something that was never asserted: that developers should be prohibited by law from choosing proprietary licences. If he had taken the trouble to actually understand what was written, he would see that the only point was correctness of terminology. When you choose a license, you are exercising power over licensees. You tell them what they can/can't do. That's what a license is for: to impose rules on others.
Stallman and Kuhn readily admit in their article that everyone who releases software is forced (by copyright law) to exercise this power. What they object to is taking this power and including it in a list of freedoms which formerly had nothing to do with exercising power over others.
Maybe the word "freedom" just has ESR overly confused. We certainly don't need Tim O'Reilly to cloud the word's meaning even further.
...but who's KSR?
Speaking for myself, this shit confuses me. I find myself agreeing with whoever is doing the talking.
Let's see if we can come up with a list of things that make this hard. Who knows, maybe it will help clarify things.
1. Most of us agree that laws protecting personal property are a good thing. Many of us think, however, that intellectual property should be treated differently. But 'time is money', as they say, so what about the time and energy that went into creating the ip? Some people like to use a metaphor, saying that sharing ideas or software or mp3s is like sharing fire, but that ignores the fact that nobody spent ten years inventing fire, hoping to recoup his investment by selling it to others. On the other hand, many people have long considered the vast wealth that comes to movie stars and popular musicians a sort of 'bug in the system', like the salaries for professional atheletes, so we wonder if maybe a pay cut might not be in order, so that we don't have to pay so much to enjoy their works. Drawing this line is hard--I'm still confused.
2. Software users should have rights, and software developers should have rights. But of course software developers USE more software than just about anybody, so now what? It's probably not an accident that the GPL started to run into real resistance among developers once the task of replicating the software that developers use most reached a high level of completion; if the GPL spreads farther, it may just cut into my livelihood or yours, instead of AT&T's or Sun Microsystems'. Is that a problem? And what about licenses? Should you or I or that guy over there be allowed to release his software under any license we see fit? What if that guy has a monopoly on OS software? It sort of reminds me of the stuff in the history books about the Labor movement in the U.S. After all, those coal miners and steel workers signed themselves up to work for those companies, and they could quit anytime they wanted to, right? So the companies should have been allowed to bust the unions? Or does duress and coercion enter into this? Apparently the government thought so in that case, and a lot of people still agree with that decision, but here's another case that sort of resembles that one, and I'm confused again.
3. And how about that encryption/copyright/fair use thing, huh? That enters into this discussion too, I imagine, because it brings up reverse engineering and freely distributable materials, and copy protection schemes on software, and whatnot. Obviously we're all on the side of the angels here, right? We all want to ability to crack DVDs and ebooks and CDs and so on because we wish to exercise our right of fair use. Like for when we write a review or something. Right? I mean when we say free, we mean free as in speech, and being able to use stuff we didn't pay for never enters into it, am I correct?
Well, I'm tired of thinking about this now, and I have to get ready to go to work, so feel free to correct this list, or add to it, cause I'm still pretty up in the air about the whole mess.
I'm irritated by propertarians' tendency to drag in the "men with guns" (you'd think they could resist better) to argue against laws they don't like, when they're always lurking behind the laws the _do_ want (enforcement of contracts)....
That's not such a bad idea, given that "Linux" or "NetBSD," sans GNU tools, are often included in things that are not full user-oriented distributions. Take, for example, embedded Linux devices, or the Ascend GRF router (which uses, so I'm told, a stripped-and-modified version of NetBSD as its OS). At the very least, I think the full distribution versions of Linux and *BSD ought to consider including "with GNU tools" as a sub-head on their shelf boxes.
Now, it seems to me that OS X is a different story, because the GNU stuff is part of the whole package...if the GNU tools were separated, OS X would simply be broken. One hopes that Apple credits the GNU project somewhere fairly prominently in its documentation, or (ideally) in whatever "About" screen or startup graphic or splash screen it has. (I've no Apple hardware on which to try OS X, so I can't speak to whether or not they actually do.)
Now, I don't think anyone intends this as "ego-inflation" for RMS or whoever, but I do think the GNU project deserves more prominent, up-front recognition, as the single organization which has contributed the largest amount of software that makes Linux/*BSD systems usable as Real Computers. The Free Software Foundation also does good work, both in the technical sense and the pseudo-religious sense. IMHO supporters of Freedom in all its incarnations ought to welcome and encourage the greater awareness of the FSF and its goals. I'm not advocating use of legal force to make anyone do this, I'm just saying that I think it's the Right Thing To Do.
As to the poster who asked, "Well, if we do this for GNU, then what about $RANDOM_OTHER_GROUP_OR_PERSON, who has also contributed $RANDOM_OTHER_KEEN_PIECE_OF_SOFTWARE? We can't set GNU above them," I would argue that there is no other organization or person that has contributed the sheer volume of stuff that GNU has given us, and this is one small way that the community can express its gratitude.
Right or wrong, this is what I believe.
"if you two could get a law passed making proprietary licenses illegal, would you do it?"
Proponents of free software support the mere invalidation of proprietary software licenses, not their criminalization. Eric's argument is rather like an anti-drug pundit insisting that proponents of decriminalization are pushing for mandatory marijuana use.
In the imaginary universe where the FSF has achieved all its goals, you're welcome to put a shrinkwrap license on your software that says "don't copy this". No one will arrest you, but anyone would be free to laugh at you as they make a million copies. It's actually a far more libertine *and* libertarian place than ESR's dream world.
Rob
Right, I just don't understand the motivation behind arbitrary selfishness. Rather, there is no motivation by definition because it is arbitrary.
I guess if you could justify your selfishness, I would understand. If you can't, well... I'm just of the opinion that the default policy should be unselfishness unless there is logical justification for selfishness.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
I think they should change it to "Fascist Software Foundation"... That would go well with a change in the GPL's name: Gestapo Public License.
Truth in advertising, if I've ever seen it.
I can appreciate ESR's libertarian sentiment (people should be free to open source or not), but realize that you are facing determined adversaries with massive economic and political force. To say "let the market decide" under those circumstances may be naive.
The problem that a lot of people are having, and that I think needs some closer inspection, especially in regards to this post is the difference between "freedom", "liberty", and "flerbage".
Since I ain't ESR, I'm not going to make any conclusive statements at this point about what term "flerbage" is based on. I'm instead going to focus on my understanding of "freedom" and "liberty".
"Freedom" is freedom from. "Liberty" is liberty to.
That's confusing, but it helps if you string them out into examples.
If I use MicroSoft Word (R), I have *freedom* from having to remember keyboard commands (because of the buttons).
If I use emacs, I have *liberty* to implement new functionality with modules.
(This example falls through with the advent of VB, but as a user, VB is as accessible for expanding functionality as LISP is.)
Both sides in this issue are claiming both words...and ESR may not be helping by inventing "flerbage" since it is intrinsically related to his own feelings about personal liberties and freedoms.
The core of this issue is that everyone involved thinks that their idea of how the world works is the best. I'm getting flashbacks from Nietzsche's _Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra_ and Stephenson's _...Command_Line_.
MicroSoft thinks they're offering the best balance of freedom and liberty for developer and user. They offer products that will hide all the gadgets if you don't want to see them, then they add-in extensibility that you can get to if you really want to. (The problem being that any good VB script you write is likely to get replaced in the next version by built-in functionality.)
Tim O'Reilly thinks that developers need more liberty than the GPL offers so that users can choose their desired level of freedom.
Kuhn and Stallman think that developers need to forgo any liberties for the purpose of allowing liberty for all. Note that freedom is not a part of their ideals. Free is. The "Free Software Foundation" is about promoting software that is "free" to be changed at any time. Therefore, if you are confused, think of them as the "Software Liberty People".
So, my point here is this..."flerbage" is useless, as it is merely part of an attempt by ESR to cloud this issue further and elicit a response by O'Reilly and Kuhn&Stallman. "Freedom" involves not having to do something. "Liberty" involves being able to do something. Further discussion of this issue should keep this in mind.
Curiosity?!? My ass! He stole shit! -T. Carpenter