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)

Comments

Foundation for Software Freedom

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Excellent

[Reality Master 101]

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.

Re:Excellent

[Uruk]

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

The fundamental divide I think is that the FSF doesn't think software should have owners. It sounds like you're getting pissed at users acting that way because the developer should own and control the software - or as you put it "the freedom to choose how their work is used".

GNU believes that programs are generally useful technical information. Most people think that patenting math formulas is bullshit. I don't really see much of a difference, since in both cases they're generally useful technical information.

I hate to borrow from Libertarian philosophy, but a right is not a right if you require coercion of another person

I agree - but put a different spin on it. Who are you to say that I cannot cooperate with my neighbor by sharing generally useful technical information with them? Who are you to throw me in jail because I copied something I bought to a CD? Who are you to call me a 'pirate' (and equate me with someone who robs, murders and rapes ships) when I'm helping my friends and coworkers out? From my perspective, distributing non-free software is coercion - it's coercing users *not* to help their friends. It's coercing them to avoid using and spreading generally useful technical information in many circumstances.

Life is all about gathering, spreading, and exploiting technically useful information. If you disagree with me, disagree with me that computer programs are technically useful information. But without the ability to use, spread, and gather good technically useful information, we're never going to evolve and get off of this planet.

Re:Excellent

[Tom7]

This is a terrible analogy.

You are using a classic device of flawed logic (among others) referred to as "What is, ought to be."

This comes in the statement, "Most likly [sic], you can't (legally) give it to your friend *and* keep it yourself."

Just because the *current* law says that it is not legal to do this, doesn't mean that it's a *good* law. In fact, since we're debating that very law, this is quite inappropriate indeed!

This is the fundamental difference between "information" and your "meat-space". The fact that we can copy information without destroying the original warrants a much different approach to our idea of 'ownership'.

Re:Excellent

[MrGrendel]

One of the big problems with ESR's response to Stallman (and yours by extension), is that it is ultimately a strawman. Raymond has ignored an implicit premise to Stallman's argument, which is completely unacceptable on his part since Stallman has written extensively on his opinions of copyright and shouldn't need to restate them again.

Raymond stated that "Stallman and Kuhn want to be able to make decisions that affect other developers more than themselves. By the definition they themselves have proposed, they want power." But this ignores the fact that Stallman does not believe that copyright should be applicable to software at all (I'm not clear on his opinions of copyright in general). It is true that they wish to remove a right that software developers currently possess, but that is not the same as desiring control over the excercise of that right. In some cases there is no functional distinction between the removal of a right and control over it's excercise, but in this case there is. Here's why: When people talk about rights, they are usually speaking of inalienable rights, or those rights that a person possesses by virtue of being a sentient being. Inalienable rights cannot be removed, they can only be restricted or controlled. Freedom of speech and religion fall into this category. But copyright is not an inalienable right, it is a utilitarian right. It is granted as a means of accomplishing some other societal goal. In the case of the US, this goal is laid out in the constitution as "promoting the arts and sciences."

Utilitarian rights do not generally have an ethical basis. They can be removed with no ethical impact on those who once held them. This is why copyright is limited (or is supposed to be limited) to a period of time after a work has been published. No one gets the right forever (as would be the case if it were an inalienable right), but only until the copyright expires.

Now, this is important to Stallman's argument because, in his opinion (I don't necessarily agree with him here), proprietary licenses (a side-effect of copyright) violate users' rights that he considers to be inalienable rights (the right to help yourself and fair-use rights in general). In his view, developers have improperly been granted a utilitarian right that allows them to exert power over others and violate their rights. He wants to remove that utilitarian right, just as plantation owners lost the utilitarian right to own other human beings, because it was recognized that such a right is improper. This is not to say that proprietary licenses damage people on the scale that slavery does.

So, Stallman is not trying to exert power over developers and make decisions for them. He is simply trying to remove a right (and the power that goes with it) that they should never have been granted in the first place. It's fine for ESR to disagree, but his responses should at least respond to the argument that Stallman actually makes, not the argument ESR wishes Stallman had made. The response could be as simple as stating that the utility of copyrights on software outweigh any damage they do to individual's rights, but at least it would be an honest response that addresses the real issue.

Stallman

[sourcehunter]

Yet Kuhn and Stallman say they don't like this world. It appears that they would prefer a world in which people who write software cannot choose the proprietary licenses that Kuhn and Stallman dislike.

"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.

Re:Stallman

[Uruk]

I gotta keep food on my table SOMEHOW!

This is interesting - in the article, Raymond seems to contradict himself on this point. From the article, when referring to GPL'd software, he says that writing it might "decrease the software's tradeable value".

GPL'd software falls under the umbrella of "open-source" software the Raymond made up. I was under the impression that one of the entire points of "open-source" was to show corporations that the tradeable value of "open-source" software wasn't necessarily less than that of proprietary software. Yet here he seems to say that for much of open source software (that that is GPL'd) the value is less.

Well guess what guys - no matter what the value is, (I'm not getting into that, since I'm not an economist and neither is ESR) it's not all about the Benjamins for a lot of developers. It's a good thing that we can write software that has something it comes with far more important than economic value - freedom. Free as in speech that is, not as in beer. Raymond seems to want to avoid the "F" word, because he says it's "confusing" even to us.

<sarcasm>Well never have I shouldered such a heavy intellectual burden, but somehow I'll struggle through to understand the meaning of "freedom" as it was in the American Revolution, as it was in the Civil Rights marches, and as it is today in my own software</sarcasm>

Re:Stallman

[Xoro]

I'm not an OS zealot, but I think ESR uses the word "appears" very liberally here. I couldn't find anything in the Kuhn/RMS piece suggesting other licenses be made illegal. No FSF activity that I know of works towards such a goal. Instead, they advocate and code free alternatives. There is plenty of advocacy for proprietary software -- having a different camp seems to satisfy the "choice of licenses" ideal.

Instead, they argue that choice of license is insufficiently free to be called free. Only some licenses pass that freedom on to the user, and some fewer licenses guarantee that derivative work will also be free to the user. It is this type of license, and only this type, that the FSF camp wants called free. What's wrong with that?

I think ESR is just as capable of hyperbole as RMS. I would restate your quote as:

...they would prefer a world in which people who write software do not choose the proprietary licenses...

Re:Stallman

[Tom7]

> It is my property, I can and will choose a license that fits MY needs as a developer.

I think we are saying that it is not your property. In any case, this kind of "property" (as opposed to natural property: physical things like your belongings, home, automobile) acts very different, and therefore deserves different consideration.

I wonder if slave owners said things like, "It's MY property, I can do whatever I want with it?"

Economics

[underwhelm]

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.

Intellectual Property decreases my flerbage

[spun]

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.

Liberty and proprietary software

[Arker]

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.

Why ESR doesn't understand the FSF point of view

[phaze3000]

Essentially, what ESR is saying is that in his opinion, everyone should have the right to publish software under whatever license they want, proprietary or otherwise.

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.

Is ESR on Microsoft's payroll?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

"Intellectual Property" is not a right.

[UnclPedro]

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.

Libertarians should hate ESR for this

[abe ferlman]

I hate to borrow from Libertarian philosophy, but a right is not a right if you require coercion of another person.

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

Re:Libertarians should hate ESR for this

[Zimm]

The scarcity lies in the ability to create the stuff, not the stuff once it's created.

This is what RMS is overlooking. Not all the software that could be written has been written, thus there is scarcity. The laws of physics exitsted long before there was any information about those laws that people could get. Once people started researching those laws, information was created, and was held by those people. That doesn't mean others can't do their own research and create their own information. Your confusing what the information is about with the information its self.

Re:Libertarians should hate ESR for this

[Jerf]

'Information, however, is not naturally scarce (although the ability to create it may be).'

I finally figured out why that statement has bothered me for so long. It's this: "Information" in the abstract is not scarce. But guess what? "Physical goods" in the abstract are also not scarce!

Useful information, information you want, in other words, "information" in the concrete, is scarce and will remain so for the forseeable future. In some isolated catagories, there may be a glut of "information" (like mail clients), but in the concrete, there does not exist so much "music I like" in the world that it can be said to be a commodity. Unless all you are interested in is stuff in the past, your current desires will always not have enough information to be met.

Water isn't scarce in many places. There's as much of it as you could possibly want. But unless all you want is water, you should anticipate needing to pay somebody for your food, clothing, and shelter. Isolated examples of non-scarcity do not prove the general case of non-scarcity.

You might say I'm missing the point, because once information is created, it can be infinitely copied. And I say in return that you (the reader) would be missing the point. In the old economy, the cost of distribution may have been the primary constraining factor, but the cost of production is still non-zero. The digital economy may make the cost of production the defining factor, but it does little to affect that cost. (Useful information, virtually by definition, requires significant effort to create. If it did not, you would not come to me for the information, you'd simply (re-)create it yourself.)

Even if the physical goods could be distributed for free, you'd still need to pay for production and creation. Even if the costs of production could be reduced to zero, you'd still need to pay for creation... unless everything you wanted was already designed, a situation not likely to happen for a very long time.

I think when you see arguments like "information isn't a scarce resource", you're seeing a confounding of cost of distribution vs. cost of production. The reality is, information is still costly to produce and you can't just wave your hands around and wish it away. While there is historical proof that some software can be developed in the Open Source manner, some catagories of software don't fare so well. Nor is all "information" like software (a massive oversimplification), and for those categories, and for those categories, there is little to no evidence that "novels" or "blueprints" are in a "scarcity-free" world.

In the abstract, copyright recognizes this scarcity by granting the author certain limited rights. In the concrete, most of the problem lies in the absurd nature of those rights. I stand against the DMCA, I stand against the absurdly long copyright terms holders have nowadays, but in the abstract, copyright still works. In fact, the guiding principles of copyright are standing amazingly well against the "onslaught" of technology, even if many of the details aren't faring so well.

Until such time as you can effectively wave a magic wand (i.e., a super-human intelligence) and recieve the answer to any question you can ask ("How can I cure my hippocampus cancer without removing large chunks of my brain and without killing me with an allergic reaction, since I'm allergic to the dyes used in scanning technologies?" That's information that's decidedly scarce and isn't going to not be anytime soon!), information will continue to not be free, and economic models and ethical arguments predicated on those models will continue to not be grounded in reality, with all that that implies.

That said, one might make the case that software is a special case. However, I submit that if that were true, it's one of those things that would be obvious to all concerned. Personally, when I write software which didn't exist before, I find the effort to be non-zero, and one way or another, society needs to support my ability to do that, or I won't do it any more. As it turns out, I'm not getting paid directly. What that effectively boils down to is that I'm 'paying myself' to do it (If I didn't get money from some source, I would not write this software), but that still doesn't mean the effort was zero, and arguments that assume zero monetary cost -> zero effort -> zero scarcity to create are doomed to inaccuracy and failure. Overall, I'd say software is no more immune to the costs of production then any other kind of information.

Re:Libertarians should hate ESR for this

[Arandir]

If the government does not coerce people *not* to copy your stuff, then copyright doesn't exist.

There is an excellent article by Richard O, Hammer entitled "Intellectual Property Rights Viewed As Contracts". It is a rebuttal to Roderick Long's "The Libertarian Case Against Intellectual Property Rights", which the FSF links to.

Both were published by in Formulations, but their links online are no longer working (as the Free Nation Foundation has split into two organizations and their web sites are still in flux).

In this article, Richard argues that a statist system of copyrights is not necessary for a creator to legally protect his works. Everyone should try to find this article, along with related articles by both Hammer and Long.

A government recognition of a class of property is most certainly not the sole basis for that property. When the government recognizes real estate as property, I gain the benefit of access to the government police and courts to defend my land property with. Should the government cease recognizing real estate, my task of protecting my property will be considerably harder, but it will still be my property. Ditto for intellectual property.

Of course, the current system of copyrights are flawed. But seeing flaws in copyright laws does not infer that software should not be owned.

ESR misses the point

[Mr. Slippery]

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.

Re:This is just silly

[bnenning]

He makes up the term "flerbage" which no one has agreed to

He makes up that term because the word "free" has become overloaded. He then proceeds to argue, that if "flerbage" is a good thing, then Tim's position is superior to Richard's. It's entirely acceptable to disagree with his premise, in which case you have to show why flerbage is not a good thing.

You have the freedom to do what you want, but you don't have the freedom to restrict the freedom of others.

That principle would invalidate every employment contract ever signed.

he seems overly concerned with hypothetical laws beating, shooting, and imprisoning him.

I doubt Dmitri Sklyarov considers government intervention in software development "hypothetical".

Re:Linux Today...

[Waffle Iron]

For those who want to call it Linux, I'd just suggest this: try running your favorite distro after subtracting all of the GNU system. Have fun.

Try running your favorite distro after subtracting all of the NON-GNU software (Apache, Perl, Python, vim, etc..). Not much fun either; yet none of those developers are clamoring to get their names prefixed to the system.

Raymond is a libertarian

[prizog]

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

Flerbage, Schmurbage

[bwt]

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.

ESR is out of line

[mkcmkc]

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???

Yes, this is an excellent point. It really troubles me to see ESR blatantly and (I assume) knowingly misstating the RMS/FSF position.

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.

Freedom is not having to bark on command.

[Futurepower(tm)]

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.

Sophistry of the worst sort

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

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.

Re:Why ESR doesn't understand the FSF point of vie

[aanantha]

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.

opensource free software -- sort it out

[ftide]

"good way for people to understand the difference between Open Source and Free Software."

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

- Bryguy gets it!

[Tom7]

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.

Re:Linux Today...

[Arandir]

my system would be completely unusable without glibc, bash, and gcc.

What a strange system you must have!

Bash is a shell that can be trivially replaced by csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh or even good old sh.

gcc is merely a compiler. It is not necessary for the execution of any program. It may be useful for you, but the average user of LiGnuXOS can forego the use of gcc indefinitely. As for myself, I have spent three productive days on my system without once using gcc. Oh, and all of the BSD systems also use gcc. Are you advocating that they change their names to "GNU/FreeBSD", "GNU/OpenBSD", "GNU/NetBSD" and "GNU/Mac OSX"?

glibc is pretty much essential without going through a ton of work putting libc back into Linux. But I have never yet heard a valid argument that operating systems must be named after their standard C library. That's ridiculous. "Slackware requires glibc, so it must be called 'GNU/Slackware'". Bullshit.

As for unusable systems, mine would be unusable without ext2fs or reiserfs, neither of which are from GNU. It would be unusable without init, and would not boot without lilo or any of those dozens of scripts under /etc/rc.d.

Re:Linux Today...

[Frodo]

There are a lot of people and groups that contributed to free software and Linux. Some of them contribute very vital parts of it. But only GNU claims to add their title in the OS name. Can't it be due to the frustration from unability to bring their own OS project to some decent result?

Re:Linux Today...

[p3d0]

Far from being crazy, the argument for GNU/Linux sounds pretty damn good to me.

I agree too. However, the main reason nobody calls it GNU is because GNU is such a retarded name. First, they pick a word with the almost unique property that it starts with a silent G; a word so obscure that no average person really knows what it is. And then they go that one extra uber-geek step and insist that you pronounce the "G":

To avoid horrible confusion, please pronounce the `G' in the word `GNU' when it is the name of this project.-- The GNU Manifesto

I have a better idea: to avoid horrible confusion, pick a better name.

"Linux" isn't all that much better, since it's also not pronounced as it's written in English, but there's a key factor that makes the name more acceptable: is has an "X" in it. That makes it instantly cool in the computer world.

This is really making me angry

[Cryogenes]

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).