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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)
Shouldn't that be "GNU/LINUX Today"...?
;)
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Random, useless fact: I type in startx entirely with my left hand.
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.
"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
This sentence has one nonstandard English flerbage.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.