Freedom or Power?

mpawlo writes: "As reported by Gnuheter, a new essay published by Bradley M. Kuhn and Richard M. Stallman carries the title "Freedom or Power?". The authors state something that we might have suspected from essays from Kuhn and Stallman before, but now is a little more clear, if still ambiguous: "However, one so-called freedom that we do not advocate is the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write". We reject this because it is really a form of power, not a freedom." The essay is interesting in the light of an earlier essay published by Eric S Raymond. ... Tim O'Reilly started the debate with his weblog of July 28, 2001: My definition of freedom zero." Ed. note - FWIW, Stallman and Kuhn are right. Not necessarily in their advocacy of the GPL, but certainly in their description of whether licensing is freedom for the developer or power over others. All licensing stems from copyright law, a completely man-made creation whose sole purpose is to give the writer of creative works artificial power over what others do with those works. If you take the canonical description of freedom ("Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins") and apply it to software, it's pretty clear that true freedom would not let one person control what another does with software.

Comments

The freedom to swing your fist

[perdida]

ends where my face begins.

The fundamental problem with anarchism lies in this statement. Open Source's GPL itself requires a heirarchy to maintain it, although it was designed to fight a heirarchy.

You need a body of people who act similarly to the RIAA or whomever, investigating people's GPL licenses and behaviors with Open Source software and its derivatives.

Of course, the "GPL police" would wind up chasing large corporations or developers who wish to appropriate GPL'd tech in closed source projects. This would make them rather ineffective, due to the financial disparities between the OSS movement and corporations.

So, OSS is going to have to do what M$ does, and that is buy into the government through a lobbying system.

Strange distinction.

[dinotrac]

I don't understand RMS's obsession with powerless freedom.

Any freedom that means something is, in some way, an expression of power.

The freedom to own my own home and house my family is meaningless unless I can exercise the power to keep others out.

The freedom to speak out against the government is empty unless there is power to prevent government censorship.

The GPL's guarantees of freedom to take, use, modify and distribute source code are meaningless without the power to enforce them.

Freedom without power is no freedom at all.

Offending the moderates

[banky]

I think RMS and the FSF are going to start losing ground, because they're going to fall into the trap of many politicians who want to change the world: they're going to offend the moderates.

I'm speaking as a USian, of course. As everyone knows, despite the media's obsession with polarized (right and left) politics, the US population is really a vast pool of people with relatively moderate views. Sure, some of them are sharply polarized about *issues* (abortion rights, the economy, whatever), but by and large, they're in the middle of the political spectrum. The first thing a candidate does is hit up his support of the issues while trying to not appear too far to one side, lest he offend the moderates.

There are a lot of people who like the GPL, because it prevents proprietary lock-in and helps create a sense of empowerment and community. The problem, I feel, is that once you put the GPL in your code, you're putting it (and yourself) into the "camp" of the FSF. You're now essentially signing on to the RMS/FSF game plan, even if all you wanted was to see your code not get folded into a proprietary product, and let as many people as possible play with things.

MS kept saying, once you start down the path of the GPL, there's no going back. I hate to say it, but maybe they're right. For all their talk about a software "ecosystem", contrasted against stuff like this, it makes me think they (MS) might have been right after all.