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Freedom or Power Redux
Ed. note - a brief response to Tim. A) my name isn't Timothy. (I know, I know, we all look alike. :) And B) I was trying to say pretty much what O'Reilly is saying - that all licensing, including the GPL, is an expression of power over what other people can do with the software. Hence the term "all licensing". If there were no copyright whatsoever on computer code, no intellectual property considerations at all, perhaps we could approach the state of true freedom. In the meantime, the GPL is a good way to place code firmly into a state where it is mostly free - you are free to do anything with GPL code except take it out of its free state. As far as restrictions go, this one is infinitely more palatable than most of the powers that software licensing seeks to exercise over software users.
As a more general point, I take issue with O'Reilly's description of copyright law as a compromise between creators and users. There's absolutely no evidence that the rights of users are considered when copyright laws are made. All copyright law changes made in my lifetime, nearly all copyright law changes ever, have been expansions of copyright law - if it's a compromise, it's an extraordinarily one-sided one. (I suppose you could a describe a mugging as a compromise between the mugger and the little old lady over rights to her purse.) Copyright law is more accurately described as a compromise between copyright holders and copyright holders. Other descriptions are both inaccurate and do a disservice to efforts to reform the laws.
In the Free Software world, we are all forced to make hard decisions. One of the most difficult is deciding which license to use. And I applaud these two men to even consider broaching the topic in such a public way.
Unfortunately, the two viewpoints are irreconcilable. One values the rights of the individual over the needs of the Free Software world, and one values the needs of the Free Software world over the rights of the individual. RMS promises that everyone will have the right to see the code they're running, and that right will be enforced by a society who accepts the GPL. O'Reilley promises that everyone will have the right of self-determination as an author, as long as the GPL is not mainstream. The problem here is that the realization of both visions is mutually exclusive.
So, to these men, I say: drop it. Let the chips fall where they may. Let the people decide which license should govern them. It's nothing short of a vi vs. emacs or Christianity vs. Islam battle, and neither side stands a chance at winning. Let the users decide.
~wally
Please, post comments. Don't use your position as the guy writing the story to give your comments an automatic permanent "+5, sysop".
Copyright is a brilliant compromise. It encourages people to make things available that they wouldn't otherwise, knowing that they still have some control over these things. Now, I grant freely that the huge extension of copyright duration works solidly against users - but other aspects of the law have done a very good job of balancing these things, such as the fair use rules.
In the absence of copyright, how exactly do you think games would get written? How would John Carmack earn a living?
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You also aren't allowed to distribute GPL'd code without an attached political screed you may not agree with, nor are you allowed to release free software which links with GPL'd code, but doesn't contain any. Consider RIPEM; a program was released, which was self-contained, and had a sed script to change it to link with the GNU fast MP math library. They got harassed because it was *POSSIBLE* to make their code *WORK WITH* GPL'd code, but it wasn't free enough.
:)
That's a far cry from "the only thing you can't do is take away the freedom". It is a lie, and a willful one, to claim that you can take away the freedom of *ANY* free code. If I put code in the public domain, no one can ever make it unfree. They can make their own versions with whatever restrictions they want, but *MY* code remains free, forever. No other license can say as much.
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Those who want to make their code free should be able to make their code free and prevent anything non-free from interacting with it. Those who want to write proprietary software should be equally able to do so under whatever terms and conditions they wish. It's ultimately up to users to decide what kind of software they want to use. The "best" license is not the license that RMS or O'Reilly say is best, but the one that gets the most support from people at large.
Either I have misunderstood what you have said (most likely) or you have little understanding of the idea behind copyright law.
Copyright law is (in most, some would argue all, cases) the only thing which
prevents you from making a copy of another person's intellectual property.
It presupposes that you accept the concept of "intellectual property" as valid.
Why would you want to accept the concept of intellectual property; the concept that someone else "owns" an idea, and has property rights to it?
You accept it because of the benefit it brings to you to do so. Or at least you do if you're smart.
The idea behind copyright law is that we agree as a society that
the benefit we derive from having Authors and Inventors share their ideas
is worth more than the cost of granting to them a limited
monopoly of control over the use of those works.
If you feel that this deal is no longer working to your benefit, you can agitate for a renegotiation. If we as a society
feel the same way, then we should re-write the terms of that deal.
We should all understand that whenever the terms of this deal
are changed, either to the benefit of the Authors and Inventors, or to the
benefit of the public, these changes will have repercussions.
I agree with you; since the establishment of copyright law in the United States, the terms of this
agreement have consistently been re-adjusted in favor of the Authors and Inventory.
(Or rather, in favor of the publishers. Was that intentional?)
Perhaps there is a need to re-evaluate the terms of this agreement once more.
Perhaps we need a Federal oversight comittee to manage the
national Intellectual Property and Copyright issues for the benefit
of the society in the same manner that the Federal Reserve
system manages the money supply for the general benefit of the society?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Ok, I'm going to be rather harsh and criticize this point for point.
There's an old children's story I heard once... Lets start out with O'Reilly's objectionable mentioning of the story regarding cows and butter. There's a reason he doesn't tell you the name of the story: that's because the story is racist, designed to make fun of African American people. The story basically details an African American boy going to get things for his mother each day and idiotically blundering in doing such simple things. The story was clearly desiged to imply that African American people are dumb.
My goal is to see as much good software created as possible, and for that to happen, we need a range of licensing models.
A simplified and stupid goal. What good is it to have "good software" if the vast majority of the public can't afford it? The goal should be to maximize the amount of good software the the public effectively has access to(that means, maximize the amount of good software that the average person will get). Progress is useless to society if it only helps the upper echelon of the rich. There are currently "treatments" for AIDS. Big freakin' deal. Only the richest 1% of people in America can afford AIDS treatment. Who cares? Zillions of tax-payer dollars were pumped into research for AIDS...the result: a "treatment" that is completely unavailable to the average person; only the richest of the rich benefit from tax-payer dollars spent on AIDS research. Don't expect that to change when a "cure" is found either.
The Slashdot moderator noted: "it's pretty clear that true freedom would not let one person control what another does with software."
This is just silly. The GPL absolutely controls what other people can do with software. Even the BSD license, which is very generous, places restrictions (e.g. attribution).
O'Reilly's assertion that "that's silly" is not backed up. Simply because GPL does express power over others, does not mean that people have the right to excercise power over others in the form of licensing. GPL is a licensing solution designed to work under the current system of IP, which does excercise some power over others, in order to prevent them from excercising power over others. I agree that GPL does excercise power over users; however, it is the only way under our current system to prevent those users from modifying the code, copyrighting it, and excercising undue power over others.
I'm a firm believer in the original goal of copyright law, which was to maximize progress in the useful arts.
Again, the same criticism applies. "Maximizing progress" is pointless. What you want to maximize is useful progress that the average public person benefits from. If progress in software means that you have to spend 1000 dollars for a single program, that progress is useless to the vast majority of us. Might as well not have it, resources are better spent on a cheaper alternative.
And I know that sometimes throwing something to the winds (i.e. releasing open source software) is the best way to maximize progress, while at others, placing restrictions on its distribution takes you further towards that goal.
Closing off ideas and placing restrictions on them is never the optimal way to increase progress; and it certainly is never the optimal way to increase useful progress(progress that the majority of the public can benefit from). Want a historical example? Lets see, lets compare the Modern age of "enlightenment" and the Ancient age, to the Middle Ages. In the ancient age, great scientific progress was made, as was mathematical progress and technological progress; the same in the modern age; furthermore, people's rights in each age were, relatively, well-respected. The Middle Ages: half a millenium of wars, torture, religious dictatorships, and zero progress. The only progress made during the middle ages was progress in killing and death. Ancient Mayan scripts were destroyed at the "ends" of the Middle Ages by visitors to America(this is technically not the "Middle Ages", but still an era under the control of religious idiocy and closed-mindedness). The medical scripts of Imhotep, the great Priest of Egypt, were destroyed at the onset of the Middle Ages...another wonder we can thank religion and closed-mindedness(including closing off ideas) for. Imhotep was the first real practitioner of medicine, even before Hippocrates. Thanks to the destruction of his work, medicine may have been set back centuries.
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social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
O'Reilly says
But that's not the same goal as RMS. RMS has repeatedly stated that he'd accept an inferior piece of software, if the superior product was non-free. RMS expects the right to copy the software, read the software, learn how it works, and make modifications to it. RMS wants the software to be unencumbered at to how you use it, where you use it, why you use it, who uses it, when you use it, EXCEPT for the tiny encumberment that you don't deny anybody else the same freedoms.
Until O'Reilly argues on the same wavelength as RMS - which means either attacking the stated goals of RMS, or attacking the means RMS uses to achieve those goals - then O'Reilly won't have an essay worth reading. When you watch a debate you expect PRO and CON for the SAME argument, not PRO and PRO for DIFFERENT arguments.
RMS acts like a rabid maniac sometimes but when you stop to think about it his point makes a lot more sense from a freedom standpoint.
Many people claim that true freedom is the right to impose whatever restrictions you want on something that belongs to you, a part of property law, and since software is intellectual property this naturally applies to software too. Unfortunately this does not hold water.
If I own a piece of land then I am well within my rights to restrict your access to it. If I sell you a piece of land my right to restrict your use of it goes away. Why is this not so with software? Furthermore, if I buy a Honda, why should I expect the Honda corporation to restrict my rights to open the hood of the car, fix the engine if it breaks, etc.?
What RMS is doing is challenging our notion of "intellectual property". Intellectual property rights are not natural rights. Congress was given the power to grant limited monopolies to creators and inventors, to encourage them to develop the arts and sciences in this country. What is happening, particularly in the proprietary software field, is exactly the opposite. Companies are using these rights to stifle innovation and competition in the field, to ensure that customers must purchase whatever software they sell no matter how bloated/buggy/outdated it may be (*cough*Windows*cough*). This has the potential effect of creating a sort of "software illuminati". Much as the guilds of the past kept information about their trade secret, both to remain in business and as a form of protection from a Church that banned the acquisition of certain types of scientific knowledge, the proprietary software companies of today keep their source code, which is nothing but information about their craft, secret. The Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution both came about during periods of relative intellectual freedom, when anyone could acquire the scientific knowledge necessary to invent and develop new technologies, art, etc.
Free software promises to do the same thing in the software world. RMS realizes this, and so does Bill Gates which is why he's so afraid of it.
RMS has not called for a law banning any form of proprietary software (that I can tell), and we all know that he has very strong opinions on what kinds of policy should be implemented in his version of a free society. I can't speak for him but it looks like he's taking the correct approach in a free society, putting his money where his mouth is. He believes that free software is so damn good from a freedom standpoint that it will eventually win out over proprietary software in the end, and that makes the GNU project a sort of social experiment to determine if this is the case. So far the outcome seems hopeful despite the landscape being littered with the decaying husks of open source dot-coms: Linux, Mozilla, Apache, etc. usage is still growing.
This is why I use free software: because proprietary software is a car with the hood welded shut.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Attempt to paint the FSF as communist fail to address that they are talking about intellectual property, not real goods; additionally, they fail to realize that the FSF focuses its efforts on motivating developers to release code under the GPL, rather than coercing them to do so. To describe them as communist would be akin to describing the United Way as Stalinist.
It has everything to do with ethics. I don't see how you can argue its like politics and social philosophy--what do you think ethics is?