Freedom or Power Redux

Warhammer writes: "In his web log today Tim O'Reilly responded to Stallman and Kuhn's essay, Freedom or Power (previous Slashdot article). I think he has some great points about not getting caught up in who has more of a right to freedom. Instead he says we should concentrate on a compromise that benefits everyone, developer and user alike."

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.

Comments

"users" are irrelevant to licensing issues

[Aardappel]

this is one issue that I have never understood about open source advocacy: the talk about "users".

(pure) users can't program thus their "freedom" is a 1:1 coupling to the freedom of the programmer that is their "supplier".

The only freedoms that thus matter are those of programmers (and "users that can program", if you must). But an easier metric to compare licenses would be "Nth level recipient", i.e.:

zero level: the original programmer and licensor
1st level: the programmer that builds on the original code
2nd level and onward: programmer that wants to build on the N-1 level base.

The GPL gives "most freedom" to levels 0 and 2 onwards (the more "selfish" license), whereas the BSD license gives "most freedom" to level 1 (a license giving "most freedom" to all of them can't exist, it will always be a fundamental choice). As soon as a level is occupied by a "user", there won't be any N+1 levels after it, so "freedom" becomes irrelevant.

Re:Some software has to be non-free

[duffbeer703]

Stallman doesn't give a shit about the software industry -- he lives and works in the academic universe.

Since his job & livlihood is funded by gov't grants, charity and tuition, he does not have to worry about actually producing profit.

Re:Actually, one more factual error...

[seebs]

So what? Your code is still free. Other people's code may not be. There's no problem here. Obviously, no, if someone makes a proprietary program that includes some public domain code, their program isn't about freedom - but the PD code gave them the freedom to do that, and gives you the freedom to do whatever *you* want *WITH THE FREE CODE*.

The GPL is only a good thing if power over other peoples' code is more important to you than their freedom to use your code however they want. If that's the case, it's a great license. I'd rather make my moral decisions for myself, and let them make theirs.