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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?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
On the point that "all copyright changes" don't take into account the user this isn't the case in the EU where some changes have been done for that reason.
One issue that isn't often addressed is the cultural differences between countries that lead to different approaches being appropriate in different countries. The same is true within different parts of an organisation ("If I can't pay it ain't worth it" to "If its free then it fits in my budget"). Licensing is about the _writer_ of the software or work which may make sense in their environment but not in that of another. Thus a proprietary license and ownership but free distribution (eg Java) may make a lot of sense if it ties in with the aims of the program.
IMO Writers of a work have a right on how it should be used, it is not for _users_ to say how it should be used as it is not their effort that created it. That said the Writer's right does not extend once the users effort has been expended, whether that be by paying cash or by building upon the artefact.
If I buy a brick, I do not expect to pay a regular license for the house.
Cultural differences are just as important. If a certain practice seems strange or odd to you probably means that your approach seems odd to them. Basically tolerance is the important deal, being dictatorial makes you as much as a fool as the guy you are arguing against.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Carl G. Jung
--
"With one breath, with one flow, You will know Synchronicity" -La Policia
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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I think there are distinctly two lines here:
1. Stallman Ideas are communist - no relation to way USSR implemented its ideas of communism. Rather an original idea of communism.
2. Other opensource licences are 'socialism' with fragments of communism, here and there. See Finland, other european contries.
Taken that, I think it is a disservice Tim doing for the public, trying to confuse them and make public analyse each of the licences. Why? Because most public is not able, interested or have time to pick apart lawyer made contraptions. Now if he was to say that BSD licence is good, here's why, that would let common programmers understand advantages of either and pick one.
Business being a thing that will consume anything to grow, opensource licences are usable and possibly exploitable under some circuimstances, while GPL is least exploitable - AFAIK.
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.
Google's cache works.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
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.
In Stallman's universe, software companies just wouldn't exist. It would be impossible for a bunch of programmers to get together and support themselves by developing great software. They'd have to find some other thing they could sell along with it. But suppose they didn't want to do that. Suppose they just wanted to write software - they're screwed. Those people are no longer free to just write software!
The freedom to decide to charge for some of your software is a freedom, because it allows you to choose your career. Without the ability for anyone anywhere to ever charge for any software, the freedom for programmers to just be programmers disappears.
I'm not saying that Free software is a bad thing. But it has to co-exist with proprietary software for software development as a whole to remain viable.
The truth is something which may only be approached asymptotically.
illegitimii non ingravare
[Disclaimer, I haven't read Tim O'Reilly's web log, it is slashdotted]
...all licensing, including the GPL, is an expression of power over what other people can do with the software.
... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Congress is supposed to legislate according to the will of the people, or at least the people who voted for them.
Michael writes:
I disagree. Copyright Law is an expression of power of the copyright holder over the users of the media. Many licenses (eg, the typical Microsoft EULA) make use of the power of Copyright and Contract Law to claim even more power over the users. It makes sense to say that these licenses are an expression of power.
The GPL, and other Free Software licenses take no additional power over users beyond those already exerted by copyright laws. In fact, they give users additional freedoms that they would not otherwise have. I would call these licenses expressions of freedom, not power.
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.
Historically, yes, copyright law has had much more to do with balancing the rights of creators with the rights of publishers. In the US, the rights of users are brought into the equation by the doctorine of Fair Use, which is a matter of legal precident in the court system, not by creation of laws.
Fundamentally, however, any law is an agreement between "The People" (being those who permit the government to exist by following the rules and refraining from revolting), and those particular people governed by the law. Copyright law is no exception.
The basis of Copyright Law in the US is in the US Constitution, Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have the power
So basically, Copyright Law as it now stands in the US is a compromise between the users (via their representatives in Congress), and the creators (via their lobbyists in Washington). Yes, it is a one-sided compromse (observe that the lengths of copyright have always been set so that Mickey Mouse stays out of the public domain).
If you want a different balance, make sure your will is known to your representatives. If your representatives ignore your will, vote for someone else. If enough people get involved, our government still won't be perfect, but at least it will better represent the will of people, and look less like the will of lobbyists.
For those of you in other nations, the basic theory is the same, the mechanisms are different.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
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.
While strictly true, this is a blatantly unfair claim. If we accept that actions are expressions of either freedom or power (as per Kuhn and Stallman's definition), we must also accept that expressions of power either limit others' freedom, or limit others' power. Using power to limit freedom, we can all agree is evil. Using power to limit power, however, must be allowed in some form, unless you feel that no-one may stop thieves and murderers.
If you acknowledge that software licensing is a form of power (and it is RMS's primary contension that proprietary licensing is an exercise of power that deprives users of essential freedoms), then it follows that GPL licensing uses power to limit power. It becomes a question of whether it's acceptible for individuals to limit others' power in this way. But you can't simply vilify all forms of power.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
But the GPL is just as much an expression of power over users as any proprietary license.
Hello, RMS.
I like the project I'm working on. I want to share the source code, because I think a lot of other people might apply it in groovy ways that don't suggest themselves to me.
But YOUR viewpoint is brick for brick the same prison as the Redmond Institute for the Monopolistically Inclined.
Mr. O'Reilly, your moderate view is a breath of fresh air.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The copying issue is the problem and what I would love to see is a free license with the following restrictions:
I believe something like this would go a long way to making sure that developers get their due, and can earn a living by charging for software but other developers/users can make copies, share with friends, or learn from the code.
The Anti-Blog
That's odd - it worked for a while. Well, try this version.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
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.
The only way to fight proprietary software in a world that has largely accepted it is to use copyright against itself. This is precisely what GPL does. GPL is the license of choice for those who believe that no software should be proprietary. That's why the license is "virulent" too.
Some people argue that GPL is "less free" because it cannot be turned proprietary by a third party, as with the BSD license. However, this argument stems from the belief that it's OK for some software to be proprietary--and proprietary software is clearly less free.
In some sort of ideal utopian society without copyright, these issues would be mute because software would be incapable of being sold and thus no economic advantage would be had from closed source. The only way software could be commercially produced in such a society would be by paying programmers / software companies for their focused labor instead their end product. And in fact, this is the ultimate goal of true proponents of Open Source software. Though copyright may be with us for awhile, GPL is a huge step towards reducing its power in the software industry.
RMS's "Open Source is the One True Way and Closed Source is Evil" stand is the polar opposite of Craig Mundie's "Open Source is evil and communist and Closed Source is the American Way" but I find them equally offensive.
Both should shut the fuck up and let developers release software with whatever license they choose and let the developers (and by extension, users) decide which method wins out...or, more realistically, allow both methods to exist in parallel.
There is a clause in the GPL that says something to the effect "This code is licensed under this version of the GPL or any later version." Removing that clause from your COPYING.TXT pretty much gives you the licence on the Linux kernel. The GPL and LGPL are nothing more than tools in and of themselves. As long as the "any later version clause is removed" then the FSF has no power over a GPLed work.
The FSF also recommends that developers give the original copyrights to the FSF. You don't have to do that either. Basically, using the GPL does not morph a developer into a slack jawed Stallmanite.
It sounds like the GPL as used on the Linux kernel may be what you are looking for. The kernel developers also permit proprietary kernel modules but feel no obligation to maintain module compatibility across kernel releases. It is up to the proprietary vendor to track the kernel in that case. So you may or may not want to remove that addition as well.
Interesting concept. However I believe that freedom and power are inseperable. When you give anyone freedom you are also giving them power. The freedom to choose how you use software is a power as much as having the freedom to choose how your software is used is a power.
I don't agree with RMS on this. I think he's off base. He advocates freedom--to a point, which isn't freedom at all. I understand where he's coming from, the freedom to license software has become abused, but is this reason to remove it? I don't think so.
With any freedom there are responsibilities. When people abuse the freedom of speech, I can't advocate removing that freedom because they are using it to thier own advantage. I can use my own freedoms to combat their misuse, however. That is the challenge, to combat misuse of freedoms. This is a duty of the masses, and not the elite. We have a responsibility to use our freedom of choice to combat what we see as misuse.
Limiting freedom of any sort isn't the answer. Freedom without power really isn't freedom.
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?
Power and freedom are very hardy words that stand in much abuse yet stand again for the next debate. You can argue all you want about Freedom and Power and yet find you are arguing about nothing at all. If you can have wars against drugs and wars against terrorism, you can have the Freedom to have Power and the Power of Freedom. You can argue endless rhetoric on how the Power to not give other people the Freedom to have Power over other people's Freedom and then find the next reply to that is another twist on words that seems equally correct.
So to avoid this in a talk about software licenses, I ask you to believe only in real things. The words Power and Freedom don't decide arguments. We're talking about the words "software" and "can do" which are real. What can you do with your software and why can or can't you? And are the reasons just?
Yes...I suppose "just" is another trap in unreality. But its an opinion that I can't say how you answer. I guess Stallman has been asking you to ask yourself a question for a long time now. Is it okay to be fined for pirating software. Or should I say sharing software. Uh! the English language is such a mess. Don't trust your language to win arguments. You must depend on the reasoning of the reader to know what it is you are really talking about and not simply respond to rhetoric on vague words. The readers who do this are most probably not the same people who win arguments or who become President.
George Orwell warned us about this as well. He said "Political language [...] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." This is about political language but it applies equally here.
However you believe, believe only in real things. Honesty is greater than wit
great comment. i have no mod points to give :(
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
It doesn't follow that O'Reilly is racist, and the proposition that he is racist does not support your argument. This line of argument is little more than a poor ad-hominem.
The goal should be to maximize the amount of good software the the public effectively has access to
Software has to exist to be "effectively accesible". And it doesn't have to be "free-as-in-beer" to be "effectively accessible". Short sighted attempts to benefit consumers by punishing producers simply don't work because they destroy financial incentive to produce. This is why we're stuck with capitalism.
O'Reilly's assertion that "that's silly" is not backed up.
Calling a hotly contested claim "obvious" is indeed silly.
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.
The requirement that the source be made available is not necessary to accomplish the above. In a system without copyright, an author could still produce binary-only derivative works, and sell them.
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.
Making resources available to everybody in equal quantities is not a sound economic principal.
Lets see, lets compare the Modern age of "enlightenment" and the Ancient age, to the Middle Ages.
"Proof by analogy is fraud" -- Bjarne Stroustrup. And no, your analogy is not analogous.
This analogy makes me feel a bit strange, since I don't like the idea of affirmative action, but do like the GPL. I guess the core reason I don't like affirmative action is that it serves to justify exactly the racism ("that guy only got the job because he is black") that it is trying to counteract. I am not sure the same is true of the GPL, the GPL says "ok, we don't like copyright law, but it exists, so we may as well use it to our own ends". Unlike affirmative action, use of the GPL does not really encourage use of the thing it seeks to counteract.
That article argues that contract would replace IP. Those things which are covered by IP in today's world are easy to copy (in digital form); the article postulates technological means of catching 'IP contract' breaches, but you know as well as I do that the nature of digital information disables these attempts (save for their legal protection, as in the DMCA). The thing about contract is that it doesn't apply to third parties.
Look at SDMI. It's all well and good, but the problem for the 'content owners' is that non-SDMI compliant devices exist, so it's protection is limited to a narrow scope of 'approved' devices. What is to prevent entrepreneurial disablement of SDMI through the marketing of non-SDMI devices? (except the force of a possible law, which would not exist in your anarchist world).
Ease of copying without detection, and the inapplicability of contract to third parties, confounds this libertarian / anarchist theory of 'IP contract'. All it takes is for me to take your content, agreed under contract, and undetectably copy it and give the copy to someone else, for the system to break down.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.