Being Free is Hard to Do

ValourX writes "What is more important to you -- the four freedoms of Free Software, or the ability to maximize the value of your computer? It's a question that comes up on Slashdot often, but rarely is it so well argued as it is in this NewsForge article. How important are the FSF's four freedoms to you? What are you willing to sacrifice for those freedoms?" NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.

Comments

Economic balance of freedom software cost.

[theapodan]

Personally, I'm willing to sacrifice the convenience of flash animations, or of photoshop, for a free (as in beer) solution. I'm cheap. The fact that the free (as in beer and in freedom) software often is excellent quality, FreeBSD being my favorite, doesn't hurt either.

However, I can see it being an impediment to adoption of free software because of the sometimes unreasonable demands placed by restrictive licences. The GPL does prevent advances and progress in some cases, such as device drivers, that otherwise would be possible. Same with flash and other non-free media solutions, whether DRM or CSS on DVDs or what have you.

I myself feel however, that sacrificing utility for the benefit of using a free software package, is only rational if the resulting loss in utility is no greater than the benefits. However, it is easy to quantify the benefit of free as in beer software, but harder to economically evalutate the benefits of free as in freedom software.

Re:Should I bother?

[SealBeater]

Honestly, someone once said (+Orc, a very good cracker back in the day) that someone's work that is done for money will always be inferior to the work of someone who does it for love. I personally would rather use the OpenBSD team's ssh than a commercial one, because I know that the people behind it are doing it because they believe in it, and are going to do their best to put out a superior product, rather than being more concerned for the buck, not the software.

SealBeater

Well argued?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's barely argued at all. His line seems to be:

A lot of people don't value freedom of software that much, therefore anyone who does should stop.

He doesn't even try to actually make a connection between the apparent premise and the apparent conclusion.

Direct quotes:

"Perhaps it is time to let go of some of the high-moral ideals and remember why we started using computers in the first place."

But he doesn't say WHY anyone with these high-moral ideals should let go of them.

"none of us should ever be asked to make unfavorable sacrifices when it comes to turning our computer time into work or money"

Again, why not? Because it makes him uncomfortable to be asked to make "unfavorable sacrifices"?

maybe.... balance?

[ignorant_newbie]

There are some areas which are well supplied by free software. in many of them, the free software is markedly better than the commercial competition. These seem to be things like Operating Systems and Web Servers.

Other things seem to be best supplied by the commercial market - Doom3 & the nvidia drivers that let me play it on my linux box, for example. These things are all good, and there is a place for all of them. Jumping up and down about whether they meet RMS's definition of 'Free' or not is a waste of time, imho.

Re:Should I bother?

[Ngwenya]

Non-free software or no software. What would you rather have?

False dichotomy. There isn't an either/or except in your premise that you wouldn't have written software were it to be free.

I too write software for a living. People pay me to do it. It's also free software - because it falls below the value line for closed source software for my employer [along with at least 95% of all software written in the company].

I have also written software which has nothing to do with my employer. I do it for the love of it. There are many others in the world with a similar view. I would write software even if I didn't get paid to do it - sure, I'd need another job to keep body and soul together, but I'd still hack.

Anyway, why wouldn't people pay you if it was free software - do you only code for people who sell the software afterwards as proprietary? Most software (95%+) is generated for internal use - so it generally makes sense to release it as free software. Because then it reduces the amount of code the purchaser needs for any new products. The more free code there is generally, the cheaper software production gets in total.

--Ng

Free != zero cost

[Noksagt]

A dozen posts & already many that confuse no-cost software with software that you can do anything with, including viewing & modifying the source & sharing it with others.

A love for zero-cost software isn't bad. I see a lot of people coming to the F/OSS movement because of it. They could run a warez copy of Photoshop, but then they discover the GIMP. After a while, they may discover the fantastic quality of software available & may try more of it. They might discover how wonderfully helpful and intelligent the community is--they are eager to help & are eager to have you contribute back.

I probably wouldn't have started to use F/OSS if it was priced unreasonably. But now I find the other parts of freedom to be much more important. It is frustrating to find commercial software that is stagnant. Bugs are always present in any software (some of which are security vulnerabilities, some of which are just annoyances that I have run into). But with F/OSS, I can usually see if a bug has already been reported, look for solutions, or report it & wait for insight from others. I'm not much of a programmer, but I can also sometimes discover a fix myself. The frustration of not being able to have this basic ability with some nonfree software is horrid.

I recently started to contribute a small amount of money each month to software which I use every day--which I depend on for entertainment and to get my work done. Paying for free software?! Well, at least it is tax deductible & it does make me feel good.

I would definitely say that the four freedoms are more important than zero-cost.

Re:Should I bother?

[Ngwenya]

But WHAT is this way to make a living? And please, don't tell me it's "support", I don't believe it anymore... I agree that you can write OSS in your spare time, but I haven't met anyone who wrote OSS for a living (and I don't want answers like Alan Cox or RMS).

You seem to have excluded the set of available answers in the postamble to your questions. A bit like saying "What's the capital of France?" and then saying "Please don't say Paris".

There are many top flight coders who work for companies like IBM, HP, Sun, etc. (eg, Andrew Tridgell, Jeremy Allison, and so on). They all get paid to write F/OSS. But you don't have to be an uber-coder to get into that game. If you work for a reasonable enlightened company [yes, there are a few], they can see that most of the software generated internally has no value as a sales proposition. So get them to release it as free software. Explain that it means that the cost of developing new software will drop, because you can now use and redistribute the work of all the other coders.

Bang - suddenly you're developing OSS for a living. Maybe you do helpdesk other parts of the time, or are a tech support guy. So what? It's still code. The more there is of it, the more it'll get used.

Hell, even the stuff which I've written and been ashamed of is useful - because it let's people know how not to do something!

--Ng

Re:Freedom 0?

[advocate_one]

very important... and a lot of people don't really get why... anyone who bitches about his gpl'd program being used by the military to suppress indigenous tribes with fails to appreciate that vital freedom. It's double edged and you have to fully appreciate this. If your conscience can't cope with it, then don't release it under an open source license. Use your own license to tie it down so that you can deny them the use of your program.

There's a missing fifth fundamental freedom

[MikShapi]

At least as considered by any business who'd want to ingegrate anything, even as miniscule as a c file with 3 functions that calculate CRC.

What's missing is just like "The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public" only the opposite -
"The freedom to improve the program, and not release your improvements to the public" (or sell said improvements to the public for profit)"

This is the issue commonly called copylefting.
What it comes down to is "Free for anyone who's part of our [opensource] club" as set forth by the GPL (If you're a Checkpoint dev, a legal obligation to release all/parts-of the source code of the product makes whatever ran you into that obligation anything but free), or "Free to anyone. Period." as set forth by X11/modified-BSD licenses. The latter offer the fifth freedom.

The obligation [e.g. lack of freedom] to integrate GPL code with [often immense] business-owned closed code serves on one hand to spur [few, IMHO] businesses to go opensource, while keeping a dark "obligation" cloud over Open Source that scares the rest away. I personally ran into this dillema at my former workplace. The result was us using BSD-licensed and commercial solutions, while [to my great dismay] avoiding GPL-code like the plague.
The LGPL is a fair compromise, unfortunately few projects use it. Sometimes you need code from a GPL app, and you're willing to wrap it in a library yourself (and offer that library's code to the public) but since the original dev never considered this and just slapped the GPL on his work, and you can't use it (whereas had he done so with LGPL, you would be able to do so).

The conclusion (which promptly earned me two flamebait mods last time I said this unliked piece of truth here) is that everything GPL is quite unfree to those [nice, evil, fill your own description] people who pay us coders our salaries and feed our families.

I, personally, as a coder who wants to tap open source where I work, would definitely like it to be otherwise. For the GNU codebase to be as legal-obligation-free and accessible as the X11-ilcensed or mod-BSD-licensed codebase (and a big thank you to anyone altruistic enough to use those licenses on his donated code).

Wishful thinking I guess...

Re:There's a missing fifth fundamental freedom

[Noksagt]

"The freedom to improve the program, and not release your improvements to the public"

The GPL allows this.

(or sell said improvements to the public for profit)"

But not this. What incentive do people who believe in the GPL for letting you get a jump-start on a closed commercial product. Strategically useful tools are often placed under an LGPL or BSD-type license if their wide-spread adoption will help the community. But for some things, GPL authors are rightfully greedy. If I developed a free end-user application, I would very much resent it if I couldn't take advantage of someone else's improvements. No one is writing GPLed software to make it easier for you to personally make a buck off it.

The obligation [e.g. lack of freedom] to integrate GPL code with [often immense] business-owned closed code serves on one hand to spur [few, IMHO] businesses to go opensource

If businesses have immense closed code, they have the resources to generate more of it themselves. How would GPLed code help both them and the F/OSS community?

What you see as lack of freedom I see as freedom: users are GUARANTEED the improvements made by others!

but since the original dev never considered this and just slapped the GPL on his work, and you can't use it (whereas had he done so with LGPL, you would be able to do so).

Contact the developer. He may relicense it to you. Since you are selling it, you might want to/have to compensate him financially for a license.

Re:There's a missing fifth fundamental freedom

[MikShapi]

0. Calm down. Your contribution shouldn't cost you your health.
1. Your contribution is greatly appreciated.
2. I [as a coder who is a paid representative of my employer] would greatly like to use your contribution, free, as you intended.
3. As far as my employer is concerned, your contribution, as useful as it is, is not worth GPL-stamping [e.g. opensourcing] 2 million lines of source, millions of dollars he invested into of engineer time, into a product with a competing edge, which is keeping his business afloat. Asking this of my employer, be it fair or not in your view, is unrealistic. He will not commit financial suicide for you. Don't take that as an insult, you wouldn't commit suicide for me either, even if I donated something to you, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
4. The LGPL allows me to take your code, wrap it in a library, and opensource the code of that library alone, not everything [i.e. my employer's entire product] that links to it. My employer uses, My employer gives something [albeit not his head on a silver platter] back to the community. This is what I referred to as fair and compromise.
>> "What do "fair" and "compromise" mean on your planet?"
Does your planet have this thing called "Economy", "Businesses" and "Programmers who have children to feed and thus need an employer to pay them a salary"? Mine does.
5. Being able to use your contribution with no strings attached is what makes your contribution free to him, as opposed to costing him something (even if you view that as free because what he pays never reaches your pocket). The term free [as in beer] is not a result of what you get. It's a result of what it costs him.

Which brings me back to my original post - GPL is free to any members of the OS club. X11/BSD is free to everyone, closed-source software businesses (with which one or two slashdotters may have crossed paths during their careers) as well. And it's you, the contributer, who decides who you want to share with.

Think of a TV ad saying "X if FREE, if only you join our club (which promptly costs money to anyone who's, say, asian)".
Free, eh?

Re:There's a missing fifth fundamental freedom

[MikShapi]

Here's an example for you.

A [quite real] company called Qualystem makes a network-boot suite that allows you to boot Windows XP clients off a UNIX/Linux-based server.

There is no opensource alternative for their product. This is said to emphasize there is neither something wrong with their business model, nor are they on the verge of drowning under free&better OS alternatives like traditional UNIX operating systems or products with opensource counterparts are.
Their business relies SOLELY on selling software. Not service. Not hardware. Just software.

Such a company cannot use so much as a line of GPL code without legally binding themselves to commit suicide, hence for them GPL != free. For them, GPL is the most expensive thing in the world.

Re:Four freedoms vs Max use?

[Neil Blender]

Look up the following: Mplayer, Kaffeine, Xine, LibDVDRead and BZFlag

Dude, you are preaching to the choir. I am a full on linux junky and have been for many years. But tell me, who's the fool: My boss (who has been in the computer business for 30 years) who is given a perfectly capable dual boot(linux/xp) laptop and asks me how do view a dvd under linux OR my wife with fuckall computer experience who can buy an ATHF dvd off ebay, stick it into her XP laptop and be watching it (with sound) inside of 10 seconds?

Me? I will spend the hour or two it takes me now (as opposed to the weeks or months it would have taken me 3 or more years ago) to figure out how to get it to work. My boss - I'll set it up for him, 'cause he's an idiot. My wife? She'll have watched the dvd three times before I'm done.

Free as in...

[burtonator]

What about the 5th Freedom?

Free as in $29.95 ....

Seriously though.. I've made a lot of money selling (my) Free Software for $29.95...

I just had the source in CVS. If you were smart enough to checkout via anoncvs and to the build yourself that was fine.

If you needed help and wanted a really nice installer it cost you $29.95...

This let me work on my little project full time which then turned into a company.

We're 7 people now :)

Re:I am so sick of this crap

[polyp2000]

Im going to bite this troll...

Simply by saying that you probably dont realise quite how much influence free software is changing the world its not some small bunch of hippies with some ideal to legalise pot. If free software and those that extoll the virtues of it did not exist your world would probably be very different. Have you ever used google ? have you ever looked at a website running on linux/bsd/apache ? ever downloaded a bittorrent file? or ripped a dvd?

The chances are that you have - and all of these things were made possible to you by people excercising their right to create, use and modify free software.

Free software people dont "want" to change the world, they "are" changing the world - and the chances are my friend that you have benefitted from it in many many ways. And ask yourself this question ... what about all those developing countries who are choosing Linux/FOSS are they and their people not going to benefit directly or indirectly from the fact that their goverments have less ties with redmond in america?

Exactly

[wirelessbuzzers]

The goal of the GPL is to make all software free.

The goal of the BSD license is to make all software better.

Re:Four freedoms vs Max use?

[ichimunki]

I'll take four hours installing GNU/Linux over four hours trying to recover from the latest virus invasion on my Windows system any day. Really. How many people do you know that run Windows who haven't had some terrible corruption issue from spyware, viruses, worms, etc?

This four freedoms discussion is more interesting if we're talking about whether to use Photoshop on Mac OS X over the GIMP or whether we're comparing Oracle on some proprietary Unix over postgresql or mysql on GNU/Linux.

Re:Should I bother?

[niiler]

Based on the many DRM and Trusted Computing posts, I suspect that Free software will not become illegal. Rather, those of us who can tinker under the hood and write our own software will become obsolete like the mechanics who used to rebuild cars in their own garages.

While the do-it-yourself mechanic can still rebuild an engine, they need an industry built $10,000 diagnostic tool to do it. Likewise, once DRM sets in, we will need to buy expensive licenses in order to work on the new stuff.

I, for one, feel that this sort of mandatory licensing is like enclosure in the past. We are headed towards a no-individual-ownership society where corporations own everything and we lease the rights to use such things from them. There's something inherently wrong with this from an ethical viewpoint, IMHO.

Free software is not for everyone, granted. But for those of us who use and love it, it means the world.

Man what a stupid article

[wrook]

Do I value the 4 freedoms more than free price. Damn yes! I've got a GNU/Linux box at home and a Windows box at work. In *no* way do I prefer my Windows box. Some of the apps are nice on it, but *every* time I have a problem with any of them I find myself screwed. If I phone the developer for "support" (which my company pays for) all I get is, "We're aware of the problem and may fix it in the next release". That's it! No other options! And notice, "may fix it". They don't even tell me if it's going to be fixed. And when a new release comes out, I've got to buy the damned upgrade *before I know if it's fixed my problem!* Not only that, I can't just get a patch for my old release with just my problem fixed.

Do I value the 4 freedoms? Hell yeah. How much money would I pay to have those freedoms? Lots, I tell you. Those 4 freedoms are worth more than the cost of a support contract.

Of course, I'm a programmer, so I'm biased. Some people aren't programmers and may not realize the benefits of freedom the way I do. But let's take the example of a friend of mine. She wanted to do some word processing for a report that she had to write. As I worked at Corel at the time, I happened to have a copy of Word Perfect which I gave to her (it's useless to me...). Well, it turns out it was useless to her too. First of all, it was too complicated and confusing for her (She's not a computer person and she didn't need all the features). Secondly the thing was full of bugs on the features that she did need. Constantly, I got calls of "Miiiikee!!!! Fiiiix it!!!!!". I tried to tell her I couldn't, but she didn't understand.

Eventually I got sick of it and replaced it with Abiword. But not stock Abiword. I ripped everything out if it and gave her a stripped down version. Then any time she asked for a new feature, I added it back.

Do I value the 4 freedoms? Hell yeah. Everyday, I program on a Windows box because the market for my latest companies product is Windows. However, I've been tasked with writing portable code (to port to *ix and Mac). To me this means POSIX. But many of the damn POSIX calls in Windows are broken. What the hell do I do? I'm not allowed to fix them. I have to completely rewrite them, or put endless #ifdefs in my code.

But here's the irony of this whole thing. I understand the value of the 4 freedoms. As a consumer, I would never be stupid enough to purchase mission critical software without those freedoms. But....

I can't quite figure out a non-consulting business model that would allow me to give my customers these freedoms. My boss understands the benefit of freedom as well, but doesn't want to be a consultant. So for now, *I* deny my customers these freedoms which I value so highly.

And here is where I disagree with RMS. He feels that it is immoral to continue the above situation. He recommends quitting and becoming a waiter, writing free software on the side. While it is *very* tempting to do this, I'm not going to. Free software will not move into all sectors of commercial development without finding a variety of business models. Michael Tiemann found one excellent and successful business model with Cygnus. Research needs to be done to find others.

Working every day in this moronic proprietary world shows me the problems and gives me incentive to do something about them. Some day I hope everyone can realize the benefits of Free software. Until that day, I'm sure we'll get lots of delusional people who actually think that proprietary is somehow superior (what a bizarre thought). I'm not going to waste my effect trying to tell them they are wrong.

Education is Also a Factor

[kravlor]

My first serious brush with Free software was when I took an operating systems course back in college. While many of the principles we discussed were universal (schedulers, filesystems, etc.) we turned to the Linux kernel to look at examples of how you would actually implement a scheduler, filesystem, etc.

Another interest I had was in how P2P networks work. I had no experience in network programming, but a firm grasp of C/C++; downloading the source to a Gnutella client and poking around did wonders. When I later had to contribute to a network-based application in college, I found myself ahead thankful for being able to reference functioning, stable code.

While the article makes the (valid) point that many people do not have the ability to easily modify the software they use, this ability doesn't just magically appear from nowhere; it's something that has to be learned. For me, seeing examples of how certain things are implemented is one of the most effective way to learn.

Besides, there's always the allure of knowing that if you're not satisfied with a Free software product, you can pick it up, study the source, and fix it yourself if you're so inclined!

Re:what freedom is

[Brandybuck]

Freedom is the ability to do something without the fear of punishment.

Close, but not quite. Freedom is the absence of restriction. The difference is crucial. Your definition focuses on the consequences of an action, while the dictionary definition focuses on the ability to perform an action.

To add a necessary clarifying point (with regards to that subset of freedom known as liberty), freedom ends where another's freedom begins. In other words, you cannot use freedom to restrict freedom. At the point where you ability begins to restrict another's ability, it ceases to be liberty and is called "privilege".

Copyright infers upon an author many privileges. The only software that is truly free as in having a complete lack of privilege is public domain software. Licensed software is judged by how much privilege it retains (or additionally aquires through contractual agreements) or gives up. Unrestricted licenses like BSD or MIT have the fewest retained privileges, and conseqently the most liberty. Copyleft licenses like the GPL and LGPL enforce a few more privileges and have a bit less liberty. Both, however, are nearly equivalent with regards to most proprietary commercial software.