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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.
What is more important to you -- the four freedoms of Free Software, or the ability to maximize the value of your computer?
I suppose that depends on how you define "value". Personally, having Free Software and using Free Software has done more to "maximize the value" of my computer far more than anything else I can think of.
SealBeater
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
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.
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
-- Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!!
He doesn't even try to actually make a connection between the apparent premise and the apparent conclusion.
Direct quotes:
But he doesn't say WHY anyone with these high-moral ideals should let go of them.
Again, why not? Because it makes him uncomfortable to be asked to make "unfavorable sacrifices"?
How important are the FSF's four freedoms to you?
Not that important to be honest. I certainly like the cost aspects of 'free software', but what really concerns me is choice. I try to avoid relying on a product which has a single supplier or is not standards-compliant, even if it does meet the FSF's standards.
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.
Sitting Walrus Blog
I always agree with this sentence: "Do it with your passion for CS."
But I'm just a student and wonder: if you do it for free how will you eat? And then someone always comes and say: "if doesn't matter, you'll always find a way to get money out of your work."
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).
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
Other people sell support contracts and customisations. Because I demand a cut of the support contract fee, I get paid. If I released it under the GPL, I could not make that demand.
Oh yes, I don't want to do the customisations and support myself. My skills lie elsewhere.
"Being Free" is even harder to do if you're studying for a degree at my university. Visual Basic 6, .NET, simple Word documents that are incompatible with OpenOffice and are unavailable in any other format, PowerPoint presentations ... the list just goes on and on.
.NET, where there's an opportunity for them to demonstrate that building applications using .NET allows for potentially cross-platform solutions, they instead teach Windows Forms on MSVC.NET.
Even with things like
I mean, what's the fucking deal? We're students. We're not all living in mummy and daddy's basement, having money freely thrown at us.
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.
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
Lately, I've had problems that I thought could be solved by software I bought, but it simply let me down. Free as in beer is pretty important not only because of the software which is useful, but because there's no penalty when it's not.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
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...
-
Look up the following: Mplayer, Kaffeine, Xine, LibDVDRead and BZFlag. Not replacements for closed source, really. Far better, IMO. As for ruddy games, that's what the Cube, PS2, Xbox et al are for (yes, in direct contradiction of me mentioning BZFlag. I can be ignorant, too).
You may also want to look at Mozilla, Firefox, Kmail (which, IMO, is the best graphical mail client ever coded), The GIMP, the FreeBSD networking stack and ipfw. These are all bits of open source software that I use on a daily basis that are "in-my-face" and noticeable. They are also the reason I would be lost without my open source OS, along with the myriad other packages running out of sight and mind that keep my computing and networking ticking over without a hitch. Being free hasn't cost me anything, so I guess I'm not qualified to comment...
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
Having done both, I'd disagree with that "always".
Where I currently work, we have strong, well-understood and well-followed processes that result in higher-quality code - source control, design and code reviews, requirements gathering, etc.
Too often in a project "done for love" these things get ignored (yes - that happens very often when done for money too). That's because (a) setting these things takes time away from the fun part of the project and (b) often the person doing the project for love just doesn't understand the need for it or (as in my case) isn't disciplined enough to do it without a framework in place (both process and social).
There are examples and counter-examples all over the place - I'm just saying don't be blind to the idea that work done for pay can be superior.
Sure, we can all debate the relative merits of GIMP and Photoshop's interfaces, the joys of flash and brew, but the article points why the current environment is unfavorable to free software. It's not so much that commercial software is superior; rather, the freedoms are, in the current environment, irrelevant. Free software only becomes viable when all users are forced to pay for commercial software; that is, when those freedoms (or at least the first three) are enforced across the board. Sticking with the photoshop example, I'm sure there are tons of semi-legitimate and pirated copies of photoshop sitting on people's computers doing relatively simple tasks that could be done just as easily as with GIMP. Let's say Adobe finds a way to shut down all those non-revenue-generating copies. What happens? Maybe Adobe will see a little more revenue. More likely, the the user base of GIMP will increase one hundred fold. Suddenly those freedoms are more than hollow idealism in a pragmatic world, but actually mean something. More users mean more development. Then your Open Source Worker's Paradise is fast becoming a reality. ...and that's when Microsoft forms a coalition with software publishers to build in a costly DRM system that requires every software product to be encrypted to an individual machine in order to work.
What do you want to pay today?
Actually you are wrong to think that people dont get paid to write free software. It shows on your part a lack of understanding of how the free software industry works, or maybe what the term free means in this case. Have you read the "four freedoms" link in the article ?
... of course not .. while there may well be many projects they dont have involvement with and perhaps volunteer contributors to their product. They mostly have good teams of developers that "get paid" to work on free software and this in turn gets returned to the community so everyone benefits. While I could go on and find other examples such as IBM - ill leave the googling to you!
;companies like Novell may well benefit from the Kernel-Hackers at Red-Hat - While the Red-Hat team may benefit from the Ximian develpers at Novell. To put this in perspective look at Microsoft well , its kind of hard to find an example here because the only business that benefit from microsoft is microsoft since they dont follow this ethic at all.
Free software is not about getting something for nothing - it is about your rights, and freedoms and ability to do whatever and use however free software in any way you see fit.
Consider the many companies that sell free software- eg - linux distributions such as Red Hat, Mandrake , SuSe, Novell . Do you think these companies leech the free software in order to create the various distro's they sell ? No
I think that you highlight the misconception that many people have - not just individuals but also businesses - that there aint any money in F/OSS. I think it is important to educate people such as yourself the virtues and dispell the myths that abound. In fact, in todays cut throat IT industry its either be Assimilated or die *cough*redmond*cough* free software and open source is rapidly becoming a form of protection for companies - companies like Novell for example - They couldnt have made a better businiess move than going down the freedom route. Think about this way
Admittedly those that are lucky enough to get paid to write free software are severly outweighed by those who write proprietary. But year after year those scales are tipping and I think its fair to say that linux and free software is a like a snowball rolling down a hill, it just keeps getting bigger and their insnt a lot that can be done to stop it. Its changing the way people think!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
a frind of mine would say that if you need more then a ascii text editor and a graphics app to make a webpage then your in deep trouble. but then he makes the pages useing php and a database for the backend and dynamicly changeing html and css for the frontend. no flash, no other stuff that needs a plugin, and those sites are damn nice ;)
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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.
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
Im going to bite this troll...
... 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?
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
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
The people at your former workplace did exactly the right thing by avoiding GPL code. I'm sure you would say people not willing to honor the terms of your company's licenses (i.e. no sharing, pay for each copy, etc). should not use your company's code. So I don't see why you have trouble with the notion that people not wanting to honor the GPL's terms shouldn't use GPL code.
I myself write closed source code sometimes, but I expect to get paid for doing it. When I write code as a volunteer, it's GPL. I don't see why I should want to do development for your closed source product so you can get money for shipping my code, unless I'm getting some of that money myself. If you want to use the closed source policies to charge people to use code, write the code yourself or pay someone to write it. In wanting to use GPL code in closed source products, it sounds to me like you're just a freeloader looking for a handout.
I think most of us have forgotten that it took great sacrifices by our ancestors to get the freedoms (in society) that we currently enjoy.
I would argue that without sacrifices we cannot achieve freedom. It seems to me that the sacrifices the FSF are asking us to make are significantly less than those made by our ancestors.
That said, I do agree with the basic premise of the article that we often need to use proprietary software to achieve our needs. The solution is better free software - not giving up the fight.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. - Mahatma Gandhi
The goal of the GPL is to make all software free.
The goal of the BSD license is to make all software better.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Sure, I agree whole heartedly that GIMP in no way can compete with Photoshop's features, nor is there any HTML program that can compete with Dreamweaver (maybe HTML-Kit but even that is Windows-only, even though it's free).
:0)
Those aside, I disagree because in most of my day to day activity, free, even open-source programs are not just cheaper (free) but better than the proprietary. Here's a few:
Operating System: BSD and Linux, much better and secure than Windows. More features (bash, gcc), less "features" (Windows Update, Internet Explorer). Hell, even Darwin, an open-source component of a proprietary OS (Mac) is a better kernel than NT.
Word Processing - AbiWord, in my opinion, much better than MS Word. AbiWord in fact looks/acts more like the classic (98, 2000) versions of MS Word than the current MS Words act like.
Music - XMMS (WinAMP on Windows), is there even a comparison to Windows Media Player here?
Video - MPlayer, it even runs without X Window. Can Windows Media Player run video in MS-DOS?
Web Browser - Mozilla FireFox. Internet Exploder doesn't even compare.
Email - Mozilla Thuderbird, Ximian Evolution. Can Outlook, pro or Express, compare to those two??
File Browsing - Nautilus, Konqueror. They crash 100% less of the time that Windows Explorer crashes. And no annoyingly built-in Internet Explorer that's available even if I denied access to iexplore.exe (which I do on spyware-infested clients' computers).
Spreadsheet, Presentation, Other Office - Gnumeric and OpenOffice are both superior to MS Office XP/2003 versions. And like AbiWord, they act more like classic MS Office than current MS Office does. And let's not mention the horrid Mac OS X versions of MS Office.
Instant Messenger - Well, GAIM may be missing some features of proprietary AOL AIM, but one of those features missing is the spyware.
Graphics - Well, mentioned before GIMP's not better than Photoshop... but it does kick Paint Shop Pro's ass. A better all around quick image program than MS Paint too. The price is right too.
Simple Text - Man, even GEdit is superior to MS Notepad.
Programming - Do I even need to compare the long list of free, open-source and standardized Unix/Linux tools to the not-quite-as-affordable MS Visual Studio??
When it comes to Macromedia, I agree with the Dreamweaver argument, and somewhat with Flash (as much as I personally hate FLash, it's here to stay and sometimes it is done elegantly), but I in no way think Fireworks is something to be missed. Everything done in Fireworks can be done with Javascript and HTML coding if you only knew the code. As for FreeHand, well there's Illustrator for Windows/Mac and for Linux I know there's a bunch of free vector graphics programs out there.
Basically, if Linux could just get her own versions of Photoshop and Dreamweaver it'd be all set (and not WINE'd either, real ports so PPC and SPARC Linux users can use it to!!
Generally, I think they'll find that most people hold a similar view. OSS advocates often get so caught up in the ideas of modifiability and redistributability that they forget that for most people, it's a total non-issue.
So just because you dont understand or have the ability to modify code its a non-issue? How about the fact that it is modifiable and can be changed by someone who does understand and modify free software can do so? Your should care that software is freely modifiable because you will be the one benefitting when someone else more knowledgable comes along and makes the product better. What happens when the noddy proprietary software vendor goes belly up - bang goes your investment - but if their product was free open source, and the software was of any great merit you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be plenty of foss developers getting their hands dirty.
Just because you are unable to do theses things yourself it doesnt mean that you shouldnt care about it being important - you benefit from it all the time without even realising it.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
People tend to forget what launched Mr. Stallman on this road toward software freedom: he wanted to use a laser printer he had on hand with his word processing program. The software didn't have drivers, and as I recall the printer didn't have documentation, either.
Big trees from little acorns grow.
So far, I've found free alternatives for almost everything I do with my computers at home:
1. Web Browsing? Mozilla/Firefox
2. E-mail? Thunderbird or Evolution
3. Group Calendaring? Mozilla Sunbird + Apache/SSL/WebDAV + iCal
4. Audio CD Archiving? Grip + Ogg Vorbis
5. Advanced Media Player? Xine or MPlayer
6. Audio Streaming of Archived CDs? Icecast + Ices
7. Recording of online streams for archival purposes? ALSA + ALSA Utils + Ogg Vorbis + Any required media player format in Xine or MPlayer
8. Firewall? Linux Kernel + iptables
9. Office Functionality? OpenOffice.org
10. Digital Image Editing? GIMP
11. IM Client? GAIM
12. IM Server? Jabberd
13. File sharing? NFS
14. Sane storage management? LVM
15. File compression? BZip2, GZip, or 7Zip also File Roller if you really need a GUI
16. Digital Photo Management? Gthumb or Nautilus
17. PVR? Mythtv.org
18. Video streaming? VLC (Video LAN Client)
19. X10 Home Automation? Bottlerocket
20. Remote desktop/application serving? VNC 4
21. Remote assistance? x0vncserver or the vnc extension for Xorg
22. VPN/Tunneling? OpenVPN or OpenSSH with TCP port forwarding
23. Web Serving? Apache
24. Mail Serving? Courier
25. Server Based Spam Filtering? ASSP
26. Client Based Spam Filtering? Thunderbird
27. Image Scanning? SANE
28. Audio Editing? Rezound or Audacity
29. Multitrack Audio? Ardour
30. MIDI Sequencing? Rosegarden
31. CD Burning (Data and Audio)? cdrecord + various GUI frontends
32. Simple PC Based Puzzle Games? Too many to list from both the GNOME and KDE projects
33. SpyWare/Malware Prevention Removal? None at this point since I don't use the internet via Windows
If I wanted to do all of this with a Windows based home network do you have any idea how much money I'd have to spend to buy commercial software? Sure it's not as easy to set this stuff up as it is in Windows, but that's the price I pay to get this stuf gratis. On the other hand, setting this stuff up in Linux isn't that hard either if you are determined to do it. I would have to say there are plenty of free alternatives and the list above is just a sampling. The only area where I don't find alternatives is games. But I don't play games that much, so it's not much of a deterrent. And *IF* the U.S. ever does outlaw free software, then I guess I'm headed for a life of crime. Crazy that I would even have to think that, isn't it? After all, it's not illegal to own and use a hammer, saw, wood or nails? Just equate your computer hardware with those tools open source code files with the wood and you will see why the concept of trying to outlaw free software is ridiculous.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I suppose I'm spoilt by FBSD's ports system where stuff generally works out of the "box" immediately. I hear Debian's apt-get does similar, looking after dependencies automatically, although I would be a bit disappointed with Debian's time-to-update.
;-)
You're right, of course. Folks don't want to spend an hour compiling things, and this is where Big Bill and the TC mob have the upper hand. They just want to slam the DVD in the hole and get the latest drivel on the screen and to hell with privacy and control. Me? I like knowing I'm in control. With FOSS, I am. With XP and Media Player who knows who is pushing the damn buttons? Have you ever run a tcpdump on a router supplying a virgin XP SP2 machine with connectivity? It's all subjective.
In a way, FOSS has forced me to learn a bit more about what I'm using. It now takes me ten minutes to install a fully functional Kaffeine using libxine on a FBSD box. When I first tried with gmplayer on Slackware, it took me two days full-on geeky head-in-the-Makefile messing and that's without getting X working in the first place. My family now happily do all the things they once did on Windows on a FreeBSD desktop system, replicated from my own desktop after each upgrade, which is far easier than keeping XP updated. The subjective here is have I lost or gained? Me? I reckon I've gained. Of course, the AMD64 helps with the wall time figure I just quoted
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
The thing that bugs me the most about a lot of the people that complain about a Free Software alternatve to a commerical program not being an effective replacement, is that often those people have not actually _paid_ for the commerical software that they say is so much better.
Those that have forked over $1000+ for specialised proprietry software (Photoshop, Cubase etc) are the ones that have the right to say the features of the Free Software replacements are not up to scratch.
Those who are using warezed versions and have no intention of ever purchasing the software, but say that the Gimp is no Photoshop aren't helping the cause, and show that they have no real interest in advancing the state of Free Software - they just want to get everything for nothing.
Advanced users are users too!
In a way, FOSS has forced me to learn a bit more about what I'm using....The subjective here is have I lost or gained? Me? I reckon I've gained.
And that is the defining difference between me/you (0.0001%) vs my wife (99.9999%) of the world. I want gain computer knowledge and experience whereas my wife, well, she wants to watch Ignignot cleverly trick Meatwad into stealing racks of DVDs and to smoke while he does so.
I take issue with the term "free software" being hijacked by what are, quite honestly, free/open source zealots. I'm posting free software on my site and keep getting inquiries about how I dare call it free, since it's not released under the GNU GPL, etc. Kind of insulting I think, because free software does not necessarily mean FOSS, and some people seem to be spitting on what I'm offering them.
I've been interested in free software for a long time -- that is, software I can acquire today and use for the forseeable future without owing anyone money or other compensation, including requiring registration (even if no fee). To me that's the essential quality of free software. If the source code is there, and if modifications are permitted, that's fine of course and is icing on the cake. The BSD license is beautiful.
But I think the time has come for GNU GPL zealots to realize that if they expect the world to call their brand of "free" the only type of "free", this is just being unrealistic and a bit obnoxious. If you are looking for free software, there is tons of it out there. Most of it you can't modify, sorry. Don't like it? Write your own GNU GPL'd free software. And if you are looking for only GNU GPL'd software, then go look for that exclusively, and stop bothering developers who go out of their way to make no-fee software of other (non-GPL) licenses.
Of course I understand the philosophy behind free/open source software (FOSS) and it's very pretty and everything, but it is just one brand of "free".
All these but mplayer were rpm installs, so it's pretty easy. Mplayer is also not too hard to compile but takes time on a slow machine, plus takes another chunk of time to re-configure prelinking, so Windows media plays nicely.
Granted, I had all updates, additional rpms and tarballs ready on a home server but that's what any Linux junky would do, isn't it?
Ah, yes, takes single mouse click and about 5 seconds to play DVD.
Question: What are you willing to sacrifice for those freedoms?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I develop software for a living. People pay me.
If it was non-free software, people wouldn't pay me because they would feel threatened by a binary only implementation locking them in to a solution they couldn't change.
There are no closed alternatives because it is all custom code.
Free software or no-software. They would rather have free software they paid me to write.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
RMS has dealt with this argument time and time again, explaining why he thinks that freedom is the highest goals of all. And I agree with him.
The world needs more thoughtful idealists like RMS, and even more people who listen to what they say.
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.
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You're not supposed to use words postgresql, mysql and Oracle in a single comment on Slashdot unless you were planning to stay around for a long, long time.
I use Windows as my primary desktop machine. I've been using windows as my primary desktop for about 10 years now, and in all those years I have never once had it corrupt drives, catch a virus or become infested. Why? Because I know how to use it.
By contrast, I have twice screwed my Red Hat linux box which I use for testing and development because I am unfamiliar with the system. This, coupled with the fact that I am unfamiliar with the install, means it takes about 10 hours to get it back to a useful state. By contrast, I can rebuild my entire XP box in about 3 hours.
I take usability and convenience any day. Don't get me wrong, half the apps on my PC are FOSS, but only because it was more convenient to me to download, install and learn those than to go out, buy, install and learn a propriatary software.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
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.
The NewsMonster project on Freshmeat lists burtonator as the lead developer.
Gee, I love Google :)
Along with everyone who is not a developer, I'm not likely to have any interest in three of those freedoms: Studying the source, redistributing copies, or changing the program for the benefit of the community.
So long as I can use the damn thing, those other 3 freedoms don't interest me.
I'm interested in using computers. I am not interested in writing code. (It's a parallel to watching TV: We all watch TV, but very few of us are interested in learning how to build a television.) Studying the source is of not interest to me, as is changing it.
As a corollary, I believe the only "community" that exists here is a small number of developers who support free software for ideological and political purposes. Otherwise, free software users are no more a community that are Windows users. (An analogy might the small number of vegetarians who actively lobby to for their dietary beliefs versus all the other folks who simply choose ti eat that way.)
I'm interested in more and better software. If some of that can come from free software developers, fine. If some of that can come from proprietary developers, fine. Frankly, though, little new and innovative software has been coming from either source for several years.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
and what I'm saying is that people like you are exceptions when it comes to Windows issues. How many other people do you know who haven't been bitten by something in Windows and spent many hours fixing their situation? How often do your friends and relatives come to you for help with that stuff?
I'm not saying GNU/Linux is a magic bullet that never has security or install problems, just that my experience leads me to believe that any talk about Windows being a timesaver in terms of install time or maintenance is mythological. The amount of time spent futzing with systems seems constant, therefore not a reliable indicator of which one to choose.
Which brings us back to applications and freedoms questions.
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Freedom is the ability to do something without the fear of punishment.
For example, my ability to practise Judiasm in the US without fear of persecution typifies "freedom of religion" in the idealistic sense. But a more devout Jew is not necessilary free in a total sense. Employers might not allow days off for Jewish Holidays, or even more important Friday night/Saturdays for the sabbath. Someone may be ridiculed by a co-worker for wearing a kippah. Of course a more devout Jew (which I'm not) could work for a different employer, and only deal with people who accept the way he dresses. (Doesn't this sound familiar... RMS would say you shouldn't work for an employer who makes your write proprietary software.)
The point here is freedom is not something that one person has, but rather is a state of mind between two or more people. If you are accidentially stuck alone on an island, freedom has no meaning. You may not have the *ability* to leave the island, but freedom itself has no context since you are not dealing with other people.
Now taking the island concept further: if you live on an isolated (from the rest of the world) island with friends and family, you could copy / modify / distribute software all you want if its mutually agreed that that's okay. Many people have considered their personal and other friend's/family's computers to be such an island. With the internet though, you are in full contact at all times with people / government / etc. who are set on punishing for such acts.
So keep in mind, you can fight for freedom all you want from a legalistic / systematic / technical / software-based way, but ultimately, freedom is a mutal agreement between people. Whenever someone is out there who is willing to punish you in some extent for what you are doing, you have a noticable reduction in your freedom. Of course, if value your freedom, you then must fight for it.
The obsession to endow software with the concept of freedom is thus misleading. People have freedom, software does not. So GPL-licensed software is *freedom-enabling* software (to a certain extent). Its using copyright law to prevent other people from punishing you.
So as we look towards a revised GPL 3.0, we should really keep in mind separate ideas of "freedom" and "ability". We need the ability to have source code availible in order to modify/understand software many years down the line (even after threat of copyright expires). Just as we need the freedom to create software without the threat of punishment by frivolous software patents.
When looking at the GPL, thus imagine it in two ways:
1) If I isolated, what abilities does the GPL ensure I still have? (access to source code, ability to modify, ability to copy, etc.)
2) As I deal with other people, what punishments am I trying to prevent? (copyright hoops to jump thru, ridiculous licensing restrictions, patent lawsuits)
...at least in Poland.
Our IRS bastards decided to "calculate the value of Free Software as equal to commercial versions" so if you install free Open Office on free Linux, they want you to pay as much tax for increasing the value of equipment as if you purchased WinXP Pro and MS Office.
With one exception. They are helpless if you actually -paid- for the software. You show them a bill from your newspapers stand where you purchased latest issue of "Linux Plus" gazette for equivalent of 2 euro and got 2 CDs with it, with, say, latest Mandrake release and OpenOffice. You register the 2 euro as your expenses, increase the value of the computer set by 2 euro, pay corresponding tax and give IRS a finger.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
That's like saying that if buying a gun is not important to a particular citizen, then there is no disadvantage to not having a constitutional amendment guaranteeing that right.
Just because fewer than 100% of society doesn't exercise a given right, that in and of itself doesn't make it any less important.
There's a fundamental flaw in the reasoning in this article, and it has nothing to do with the definition of free software, or the importance of freedom, or any such deep things already discussed.
"What do we do when we have a substandard free software product that we could use, but would be more productive with a proprietary competitor?"
The author argues, throughout the entire article, about productivity; we're talking about a commericial, professional enviroinment, where money is made through using software.
On the GIMP, "It can of course be made to work in place of Photoshop, depending on your needs and budget. But if you have paying work to do, how much of a hassle are you willing to go through to use free software?"
The author argues free software doesn't offer good enough alternatives to proprietary software, still in a commercial, professional enviroinment.
Continuing,
"The majority of proprietary software licenses restrict the user's ability to use, share, modify, and study the software, but there is virtually no enforcement of these terms in the non-business portion of the software world."
The author argues it's acceptable and risk-free to "share" proprietary software as long as you're not going to use it comercially. While I question the validity of this, let's let it pass for the sake of argument.
Free software is criticized as sub-par for commercial use where a job or a contract is on the line, and it's argued that the benefit of free (speech) software being free (beer) is negligible, since nobody's going to sue you for "sharing" proprietary software for personal use. The article sets the bar for free software in business use, which is clearly much more demanding, and excuses the ridiculous cost of proprietary software commonly used in business since it's okay to steal it, but, erm, if you were to use this proprietary software in the same way the author says free software lags behind, you'd get at least a million dollar lawsuit, and at most a visit from the FBI.
"Well argued" my ass.
...a particularly effective programmer (I just know a spot of C++) or well-to-do enough to hire one on a whim, freedoms 1 and 3 are not useful to me at their full potential -- but if I ever wanted to improve my programming, an obvious first step would be to browse some free source code -- and I like the indirect benefits of those two freedoms, such as just about everything on Fink being as available on my Macs as it is on my Linux box, thanks to people out there who know what they are doing.
But to me, freedoms zero and two save a lot of headaches. I do not at all like being restricted in terms of how the software can be used, and if I am truly to love my neighbor as myself, I need to be able to legally share software. What really gets under my skin about a lot of free-beer software that isn't free software is limited redistribution; you can't distribute the Flash plugin with an operating system, even though Macromedia always has and barring going out of business likely always will allow anyone to download it.
That being said, as noted earlier I have compromised and mostly use Mac OS X. It's not free in either definition, and neither is Microsoft Office, but OS X has more free components in its base levels than does Windows, at least. Obviously a GNU-based Linux distro or some free version of BSD would be better in some ways, but on the other hand I like the ease of just being able to turn the bloody computer on and have a working Unix-like OS that can run the best office suite in the world (in terms of file compatibility and reliability).
Barring a piece of nonfree software like CrossOver Office (based on Wine much as OS X is based on *BSD) you can't run Office or QuickTime on a Linux system -- these are nigh essential in the modern world, so I might as well use OS X which has native versions of the above.
There is various other nonfree Windows and Mac software I use as well, but I try to use free software when it fills my needs -- but when it does not, ideology takes a back seat to praticality, and in comes proprietary software.
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!
We have a winner.
There's no reason to claim that all proprietary software has better UI than FOSS, nor that no FOSS has excellent normal user intuitive UIs. However, there is a huge gap between average UI experience in "popular" proprietary software and FOSS in general.
"normal people" don't want to be learning contorted UIs like geeks groove on. They want to be using functions, fast and as easily as possible. Software with less functions but which gets the user to them faster and more easily is superior in "normal users" eyes.
My spouse is both a longtime UNIX CLI and X user with some CS classes in college, and a graphic artist and designer. What she has to say about the quality of the FOSS graphics tools is unprintable. She's used Macs for graphics and layout consistently, and would probably be ok with Windows programs (whose UIs are now roughly tied with Mac) if the platform didn't suck so badly.
The sad part is that the User Interface ideas are things that can more or less be freely adopted from good commercial products into FOSS, if people cared about the problem...
So you can find it whatever you want, but since they don't do it, you're kind of starting from the wrong place. ;-)
(As someone else has said, APIs do change - but they change for reasons other than "let's break all the binary drivers".)
Upon reading the article, I decided that it was based on a faulty premise--- that the choice is between certain features and freedom, and that these are the only two factors that count.
I am a pragmatist, and I will generally use the best tool for the job. That being said, I have found that open source offers me unparalleled capabilities and value at low prices. This is because active open source projects turn these four freedoms into economic advantages. These include:
1) Community support is generally more active, knowledgable and helpful than it is for proprietary software. This means that if I need to pay for support in an emergency I can, but if it is not an emergency, I can get expert asisstance, possibly even from the software authors. This is important because of the freedom to modify, study, and redistribute the software.
2) The software often better fits the community needs because the division between software development and technical support does not generally exist in the open source world (try getting the guy who wrote a snippit of Windows source to fix a bug in it by calling PSS).
3) The lack of the division between product development and technical support also ensures that commonly used open source software will be extremely robust and quite bug-free, and that new bugs will be rapidly fixed.
4) Access to the source code also creates an environment where the value of the option of self-reliance becomes apparent. If I am running SQL-Ledger, for example, and I find a bug, I can report it and wait for the next version, if I have the ability, I can fix it myself, or I can hire a third party to fix it for me. This frees me from worrying about whether Microsoft will fix the latest security advisory, or whether this particular application crash will ever be resolved. A "Can-do" attitude goes a long way.
My mail server runs an Almost-Free/Barely Open Source program called Qmail. I use it because in many ways it is the best tool for what I need it for even though it is not quite Free Software (it is not quite proprietary either). I run PostgreSQL, Linux, OpenOffice, Gnome, Mozilla and others.
At the same time, pretty much all the rest of my software (except a few games) are all open source. It has been an adjustment for my wife, and it was an adjustment for my parents, but as time goes on and they start to see how powerful and capable the open source alternatives are, they don't ever want to go back.
Now regarding your post:
anyone who bitches about his gpl'd program being used by the military to suppress indigenous tribes with fails to appreciate that vital freedom.
Very well said. I have often commented about how I hope that open source brings Iranians, Arabs, and Israelis together to coorperate in improving OpenOffice, KDE, Gnome, etc. Sometimes, you hope that this community can continue to help people build working relationships across deep political, military, and social barriers and perhaps even fuel some understanding of those who would otherwise be enemies.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP