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

Depends...

[SealBeater]

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

Freedom 0?

[tektek]

They start at zero -- how cute. :)

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.

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.

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:Economic balance of freedom software cost.

[kasperd]

kernel developers intentionally and frequently break API/ABI compatibility between minor releases so as to "encourage" vendors to release drivers under non-proprietary licenses.

People keep saying that, but I have yet to see just a single case where it happened. Kernel interfaces do change, and they change for the better. But I have never seen a change, which happened just to encourage rease of driver sources.

Right now I can remember a single change between minor releases, somewhere in the 2.4 kernels the up_and_exit function was removed, and a new complete_and_exit was introduced. I don't know how many drivers where affected by that, but at least the USB driver had to be changed. Of course the change didn't happen to break compatibility. The purpose of up_and_exit was to avoid a race condition when removing a module which had a kernel thread running that needed to be stopped before removing the module. If the module had just called up to signal it was terminated, and afterwards called exit, the module code might have been removed before the up call returned and caused a kernel crash as it returned to an undefined address. Having the up_and_exit function solved that problem. But it turned out there was still a race condition. Though no code was accessed inside the module, the sempahore itself would be a part of the module, and it could be removed before up had finished accessing it. This is why completions were introduced, they are different from semaphores, and are designed exactly to avoid this problem. So every user of up_and_exit had to be changed to use complete_and_exit instead. Nothing would have prevented leaving up_and_exit in the kernel, but any user was known to have a race condition. Had the function been left in the kernel, a lot of those buggy users of it might not have been noticed. By removing up_and_exit all instances of the bug would be revealed, and could easilly be fixed.

This was just one example, there might be more. The point here, is that the change did not happen to intentionally break binary compatibility. The change happened to fix a problem. And while you might think it broke the compatibility, it really just revealed all the modules, that were already broken. And kernel developers frequently make changes to make debuging easier, that is part of the reason the code is of such a good quality.

The kernel developers don't intentionally break binary only modules, in fact it seems they ignore binary drivers as much as possible. If a change can improve the kernel, it happens. In stable branches such changes only happen if they are necesarry to fix a bug, or if they don't cause major breaking. If all drivers in the kernel can trivially be updated to the new interface, there is no reason not to make the change.

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"?

Not that important to me

[Decaff]

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.

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

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:There's a missing fifth fundamental freedom

[DrSkwid]

So you want to take my GPL software, incorporate it into your closed source project and sell it back to me ?

And because you can't to this you are complaing that the GPL is your enemy ?

well thank fuck for the GPL !!!!!

Re:Four freedoms vs Max use?

[Epsillon]

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...

Re:Should I bother?

[tdelaney]

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.

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.

Remember what started it all

[satch89450]

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.

Re:Should I bother?

[eno2001]

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.

Re:Four freedoms vs Max use?

[Epsillon]

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 ;-)

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:Sure...

[Bulln-Bulln]

You are not comparing free software against proprietary software. You compare FOSS against MS apps (with the exception of AIM).

Music - XMMS (WinAMP on Windows), is there even a comparison to Windows Media Player here?

WinAMP ist not FOSS. It's a free (beer) closed source app.
Both are just a joke comparing to iTunes.

Video - MPlayer, it even runs without X Window. Can Windows Media Player run video in MS-DOS?

What kind of argument is this? Who cares about DOS? WMP is OK when you install the missing codecs. (I prefer VLC though)

Web Browser - Mozilla FireFox. Internet Exploder doesn't even compare.

And Opera? Firefox is also my favourite browser, but Opera has many interesting features that you can't find anywhere else. Opera is commercial or free (beer) software, but not FOSS.

File Browsing - Nautilus, Konqueror. They crash 100% less of the time that Windows Explorer crashes.

What are you doing with Explorer? I didn't see it crash the last couple of... er... years.

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).

How about blocking Explorer.exe and deleting iexplore.exe? (That's what I do when I have do mess with Windows.)

And let's not mention the horrid Mac OS X versions of MS Office.

Yeah, MS Office:mac is sooo bad when compared against GNUmeric and OpenOffice. OK, GNUmeric and OpenOffice only run in an X-Window, don't support drag&drop, looks ugly-as-hell, etc. while MS Office supports all that stuff. Wow, GNUmeric and OpenOffice are soooo superior.....
(BTW: Yes, I know about NeoOffice/J - it's my main Office suite. But NeoOffice is != OpenOffice)
Abiword compares to Wordpad, not Word (or OpenOffice Writer).

Instant Messenger - Well, GAIM may be missing some features of proprietary AOL AIM, but one of those features missing is the spyware.

Trillian? How about that?

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??

A lot of developers say that VisualStudio is the best programming environment. Others say it's Xcode. Both aren't FOSS.

PS: No, I'n not bashing FOSS. Most apps I use are FOSS like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Fire Messenger, but theres more closed source software that's better than it's FOSS counterparts than just Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Opera is cool. Trillian is cool. MS Office:mac, Explorer (not IE), or Windows Media Player not so bad either.

Re:Four freedoms vs Max use?

[jacksonj04]

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.

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.

what freedom is

[mikey573]

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)

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.

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!