Slashdot Mirror
RMS Weighs in on BitKeeper Debacle
mshiltonj writes "You know its what we've all been waiting for: RMS weighs in on the BitKeeper debacle. An excerpt: "I want to thank Larry McVoy. He recently eliminated a major weakness of the free software community, by announcing the end of his campaign to entice free software projects to use and promote his non-free software. Soon, Linux development will no longer use this program, and no longer spread the message that non-free software is a good thing if it's convenient."
Yeah imagine paying for something that's convenient and useful. How evil can you get :)
McVoy's great triumph was the adoption of this program for Linux development. No free software project is more visible than Linux. It is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, an essential component, and users often mistake it for the entire system. As McVoy surely planned, the use of his program in Linux development was powerful publicity for it.
Yeah, RMS is all about Free/Free but I see it as an important step for all software. Free stuff that isn't "totally free" is *not* wrong.
I would like to make my personal feelings known that non-totally free stuff that is later taken away because someone didn't learn "no give backs" is lame.
Yeah, RMS is right about a lot of stuff and really does have vision but I just have to disagree w/him here. Not everything has to be free.
Yes, he is saying the same things as always. The same things he's been saying twenty years ago. And still, the rest of the world keeps behaving in exactly such ways that his words apply perfectly, again and again. Makes you wonder who's being more stubborn, exactly.
There's nothing wrong with non free software, so long as the cost is worth the end result. Sometimes it makes more sense to buy something because it is supported and stable and someone can be held accountable for mistakes. Don't get me wrong, open source software has it's place, but that place is not every where. For the most part Open Source means Open Sore, which is fine if you have the time/engery/resources to make it work the way it needs to. Not everything is free.
Why do all people in software seem to fall into one of two sides?
"Open source is best, paying for software is dumb and evil!"
"Open source is for idiots, you'll live with your mothers till they die then you're on the street. Make money or get out"
Whatever happened to "every hole has a peice to fit it, some peices require different tasks to get them. Some require money, others require some code". It's no wonder MS is calling people communists, it's exactly the same pathetic ideals which no one wishs to adapt to the world.
I like muppets.
Dude, his whole point is that the KERNEL should be called Linux and a system built on it should be called GNU/Linux. So, no, it's not too funny.
hehe, that is funny... but it should be noted that in this case RMS is actually talking specifically about linux, the kernel, and not gnu/linux, the operating system.
who is she? leave a comment!
No, the priorities are different. For a long shot, he'd consider it more important to create a free tool to do the task well, than to just do it with a non-free tool. It's just that, to him, freedom is more important than anything else. So, it's very natural and consistent that he'd rather first write the free tool and then do the task, instead of the other way round (and probably never get around to writing that free tool, anyway).
If either the grandparent or the parent poster had read the article, they would know why their comments are off the mark. RMS meant "Linux" in this context, as he explains right there in the article.
I always hate it when people mark me as a foe and don't explain why, so I'll explain to you why I just marked you as a foe.
I'm afraid that your post smacks heavily of a "me too!" syndrome that is pervasive in the "Free Software Movement". The fact that the economy needs to run and that people should be compensated for their work seems to go right past your head. McVoy apparently did good work in both creating and marketing his product. Thus he is receiving compensation in the form of product sales. Whatever squabbles there are about a Linux version, there is nothing wrong with selling software. In fact, the sale of software is a cog that keeps our economy running.
RMS's comments are childish, and extremely self-serving. I take no issue with his goals of making all software free, as long as he's willing to write, finance, or support others in writing that software. But I do take issue with him attempting to bully others into accepting his idea of how software should be handled.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
they're called visionaries because they have the insight to see things the average person cannot see.
in ten years, we will all be thanking RMS for his foresight - or lamenting that too few people took him seriously enough to avert disaster...
who is she? leave a comment!
Software can be distributed w/o charge but does not have to be 100% free. Why he insists that this is the case is only understandable by him and people that are just as warped as he can be.
This whole incident is why software should be 100% free. Had BitKeeper truly been opensource Tridge (or anyone, for that matter) could have simply forked it and kernel development would have continued on. All this whole incident proved is that when your development is determined by the whims of a single entity you run a very significant chance of getting burned.
git will get better and one day it will be competitive with the best-of-breed software, and the benefits of this will flow to everyone - from rabif free software gurus to people who just can't afford commercialware.
Linus might not be able to get people to follow him next time. Linus went out on a limb for BK big time. He took a strong political position that the majority of his followers disagreed with and convinced them to go along since it would all work out pretty well anyway, the software was really good and would make a huge difference, the license was fair enough, Larry is a good guy...
All of this has been proven to be nonsense. Larry while a good guy years ago is basically an asshole taking positions on software that would embarrass Bill Gates. The software used didn't make anyone's job easier with the possible exception of Linus's. It only made Linus's job easier because he is being stubborn not wanted to change a bad work practice. The license wasn't close to fair enough. Linus lost some "approval rating" over this, the next time will be much harder for him.
We just watched David Dawes's and co. unwillingness to listen to their developer's make them lose control of a core open source project that had been amazing succesful well beyond even its original scope. I'm not saying Linux would fork over Linus doing another boneheaded move but he might encounter more opposition this time. There are lots of players that aren't thrilled with his leadership on other issues as well.
If Bitkeeper had been a game, very few here would have complained about the fact that it's not truly free, and one wouldn't expect Linus to be terribly annoyed in the face of Tridge's actions.
But Bitkeeper was used in the role of a mission-critical piece of software. This is not really any different in importance than the kernel you run, or the database engine that stores your critical information, or the office suite you use, or perhaps even the web browser you use.
What makes those pieces of software so important are the consequences to you if they should fail to function properly, or if their use should suddenly be taken from you. They're mission-critical, or (perhaps) infrastructural in nature -- their importance is much higher to their users than that of much of the software that's out there.
And so, the importance of them being truly free is also much higher.
I sometimes wonder what the consequences to the Linux kernel today would be if Linus had taken a few weeks off to write the revision control system he wants and needs, rather than to deploy Bitkeeper. He'd have to stop accepting patches to the Linux kernel for that period of time, of course, but the submitters of the patches in question could certainly sit on them until he was ready, no?
In any case, I agree with RMS that there's a lesson here: if you use proprietary software for mission-critical work, you're essentially giving control over that mission to someone else. Think about that carefully before you choose.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
IE is free once you get above software.
No matter what tool or code you cite, I can cite closed code that is very cheap or no cost.
We are not in this just to save money, if that is what you are thinking you have missed the entire point of free software.
Where have you been?! The lack of incentive for US students to enter the software industry is due entirely to the lack of jobs available once they graduate. Those jobs have NOT been replaced by the use of open source software. They have been replaced when software development is outsourced to India, or elsewhere.
And secondly, why would the software industry suddenly die with open source? We would still need software. Thus software would still need to be written. IBM and HP pay people to write open source software. Now I'm not saying that all software SHOULD be open sourced, I agree that's ludicrous. I'm only saying that it could not kill the software industry.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
In other words, BitMover Inc. spent money and did research to determine what features were needed. Now Andrew Tridgell will simply implement thoses features.
Now, equivalent free software is better than non-free software (you get the source code, and many more rights), but we have to accept that kind of incident reduces the motivation of software firms to write software in the GNU niche of the market (unless they can figure a way to make money which does not involve selling the software see SuSE or Red Hat). If I discovered that people running GNU/Linux needed some kind of software, and tried to write it and make money by selling the software itself, RMS (or someone else) would instantly sponsor a "free software alternative". Thus I'd have two options: make the software free from the start (donating the programming effort with no gain) or not write it at all.
In the GNU world, both alternatives are good. The ecology of this market drifts towards all-free software, the holy grail of the FSF. For myself, since this kind of ecology does not always guarantee the software I want being available, I'd love to buy proprietary software when the alternative is no software at all.
> Had BitKeeper truly been opensource
It would never have existed...BK makes $$$ off selling licenses, so there would have been little to no motivation to write the software in the first place.
I'm pretty sure that the BitKeeper adventure has been, overall, good for kernel development. Linus and a lot of the others liked it, and felt productive using it.
More importantly, the switch to something else seems to go quite swiftly. git and cogito are already good enough to manage the kernel (if a little rough around the edges yet).
In other words, the price for dumping BitKeeper was pretty low. And so was the risk taken by using it.
And that's exactly the point of free software: nobody can take it away from you. That keeps the risk in using it low.
The risk and cost of using non-free software might be ok if you can live without it. But use free software for important stuff.
This whole 'ethical' line of argumentation. A more mainstream economic argument holds a lot more water.
The negative spin applied to LM's motives, in the case of this article. RMS wouldn't make those statements without evidence, I'm sure; I simply find them in bad taste.
FOSS will turn a maturity corner when it achieves the unbunched panties of the BSD community about other viewpoints, and lets the intrinsic goodness of the GPL do the talking.
I especially hope that this mellowing can occur before GPL3. One thing I figured out fairly early is, if you give the opposition ammunition, they will shoot it at you. Proceed, therefore, with boldness tempered by wisdom.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
How many years did "the community" have to code a replacement for BK again? Does anyone think that Linus would not have switched to it in a heartbeat if it was "free as in everything" and did what he wanted? No. But where was it?
I love RMS. This is all McVoy's fault. "Look, the evil man has been defeated! yay Free Software!" I guess he forgot that no one held a gun to Linus' head to force him to use BK.
And the "GNU/Linux" name dropping? Classic.
Great stuff.
For the same reason you get to vote for your President. Do you want to be in control of your environment or do you want to trust someone? The Constitution provides an assurance that you will never have to blindly trust a leader, because in the end this trust is always broken.
Likewise for software - the GPL is an insurance policy against someone else controlling what happens on your computer in a way that requires your trust.
I'm saying that if all software was "free" by Stallman's definition, there would be no incentive for companies like IBM to develop.
The bottom line is that IBM and HP are businesses, and if there is not a business case for developing open source software, they will not do so.
The question becomes:
"Why would IBM develop free software?"
They can't really sell it - all someone would have to do is purchase a copy (if IBM doesn't give it away for free, as in beer), rebrand it (removing all IBM trademarks, copyrights, etc.), and distribute it themselves for free (beer).
The only reason why anyone would then use the pay IBM version would be to sell support services.
In the end, the question of the day is..
If all software was Stallman-free, how would you make any money developing software? How would you attract the top minds of the next generation to the software industry?
My assertion is that you cannot.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
OK, take a deep breath. Good. Again.
Now, let's not freak out here. A volunteer programmer, by definition, will work towards their own agenda. If they listen to RMS, blame them for their own choice. RMS didn't drain their wills or twist their brains - they made their own choices.
Although I think you happen to be wrong in this case. I don't recall Bitkeeper being reverse engineered on company time as a factor in the decision to yank licensing, although I obviously don't know everything about it. If they did use company time it was inappropriate, but my understanding is it would have made no difference in the end.
I would say Gnome and KDE existing is a good thing - neither can get complacient. And since everyone seems to be having fun working on them (which is, after all, still the whole point of volunteer programming) I fail to see an issue.
You seem to be upset that open source developers aren't marching as an army to take over the world. Sorry, but that's not how it works, whatever the media would like to think. It's people having fun, and anything else beyond that is simply icing on the cake.
Yep. Just like in the case of slavery it would.
So let me get this straight. If I work hard, charge for the fruits of my labors, I'm the bad guy. Well that just puts every FOSS fan right in the same camp as my less savory former employers. "Why should I pay for what you're doing?"
"Why should I do it?"
"Because I pay you to."
"So your question was again?"
Except in the case of FOSS, the reason I should do it is because the users simply insist I should. WTF have they done for me lately? Stroked my ego? Read the docs I custom tailored to their intelligence level? Nope. "Code should be free!"
Fine, you invent it then. I won't write anything. I'll simply schlep others' code around, fixing your machines instead of improving on them.
No? Well then, pay me what I'm worth.
What I want to know is where did we suddenly decide that shareware should go the way of the dodo, and we instead of being upstanding and honorable decided to go with stingy grubbing, however open and honest the gimme gimme mentality is?
If you like to put out work for free, give it some protection, but otherwise let anyone use it for nothing, that's your right. I would do it myself in some situations. But Free != Good. Sometimes Free == Tyranny of the Mob.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Personally, I'd say that this is the first time I've really understood RMS's point of view, and agree with him.
While bitkeeper was "free as in beer", when someone pissed of Larry, he took away the whole software. Also for a long time he's said people haven't been able to use it if they work on competing products.
If it had been GPLed, then someone couldn't have decided to just withdraw the software just because some did something they didn't like. Now the kernel has been left in the lurch. This kind of thing is exactly what RMS has been telling us would happen for years, and this is the first time I've really seen it happen.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
This for me is an important point. I may be an eccentric, I am certainly a slightly lapsed Quaker, but for me one of the most important things in an ethical business is price transparency.
Before any libertarian gets started, this is not an anti-business attitude. The object of stock markets, for instance, is to provide price transparency as well as liquidity. This is one of the things that makes markets trustworthy: things take place in the light of day, not by private agreement.
I do not have a problem with charging for software and support: I do believe that it should be standard business practice for software companies to have a clean and transparent pricing model so that it is possible both to compare products by TCO, and to know that by using XYZ software you are not paying through the nose while XYZ is doing a cheap deal with your competitor.
My beef with MS, for instance, is that I cannot buy Windows alone for the same price as buying it bundled with a PC, plus the belief that the price of the various Microsoft offerings is related to negotiating ability. It is not a level playing field, and this is probably worse than being a monopoly. A monopoly that screws everybody equally at least encourages everybody to look for a way round it, rather than seeking to produce power alignments that keep it in place.
By following this "the price is what you negotiate" approach. Bitkeeper cannot avoid the suspicion that people who advocate its use might be in a visible industry position and be getting a special deal.
To anyone who says that this is excessive idealism, I would suggest that I do not have a problem with price variation or special offers provided they are freely and openly advertised. I am not in favor of limiting the ability of companies to respond to market conditions. I am opposed to secret deals.
Anybody who questions this might compare the laser printer and copier markets. Historically printers have been engineer-driven and tend to sell to a price. Copiers have been salesman-driven and the vendors have tried to hide the real costs in complex leasing and contract details. It isn't surprising that, as buyers become more aware, power starts to shift to the printer manufacturers. Nobody likes copier vendors.
Scott Adams (who is an economist as well as the creator of Dilbert) has summed it up well by using the term "confusopolies" to describe the vendors of mobile phone contracts etc. who seek to conceal the true costs.
So, in summary: Bitkeeper's business practices as regards the cost of their products causes me not to want to buy them.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Instead of inventing an ethical principle out of his head (something theoretical and Utopian like, say, Marxism), he grounded it in the common practice around him: people can do this stuff (disassemble, share, etc.) with the physical objects they own, why not with the software? This reasoning (if I understand it correctly), in this particular instance, seems very old-school conservative / traditionalist to me.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
The parent was merely pointing out that economics isn't the only factor to consider when making decisions.
Software should be Open Source as much as possible, but there is no reason at all that _all_ software should be _Free_. Anyone who says so is a hypocrit (don't conform! er, uh, conform to what I say!).
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
Tell me about it. One of the big problems in the FOSS world is that OpenOffice, a very important open source program, is using more and more Java. In OpenOffice 2.0, many of the core wizards and their database components are written in Java. Whereas Java was pretty minor in past editions of OpenOffice, Java is a major dependency in OpenOffice 2.0
Some people have said something on the lines of, "What's the problem? Quit whining and crying, and wake up and smell the Java. Download the JDK, and fall in love with the new-and-improved OpenOffice." The reason why FOSS users aren't too fond of OpenOffice's use of Java is because the Java features are currently Sun-only; the free Java compilers and VMs haven't implemented all of the Java libraries and features at this time. Many of those Java libraries are also underdocumented; even though the core language is well documented, the Java libraries aren't.
Secondly, the Sun JDK is very hard to install. The license is very restrictive. Even if had no problem with the license, if you're running Linux on anything that isn't a x86, or if you're running BSD, then installing the Sun JDK ranges from very difficult to almost impossible. OpenOffice's use of Java could alienate users of "unsupported" platforms that are capable of running OpenOffice, but can't because its dependency, Java, can't run on it.
OpenOffice looks ripe for a fork. Aside from its Java issues, OpenOffice is very big and bloated. Why does it need its own widgets and font-handling system? How come the applications cannot be distributed modularly? Why must it inherit some of MS Office's quirks?
If OpenOffice forks, it should be similar to Firefox; get rid of all of the integrated bloat and start working on perfecting the individual applications. Get rid of Java just like the Mozilla people did when they got the Netscape sources. Separate the interface from the underlying portions.
Even if you're fine with proprietary software, expecting open source programmers to stop doing what they do is not reasonable. If BitKeeper had something worth cloning, it would be cloned. In the meantime, Larry managed to bootstrap himself a company using the free advertising Linus gave him.
Since people keep saying the same things, I'll keep responding with the same too:
It's a bit silly to say 'I told you so" - especially since I didn't actually say it. I thought the arguments made by Linus had some logic behind it too (the technical-merit-before-anything-else approach). Often I thought both sides (Stallman and Linus) had some valuable viewpoint on it, and it was difficult to say who actually was right on the matter.
It seems now, after all, it was R.Stallman all along. Yes, Linus has a good point in chosing for technical superior alternatives...BUT, in the end, as is clearly shown now, you can't just devide the political/ideological/proprietary issue from the mere technical one. When push comes to shove, an alternative that isn't really free, isn't really an alternative. You are always dependend on the goodwill of whomever owns the product- even when buying it, I may add.
So, it would seem the viewpoint of Linus, in this instance, is the weaker one, because now he doesn't have a 'tecnological superior' product anymore, and what is he going to do? Go for another proprietary product, because it's technologically better? And have the same thing happen to him again? I don't think so. I think he learned his lesson, and he will go for the really free alternatives that R.Stallman suggested, which, albeit not as good, at least allow you to continue with it as you see fit.
Stallman can be a nag sometimes because of his gnu/linux diatribe, but in this instance, he was right.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
All this whole incident proved is that when your development is determined by the whims of a single entity you run a very significant chance of getting burned.
Sorry, but this arguement just falls down flat. Linus seems to be having no problems moving away from BK to another solution, so the kernels development is NOT determined by the whims of a single entity other than Linus himself. Since BK made a significantly positive contribution to the workflow of the kernel developers, I would offer the opinion that the whole Bitkeeper saga has been nothing but positive from the start to the end, despite what RMS and others may have you think.
I believe that sourcecode should be at the control of whoever created it or paid them to create it, its their investment so why should a random person have the ability to fork it on a whim, unless the codes owners agree to that in the first place by CHOOSING to embrace such a move and opensourcing their code by freewill.
RMS isn't in this to save money, he is in it to preserve freedoms that are important to him.
Linus is already working full time on free software under RMSes favorite license. Let him use Visual Studio, SourceSafe and Word ...
OSDL should have recognized that Linux is a more important project than reverse-engineering BitKeeper and told their employees not to do that on company time/servers or get fired.
Question: If Linus HAD been using VS, SourceSafe etc, and it had been Microsoft who had been pissed off about Tridge's reverse engineering of protocols, should OSDL have layed down the law against Tridge as well?
Should they have said "Linux is more important than Samba, so Tridge has to stop working on it to make sure that Linus can keep is Visual Studio license"? Since when does a proprietary software developer get to hold the community hostage by threatening to pull its licenses? How stupid do you have to be to consider that a good thing?
Tridgell never ran Bitkeeper or downloaded it or any legal way came in contact with McVoy's license. He used standard UNIX tools to develop a way to access developer metadata that McVoy was (VERY improperly) laying claim to. Tridgell never had a copy of Bitkeeper so what code or license was being trampled on?
He believes *VERY* strongly that software is a freedom (liberty) like free speech, the right to assemble, etc etc. His message is becoming INCREASINGLY relevant as computers dominate our lives now.
Most people just want to use their computer and not be hastled. Think of Bill Gates on one end of the spectrum, and RMS on the other. Bill Gates wants you to have *no* rights -- you "license" software, you pay far out the ass for it -- and you get NOTHING for it. Have you read the EULA on your MS products? It basically says -- that MS wont even guarantee that the program you bought actually does ANYTHING at all ("fitness of purpose"). They want your money, and literally want to give you nothing in return.
RMS is the exact opposite -- you get rights and responsibility.
Is RMS right? No. Is Bill Gates right? No. The dialog and pressure each puts on the other arrives at a medium that is about right.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
I like extremists. Not in the direct sense, but in a lot of other ways.
Firstly, they force me evaluate my own beliefs and principles. Why is democracy good? Why is Free Software worth bothering with? What could possibly be wrong with drinking alcohol?
Secondly, most movements in history was seen as radical or just plain whacky. Don't think you are allowed to sit at the front of the bus, woman. Oh no, the sun is clearly rotating around the earth, Mr. Astronomer. Without them, we would still be living in caves and killing our food with spears. No, not even spears, because that guy or gal probably got ridiculed a lot at first. We would be throwing rocks.
Third, the limits of our society are shaped by the extremes on each side of it -- the nuttier the sidelines, the more stable it is in the middle.
Also, some of these dudes are really entertaining, and it is always completely unintentionally...
This whole incident is why software should be 100% free.
Comments like this baffle me. Why is it software should be free? Are all programmers supposed to just donate all their time for the greater good? It's all well and good to advocate giving stuff away when you don't make your living writing it.
Sorry, but this arguement just falls down flat. Linus seems to be having no problems moving away from BK to another solution
Writing your own version control system is no big problem?! That's a BIG problem in the books of most developers, even though Linus is a great programmer he himself admits that his solution is nothing more than "a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager". So going from a really nice SCM like BitKeeper to this is a big deal no matter how you spin it.
I agree. You can point to RMS and say "look, if he hadn't been a kooky visionary 10 or 15 years ago, we wouldn't have all this great Free software today", and you'd probably be at least partially correct.
The problem is that though Free Software has become much more mainstream, that mainstreaming has been led by the Open Source banner, because they are open to economic argumentation. That's the *ONLY* reason there is any support for this stuff from industry, which is of course secondary to ethical concerns for people like Stallman.
Furthermore, it strikes me as strange that RMS focuses on the ethical issues to the exclusion of all others, when the very reason for the success/adoption of the GPL is pure economics - it creates a "you scratch my back, i'll scratch yours" community of participants who contribute back improvements in exchange for the right to make use of a large library of infrastruture components avaialable under these common licensing terms. Forgive my oversimplification, but I don't think that's a radical claim I'm making.
Since the GPL itself is all about economics, why is Stallman so loathe to even mention economics? Especially when the moral or ethical case is one that would leave even most philosophy professors scratching their heads. What is so inherently unethical about separating modification rights from usage rights, or imposing reasonable restrictions on redistribution in order to ensure compensation for the labor of producing a work? And why does the effectively zero marginal cost of production of software somehow make software distribution into an ethical, rather than economic, issue in a way that it doesn't for real goods?
Furthermore, I don't see why I should be guaranteed rights to the source code unless I've compensated somebody for those rights - one way of compensating somebody, in fact, is accepting the terms of the GPL and agreeing to contribute back any useful modifications that I make if I redistribute them.
However, a thing like this wouldn't have happened with Free Software. By that, I don't just mean something like the free software attitude would have prevented it or anything -- this would actually have been impossible if BitKeeper had been free software.
This is, of course, because even if McVoy had been the only developer and he decided to move to a non-free license for a new version for whatever reason, someone would just have had to fork it. Therefore, things like this cannot happen with free software.
The same, of course, goes with all proprietary software. Now, I don't believe that Microsoft will go out of business anytime soon (no matter how much I'd want it to), but imagine if it did! Suddenly, Windows would be completely unsupported and would never be developed further. Smaller companies can probably go bankrupt for lesser things than that. With GNU/Linux, that literally cannot happen. Someone will always go on working on it, and even if noone does voluntarily, you can always hire someone to do so.
The fact that you and many others have a problem with "This whole 'ethical' line of argumentation" vs. a "mainstram economic argument" is probably the biggest single reason we have debacles ranging from the Enron debacle to the scandal plaguing the Canadian government at present. Please explain how an economic argument "holds more water" than an ethical/ideological one.
/. discussion so I had to add it).
It doesn't matter what sort of political or economic philospohy you subscribe to, when pure economics takes precedence over "ethics" then the said economic or political system becomes corrupt and vulnerable to collapse. Slavery did not end in America because someone had a convincing "mainstram economic argument" against it. Nazi Germany did not fall because it had an inferior economy. We triumphed over both because they were morally reprehensible (sorry, but I didn't spot the pre-requisite reverence to Nazis in this
I recently came across an interesting example of a compelling argument for "ethics" in business. The "Chik-fil-A" fast-food chain was founded and is headed by a very conservative, evangelical Christian. This man and much of the staff wear their religion on their sleeves, and unlike most visible personalities of the "religious right" they seem to actually practise whay they preach--their beliefs, faith, religous observances and family are of the highest priority--more so tham profits. The head of this company insists on not doing business on Sunday and on directing a portion of profits towards philanthropic activities as a sort of "tithe". While I do not subscribe to his brand of religious conservatism, I respect him highly for following his beliefs because they are the "right thing to do" even when there was no "mainstram economic" argument to do so. It is in some way like Google's well-known policy (at least in this forum) to "do no evil".
The result? Chik-fil-A has undergone rapid growth and has virtually the best employee retention and customer satisfaction in the industry. And we all know how Google turned out.
As for the maturity exhibited by the "unbunched panties of the BSD community"--what has that achieved for them? The many variants of BSD are certainly excellent from a technical perspective and are popular for web hosting and security, but there is a reason for the "BSD is dead" jokes--it is invisible to the general public and has no presence at all on the desktop. RMS and others might come across as wingnuts at times, but it is their dedication to ther beliefs and their inthusiasm for the free software movement that has made GNU/Linux as successful as it is.
You may view RMS' idealism as giving ammo to the opposition, but I prefer to think of it as a kevlar vest. The key is to stick to your principles while being informed and aware so you don't shoot yourself in the foot.
I didn't stand up when they came for the free software zealots, because I was not a free software zealot. I didn't stand up when they came for the developers of free-as-in-beer developers, because I charge for my software. Now they have come for all the rest of the developers, and there is no one left to stand up for me... At this rate, someday it will be illegal to create software because of all the patents. If you don't draw a line, you'll only be pushed back forever until you are either irrelevant, or inherently guilty of some crime.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
-------
... with easy to find staff (that increase the internal hype) can really reduce the network infrastructure TCO.
...
Free Software is not Open Source. Ethics is the whole point behind Free Software. Rarely does a moderate stance drive change.
-------
With respect, ethics may be YOUR whole point behind free software but it is not everyone's point. As a CTO for a small company there are several corporate reasons I use 'free software', honestly most boil down to cost and support.
Linux in a corporate environment is about both free as in beer and free as in choice to switch. BUT both are really a TCO issue. The free to switch or modify is about reducing risk or cost, not about having more toys or supporting an ethic.
My boss doesn't care about the freedom ethics of F/OSS. He cares about his bottomline (that IS his job) and the freedom ethics of F/OSS are a means to an end. The corporate advantage of freedom in F/OSS is about the availability of patches, the replacement of developers, and the long term availability of inexpensive product.
IBM/Novell/HP/? doesn't support Linux because it is cool, they don't support it because of free as in freedom. They support it because they can make money that way. It adds billions per year to their bottomline. If Linux dies off tomorrow and BSD is the new drug of choice, they will support that and my corporate infrastructure will run on that (in fact it did, before Linux). They go where the customer goes, that's where the money is.
What is driving change on the corporate level is the low TCO, good support, and the hype reaching senior management. BSD has low TCO, not as good a support structure (but still good) and significantly less hype. Small companies have used it for years before Linux and some still use it today. The hype reaching management and the availability of 'linux trained staff' in droves off the street (compared to BSD) is Linux's major leg up in the corporate network infrastructure game. Easy to get/use mail server stuff, www server stuff, DNS, anti-virus, anti-spam, file/print share, networking,
Now this is stated by someone that has given away free (as in beer and freedom) software since the early 1980s (waaay pre GPL, I did it public domain:). I like Linux, I've used Linux since about the 0.93(?) kernel. I like the concept of free (freedom) software, always have, that's why I've released tools PD years ago (sadly I push paper not bits now). But my job isn't about what I like, it is about doing my bit to improve profit and reduce costs. As it is in most corporations I've ever worked at. Linux does that, that's the reason to implement it in a corporation.
Oh, well. Mark it off topic and let's move on
McVoy IS a tantrum-throwing child. If you knew anything about the whole BitKeeper situation, you would have noticed that. Yeah, he let some projects use his software. WOW. Let's see, it cost him exactly $0.00 and he got lots of free publicity from it. He has all the compassion of a loan shark.
Free is better if it's available, meets the user requirements, and the overall costs of the non-free - dollars, political, and otherwise - don't exceed the benefit.
Any state where non-free is preferable is usually and should be an unstable state:
Either free software will be made, and non-free will no longer be preferred, or free software will be made and the non-free software will improve, so the new, better non-free software becomes preferred.
In the free market, the "more cost effective" product will carry the day. Non-Free products carry several costs, including political costs - particularly when it's a tool used for FOSS-development, the cost of not being able to modify the source when needed, and the costs of vendor lock-in. These, plus licensing fees if any, must be weighed when deciding to use non-free software.
In this context, free is as in freedom, not as in beer.
I think Linux was right to use BitKeeper at the time he made the decision. I think he was wrong to discourage the use of Tridge's work, but given the aftermath, he was right to move to an open-source solution. The time is ripe to use an open-source code management system for the Linux Kernel. One could easily argue this work should've been started a year or two ago.
By the way, there's still non-free code being used to develop Linux, albeit indectly and not under the control of the developers:
When a developer checks in code, his code travels over routers, some of which use non-FOSS code. I'm sure there are many such examples of how non-FOSS code is used to further the Linux kernel.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Actually, that's not a third hand. That still falls into doing what you think is right.
On the other hand :) I used to think RMS was just a raging zealot, but I've come around to his way of thinking. It's not that it's a crime to develop or use closed software - it's just stupid to depend on it, because you never know when they're going to screw you around. This is especially true of specialty software, like SCMS, or software for specific markets like child care. Most of this software can no longer be purchased - it can only be licensed. You buy a media set, and you buy a license. The license allows you to use the software until it expires. If they want to change the terms of the license on you, they can do it any time your license expires; if you want to get your information back out of the program, assuming it's even [reasonably] possible, you have to pay the license cost.
For example, the people in the childcare department at the school for which I work (a community college) want to use a program called Childcare Manager. It's written by a company in oregon called Personalized Software. Apparently, this software is licensed, not sold. What does it do? It handles accounting, contact management, child information, instant messenging, and employee information, and it can export to quickbooks. It is currently over a thousand dollars a year. If you're going to spend that kind of money, wouldn't it make more sense to spend it on customizations to free software, so that you A> don't have to pay a recurring license cost and B> can never get stuck in a position where you have to pay a ransom to get your data? I chose this software in particular because it doesn't do anything that you couldn't whip up in a month or so using PHP, and there are strong privacy concerns involved - how can you ever know that the software is secure?
I firmly believe that to use anything other than Free software is to invite disaster. I am not entirely against the use of proprietary software, but I believe that it should be avoided wherever possible. It is true that you can only measure costs of the things you can foresee, but it's the things you aren't expecting that typically cost you the most.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I used to think RMS was just a raging zealot, but I've come around to his way of thinking. It's not that it's a crime to develop or use closed software - it's just stupid to depend on it, because you never know when they're going to screw you around.
Allow me to give you insight into the mind of a techie who is NOT a programmer (I'm more the sysadmin type. I can't code C, can't even READ C++, but I'm a demon when it comes to perl).
Relying on ANY software is stupid, by that logic, since if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it.
Just because the code CAN be fixed by someone else, doesn't mean it WOULD be. There are hundreds if not thousands of orphaned programs on Sourceforge alone. If I happen to need an abscure bit of code that someone wrote on a lark (and I often do) great! I hop over to SourceForge, grab the tarball and 'make'. Oh... crap. It only works on Linux 2.2.1...
This is a problem with OSS. Despite all the zombie masses shouting "GNU isn't against selling software," the issue is exactly that. If the program gets into wide enough use, people stop paying for it since they just snarf the source and build it themselves. So fixing bugs doesn't become financially feasable anymore, unless you SELL THE UPGRADES, which brings you RIGHT back your #1 argument against closed-source software. Otherwise, the only reason to keep working on it is for the love of the project, and they WILL eventually get bored, move on, and the project will stagnate. Then those who rely on it are equally screwed.
Note: I am NOT anti-OSS. This is just a problem I genuinely think needs to be recognized and addressed, and Stallman is too busy preaching to actually do so.
Writing your own version control system is no big problem?! That's a BIG problem in the books of most developers[....]
If it's such a big problem, why doesn't an open source alternative exist? Or, if one does exist, why isn't it considered good enough to use for the project?
Could it be because there is no economic incentive? Or is it because programmers lack the ethics to write a free one?
Free in Free Software refers to liberty, not cost.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
All that "data" he got out was in a proprietary format which he then had to reverse engineer. That's what Larry was bitching about. Not that he had any right to.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There are people who still maintain, track, and use the Linux 2.2 kernels, even to this day. There are also people who make linux distributions that are stripped right down to the bare minimum, and then add software on as needed.
As a platform for millions of dollars worth of software, this is the only sane way to go.
As for MS extended support? They offer it for some things, not others. And it's very expensive. FOSS OS's would help the Air Force mitigate the long-term expense of keeping their mini-linux distro up to date, because other groups (probably within the government itself!) would be working on similar problems.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
I believe that sourcecode should be at the control of whoever created it or paid them to create it, its their investment so why should a random person have the ability to fork it on a whim, unless the codes owners agree to that in the first place by CHOOSING to embrace such a move and opensourcing their code by freewill.
This is a strawman. Nobody's saying people should be forced to license their work as Free software. The onus is on the average consumer to be wise enough not to rely on proprietary software.
This 'all software should be Free' thing people kick around is not the concept of someone like the government mandating that all software be Free, but having a market where anyone who doesn't release their source gets laughed at and their product not even considered by the decision makers.
Will this ever happen? Don't know.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
But its RMS's brand of extremism that hurts free software more than it helps it.
It's "RMS's brand of extremism" that is the reason the vast majority of free software even exists today, you ungrateful bastard.
Do you really think you'd be posting on slashdot from a 'Linux system' if RMS was cool with proprietary software?
So instead of bowing down and thanking the proprietary companies for letting me use thier software, I should instead bow down to some loony long hair who now decides to tell me what my code can be licensed under, and what software I can put on my machine? You disciples of St. Ignacius can keep your religion, I'll continue to use the best tool for the job.
Relying on ANY software is stupid, by that logic, since if the author decides to screw me around, not fix a bug, or just generally bugger off and move on to a new project, I'm JUST as screwed as if it were MS who did it.
No, you aren't. The difference is, with FOSS you at least have a fighting chance. You may not be a programmer (most people in this world aren't), but if your company is relying on said software to do business you have the ability to pay one or more people who ARE programmers, and they can fix the software for you. This is no big deal for most medium-to-large businesses, or even for small businesses depending on the size of the problem. If it's something that's important to a large number of people it will almost always get taken care of, or a free and often better replacement will be created.
With closed software, you are simply screwed, unless you are big enough to buy the closed source code, and that's assuming the source code still exists in some usable form. With free software, you are NOT "just as screwed" as you are when a closed-source company dies.
You're right about one thing, just because open source CAN be fixed doesn't mean that it WOULD be fixed if it's not a popular bit of software. But "can" is ever so much better than "can't", wouldn't you agree? What you get with orphaned close-source applications is almost always "CAN'T". To avoid getting stuck with orphaned open source software that you can't fix yourself or can't afford to pay someone to fix, you just have to pay a little attention and try to stick with popular software that WILL get fixed. Oh, and taking advantage of actual standards as much as possible is always helpful when you're forced to replace an application with an alternative.
Your statement that developers will ALWAYS eventually abandon a project and that all popular open source software will ALWAYS become non-profitable because everyone will download and compile their own copy is just nonsense. If that were true, Red Hat (and all other commercial Linux distributions, etc.) would have been out of business a long time ago, since you can download their entire OS for free or get the free CentOS or White Box versions. Same software, just relabeled. And yet, companies are still willing to pay thousands per license for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. The reasons range from support to tax write-offs to convenience, but the point being there will always be a market for F/OS software, or at least for quality F/OS software. You're just not understanding the market or the developers.
Some people have to work for a living unfortunately since money does not grow on trees and we don't all have rich parents and we cannot all live on welfare.
Software is worth paying for if it performs the job well and is easy to use. I'm sorry but most OSS have craptastic UI's and no offline documentation. Some software does not even have up to date documentation online.
Many of those proprietary software companies (Apple, Adobe etc...) employ usability experts to test the functionality of the UI. They know what works and what does not. You are not going to see many programmers with a knack for UI design working on an Open Source project. They are motivated by "scratching their own itch" rather than creating software for the public at large.
Can you honestly say that you would spend your own valuable time developing a useful UI for everyone to use when a "good enough" craptastic interface only you can understand would suffice?
Where is the motivation to create a better UI for other people?
I grew up poor and so I understand the value of a dollar and the value of work.
Don't give me that "freedom" and "free speech" bullshit. I can exercise my freedom and free speech by releasing software as a closed source binary if I so choose. If I do not provide adequate documentation, a good UI and value added features, people may choose to use an OSS alternative. It's called competition people. If I can provide a better user experience and functionality, I should be able to expect monetary compensation for my efforts.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Uh, except that technically Linus isn't allowed to make his own source control system anymore.
The bitkeeper license, last I checked, explicitly stated that users of Bitkeeper could not work on competing source control systems. Git, Linus' new project for supporting linux development, is a competitor, and therefore he's violated the license after the fact.
As far as I can tell, Larry McVoy could go after Linus on a contract violation suit now. (Not that I think he will, that would be mondo bad publicity. *maybe* if he got bought out by somebody else, or if his company goes under and gets sold to someone willing to do anything to extract their dollar's worth.)
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
Ok, we can talk about that too, but how you think the business model could work is unrelated to whether GNU types are anti-capitalist. Which was my point.
If you're curious about how the GPL can and should work for capitalist endeavors, take a look at the way it is being used by business , and maybe you'll grow a clue. IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC all realized that Linux was important to their business. They chipped in a bunch of cash to form the OSDL. OSDL pays programmers to work on Linux. IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC also hire programmers to work on Linux and focus on the issues their customers are interested in.
Then IBM, HP, CA, Intel, and NEC sell shit that uses Linux.
Ok, where did anybody do anything anti-capitalist? Where did it not work in the real world?
Do people buy Red Hat Linux for giggles? Practically speaking, you're wrong. And who says the dominant model for software is pay-per-copy? Shareware authors and Adobe, maybe.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There is a difference that should be important. With open source you can hire someone else to fix it for you. Perhaps this isn't worth it in your care, but companies go out of business from time to time. If all your data was in a program from a company that goes out of business you cannot expand because you cannot get more licenses for your program.
Maybe you can use what you have (if the license doesn't expire), but as soon as you want to hire someone else you are breaking the law because you lack the ability to get more licenses. For a home user a pirate version is fine. For a business that is a bad idea. You might eventially get big enough that those who got the assets of the old company find it worth their while to sue.
With closed source you are relying on the company to provide updates. What if they abandon the software (see above)? What if they decide you are small fry and ignore you. Microsoft won't listen to my (20 person) company if we need a new feature in Word. With open source we can hire someone if we need something bad enough.
Maybe you can't hack C, but I can. Pay my salary and I will make that old program that last supported linux 2.0.19 work on a modern kernel.
People have offered to pay for the rights to M.U.L.E., and been refused. So those who love the game need to keep an atari 800 (or 400, all other models only support 2 players) and disk drive around. Which sounds easy, but the media is going bad, and the copy protection is strong enough that few attempts at copies work. A great program dies because there is no source. (Yes I'm aware of clones, but they do not change my point)
Linus cannot revoke the license for Linux. He can't even change them, because he is not the only copyright holder. The copyright is held by a few thousand individual developers (and a few companies) who each have to agree to licenses changes, or their code removed before the license can change.
Instead of inventing an ethical principle out of his head (something theoretical and Utopian like, say, Marxism), he grounded it in the common practice around him: people can do this stuff
To be off-topic, Marxism was based in the real world too. It was an extrapolation of observed anti-aristocratic trends.
The tremenous failure of Leninist-Maoist pseudo-communism shouldn't be used as evidence against the accuracy of the theory of which they were perversions. Marx said that communism would come after capitalism, and so far even capitalism hasn't covered the whole world yet. Even if he were right, we wouldn't expect to see the results til later.
There still remains an outside chance that we will end up in a society conforming to his ideals. For example, if corporations along the lines of Wal-Mart continue to grow and manage ever-increasing domination of the economy, they could become tantamount to a communist government.
He's talking about the kernel, hence he respects the name it was given--Linux. He asks people to do the same when speaking of the OS in which the Linux kernel is most commonly used so that both projects get a share of the credit--GNU/Linux.
Time to read the GNU/Linux naming FAQ, perhaps.
Digital Citizen
Anyway.. So far Red Hat has been working on compiling the parts of OOo that do work (or can be made to work) with GCJ for shipping with their distro. I suspect Debian and so on will do something similar. So in that sense, it's already forked.
Actually that could end up being quite good. It's possible the pressure to use OO2.0 on a totalyl Free system might well be the impetus required to really beef up GCJ! So in that sense it could end up being quite beneficial that OO2.0 has a mcuh stronger dependancy on Java.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And yes, I understand it's a perfectly valid tool when you want your software to be less freely usable, but that's not the path I choose, maybe because I don't view people that want to sell software as evil and I value their contribution to the further development of my code regardless of their motivations or benefit from that.
Is it more practical to settle into one version control system and use it over a long period of time, or to shift between proprietary version control systems that flake out from underenath you and require you to change systems on THIER terms, not yours?
That is pretty much at the heart of what RMS is trying to say, all the time. That ultimatley the only "Practical" software is software YOU control, not another company.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes. Let's not forget that this is the man who, seeing the need for free software, first started to write the compiler with which to build free software. A more "reasonable" person might have said that "Ah, the development tool chain isn't that important, it's the code that actually gets work done that is. Let's depend on a proprietary compiler for now, after all, the interface to it (i.e. the language) is portable and consistent between vendors".
But not Stallman. He's not one to back down from difficulty. As a result we now have a very capable free tool chain (gcc, gdb, glibc, gmake, flex, bison etc).
I'd say he's got his priorities straight.
Stefan Axelsson
Many enterprise software companies have a considerable market power, even when they have competitors, and so they act accordingly. One thing such companies do is price discrimination. There is no one price. Witness Oracle. They won't tell you the price outright on their web site (when they do it's usually an upper bound, above the price many companies pay). They'll look at you and then try to estimate how much cash you have. They won't attempt to have the cash that you don't have but they WILL try to extract as much of your cash as possible through licensing and support fees.