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Stallman Unsure Whether Firefox Is Truly Free
Slatterz writes "Among the theories Stallman bandies about in this Q&A are: Facebook may not share private data with the CIA, Firefox isn't really 'free software,' and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software. Agree or disagree?"
I'm sure we're going to get debates about pragmatism versus idealism. Isn't idealism just pragmatism with an eye to the future? Both want to get the best. The pragmatist wants the best of what is available now, the idealist is prepared to sacrifice now for the best that it can be in the future.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If the CIA needed access to the Facebook databases and were unable to get it (either through social, legal or technical measures), I would consider that to be a massive display of incompetence. If the world's most highly funded spying agency isn't capable of accessing Facebook accounts from a cooperative company, then it (the CIA) should be shut down, since it's clearly going to be of no use at all against more determined opponents.
Is there a necessity for software to be proprietary?
It's necessary for there to be an economic incentive to develop software. Nobody is going to donate millions of man-hours to write the software for the F-22 out of the goodness of their heart. Nobody is going to donate the man-hours to write the software for my insurance agency or hospital.
I don't think open-source is inherently incompatible with that economic incentive but if Stallman thinks that open-source is the cure-all for every single problem that can be solved with software then he is just as much of a zealot as the Microsoft trolls that think all open-source software is communist and evil.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
No he isn't. He appears to support the idea of paid software development and paid services, but insists that the users of that developed software should have the right to copy, modify and redistribute it.
Anyway, I agree with him. Having worked for 2 years with a contracting company that was almost 100% Linux and open source, I can say that the open source software development and services arena is very profitable. We never had a customer complain that the solution we delivered was either based on open source, or that our changes would be open source due to the GPL or whatever. What customers cared about was a) did it work and b) did it not crash (the two are somewhat related). As long as we checked those boxes, they were very happy - you'd be surprised at the number of contractors who try to deliver overly fancy solutions but fail on those two basic points.
More software developers should ask themselves "What's the worst that could happen if my customers could modify and redistribute this software"? For proprietary software, it means you can no longer hold customers to ransom and insist on yearly revenue generating "updates". For developers who get paid for hours worked doing actual development and support, this is no problem. I prefer the latter - getting paid for actual work just seems more honest.
Nobody is asking them to. The developers that wrote the F22/insurance/hospital software would still get paid, because the software has to actually be written, and they'll get paid for modifications and support too. What they can't do is get their customer reliant on some bit of closed software, and then jack up the cost of that software a couple of years down the line when replacing it with something else is almost impossible.
What's the worst that could happen if hospitals actually used open source systems? That open standards would be developed and utilised, and that information interchange between systems would be many times easier? That patients might have some degree of control over their own data? That vendor lock-in, the type leading to the failure of the "£50 billion, largest civilian IT programme in the entire history of the world" might be avoided? I could support that.
Okay, many people have accused him of this, but reading his response how he came about to his free software ideals really doesn't strike me that he quite understands why software costs money. Kind of like how warez kiddies I knew in highschool didn't quite understand why those pirated copies of Photoshop weren't free to begin with. Coding on a PDP-10 in the 80's is great ... but now we're at an age where thousands upon thousands of software developers have to make a living *somehow.* Calling commercially closed source developed software a social problem is extreme. I couldn't imagine an age of software development where I could buy something, freely replicate it and expect the application developer to make money on it in other ways than dragging their heels on supporting it. How does he expect software developers to make a living?!
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Richard, you're rewriting history. The licenses of open source software are more often derived from sources like the BSD and MIT licnses, which are at least as old as the GPL.
Sit a potential user down and get them to look at GNU. Shitty logo, meaningless name, and stereotyped militant following. Now get them to look at anything to do with Microsoft. Clear cut image, a household name before it was a household name, and a stereotyped idiot following. People seeing this would rather commission a team of programmers to create them an app that already exists in Open Source form that they never knew existed, because apart from the odd exception of people like Red Hat, Ubuntu et al, nobody in the open source community is willing to regard people used to closed-source software as anything else than the unwashed masses waiting for enlightenment. The people that make the decisions don't give a shit whether a new OS/software package/etc has a particular philosophy associated with it, as is evident from a lot of companies being "liberal" with site licences they actually paid for. What does matter is the snobbish attitude shown off by people like Stallman towards people who have a need for software, be it open or closed source, and the stereotypes they generate that have harmed the open source community.
Hello? Mods on crack!
iceweasel was kind of a dick move from developers that didn't want to live up to the same expectations as everybody else.
I'm not certain why you think it's a "dick move" to do something that you're allowed to do. But I AM certain that they are living up EXACTLY to the same expectations as everyone else.
Oh! I can field this one... As someone who once made a fairly shitty, uncourteous move myself...
See, back in the late 90s I made a fork of the game XEvil. XEvil v1 was GPL'ed, while XEvil v2 was not. I forked a late version of v1 and called it "XEvil Mutant Strain" - added some characters and weapons and stuff, put my name on it, etc. It even wound up on a CD release of Linux games.
So why was this a shitty thing to do? Basically, during all this, I wasn't thinking in terms of how to be courteous to the original author of the software. In the case of Mutant Strain it was like "I'm gonna fork this 'cause I don't approve of your new license" - followed by a lot of shoddy work, and promotion of said shoddy work, using the name XEvil and without being courteous or thankful for the original code I was working from. I didn't do enough to distinguish my project as a fork and I didn't do enough to recognize the original author.
So I can appreciate the perspective from which someone says it was a shitty move to call the fork IceWeasel. I never really thought of it like that before - mostly I just thought the name choice was kind of funnny. But the fact that the name choice is kind of a parody (especially given all the name changes Firefox was subject to early on) is kind of ungrateful in a way - almost like the people who chose the name wanted to express spite toward the Firefox folks for creating the condition in which they couldn't change the source to fit their distribution and still call it Firefox. I think a more appropriate attitude is continuing thanks for making Firefox source free in the first place, even if there are uncomfortable limitations.
Bow-ties are cool.
> All they ask, unlike some, is DON'T put my name on it. Is that so bad?
Which is why it is important that we give them EXACTLY what they demand. Iceweasel. If every distribution did it they would suddenly realize that what they thought they wanted wasn't what they actually wanted. Only then can the discussion of a more reasonable trademark policy begin. As a general rule, it is only when you make stupidity painful that people change.
Democrat delenda est