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Stallman's Legacy Halts At Hardware (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: To say Richard Stallman had a profound effect on free software is not a bold enough statement. The power of the GPL, and his advocacy for software freedom have changed the world. But there is one frontier that has yet to hear this gospel. These days, no hardware is an island. Almost every type of electronics we use is running some type of code, and in almost every case some of that code is secret in more ways than one. From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
Stallman has always had the right idea IMHO, but that 'ideal' put up against Corp Profit will never win sadly.
"Those who don't understand code, will be owned by those who do"
I'm all for a hardware manufacturer who creates and promotes 100% open hardware with public code provided.....................know any?
His legacy also stopped at bathing as well.
The biggest barrier to true open hardware is the fact someone has to pay for a tangible good, and that tangible good - hardware - is designed for a specific purpose. The BIOS and bootloaders and such are immaterial, and do not limit you from using a piece of silicon as you desire. The block is silicon that does what you want to do in the first place. And that carries with it costs beyond just software creation.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In the long run, the real legacy of the GPL will be that it proved that developers and users don't want lengthy, highly-restrictive licenses that claim to be "open" and claim to support "freedom".
Instead, they want concise licenses like the BSD and MIT licenses that go out of their way to promote openness and freedom for all: for developers, for users, and for those who wish to use open source code without contributing back any changes.
That's the thing about freedom that the GPL crowd just doesn't get. It's not freedom when you force somebody else to contribute back changes they made to software; it's tyranny.
True freedom is when you get to choose what you do with changes you made to open source software. If you want to contribute them back, then you can do it. If you don't want to distribute the modified source code, then you don't have to. It's real freedom at work: you choose what you want to do, without somebody else dictating anything to you.
The BSD and MIT licenses offer true freedom. The GPL offers restriction and the elimination of freedom.
This is all obvious. Why post an "article" which is simply clickbait?
When you start missing the days when every piece of hardware you bought came with schematics and firmware listings, instead of six page license agreement printed in four point fonts and written in incomprehensible legaless (and indeed, demanding adherence to reprehensible terms.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
What's the point? CPUs have hardware interface and instruction set specifications that allow reverse engineering. Sure, some things are microcoded, but microcode is slower than hardwiring and is mostly useful for working around design flaws.
GPUs, on the other hand, are clouded in secrecy and there would be a benefit from opening them up much more than they are now.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I think patents are why this can never work.
Pretty much EVERY industrial process is patented by someone. That patent is guarded by a corporation who wants to ensure they get paid ... either through sales, or licensing the patent.
IBM makes a zillion patent applications every year.
There's simply no way you can bypass the sheer quantity of "intellectual property" which encumbers the world. And since pretty much every aspect of the hardware is probably covered under a patent, you're not going to get it.
Hell, even with software, Microsoft used to insinuate that Linux violated a bunch of their patents, but wouldn't ever name them.
The modern world has been structured to serve the needs to greedy corporations. They're not going to allow you to sufficiently change the rules of the game to take that away.
Which is why every treaty these days is having the intellectual property pushed even harder, because governments are on the payroll of entities which want to further entrench their rights as superseding ours.
Keep dreaming.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
well DUH! if people started publishing firmware code they'd end up like snowden... ;-)
Nothing is stopping you making and using your own hardware, rather than putting expectations on other peoples products. Of course, making your own hardware isnt cheap or trivial, whereas putting expectations on other people is both of those things.
Say what you want about Richard Stallman, no one's ever accused him of being too willing to compromise on his principles in the name of pragmatism and expediency.
Oh, wait, they totally just accused him of that.
Source: e-mail exchange with him, based on my shmoocon presentation on hacking USB flash drives.
In short: I said there's no way you can have open source firmware for a proprietary undocumented ASIC, that has to keep track with new developments in flash memory every 3 months.
He want on to ask if there was a way to buy a USB flash drive that wasn't field-reprogrammable, or to "convince a company to make USBs [sic] that way". I'm not aware of any, and it's impossible as-is to A) ask a vendor "What chips are you using?" and B) have the vendor use the same controller/flash chips on the same device.
Dude wouldn't listen, and I gave up trying to educate him.
da w00t. mtfnpy?
the reason a legacy of GPL can be attributed ot stallman is because of the egregious error of computing in capitalism. Namely, the means of production of code were given to coders themselves and in doing so they were empowered to construct the terms of that softwares use.
Hardware has enjoyed this luxury for quite some time, however its days may be numbered. open source firmware for routers and mp3 players has existed for a while, and open source chip design and hardware is slowly coming to fruition with the open hardware laptop by bunny huang and programmable keyboards from input.club.
expect a future of open hardware to seem eerily familiar to the future of open source software. First its ignored, then its laughed at, then its attacked as inferior and dangerous, and finally its either embraced by hackers and business or outlawed through a combination of DMCA style legislative chicanery and thoughtcrime akin to aaron schwartz.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Why does TFS talk about Stallman like he's dead?
just a thought... help bring us out of the '80s sooner
I guess whatever device we're talking about here has had limited scope until this wearable/beacon/smart bubble started. We effectively have known that specific devices (think: a clock, a fridge, an AC unit) did and still do very specific things, and until now we see them doing those things clearly, not transparently, because they are usually one-task devices. So what point was there really in open-sourcing that stuff or requiring any form of software-bound compliance? Not much really.
Now that we're getting super smart watches that are basically computers, with a lot more IO into and from our immediate lives, we need to start caring what they run and who they share with, but to me this is just the smartwatch getting closer to the router in effective "influence" on our privacy, security, and other GPL-centered concerns. Whatever has been said about software for computers, that started applying to servers, routers, set-top-boxes at some point, can now apply to all "hardware", because, well, that hardware runs and does what a generic-purpose personal computer runs and does. And then some, if you add all those sensors, it gets access to a lot more stuff than those Spring Break pictures you're embarrassed about. Richard Stallman needs not say one thing
Off-topic: why is this article's tone sound like RMS is no longer alive or active?
Get On the Plane. Literally.
Unfortunately Open Source Soap, http://opensourcesoap.com/ , is only OSS and not GPL or LGPL.
How was it a "right" idea? The society — and generations of programmers — were spending considerable efforts on software, which could not be used by all. This caused a substantial duplication of efforts and repulsed a substantial body of programmers, who preferred the truly free BSD-license instead. Instead of cooperating, people and groups ended up competing. And when the original GPL proved to not be "enough" — for example, it was still possible to use GPL2-licensed gcc in a BSD-project, Stallman doubled down with GPL3, forcing FreeBSD, for example, to switch from gcc to BSD-licensed clang.
Yep, these denunciations of "profit" is the very core of the problem. Generations of young idiots do not realize, that profit is simply a reward for doing something people want. There is nothing wrong or shameful about it and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I don't think it's possible or even desirable for every piece of software to be open source. That would result in a lot of useful software not being written, as many smaller developers will not figure out how differentiate themselves from legal copycats.
Nevertheless, FSF made a huge positive contribution by making compelling critical mass of free software available and forcing commercial companies to share improvements that they make to Linux kernel, compilers and other key infrastructure. We can't even imagine how sucky and insecure commercial products would be today if they were not built on shared community foundation. GPL essentially helped overcome tragedy of the commons where it's better for everyone if there is, say, a good OS kernel available for everyone to build their own UI on top, but it's in immediate interest of any one company to withhold improvements from competitors.
I can see a similar need in hardware - a set of copyleft hardware, firmware and 3D printer designs that anyone can use as a base for an innovative product while sharing improvements to reusable components.
It's an important secondary benefit that people will be able to run 100% open systems to learn, because of concern about government backdoors or just because of philosophical objections to not having source, like RMS. I just don't see it as a primary motivating factor for most people in the position to actually contribute code.
Very strange wording for someone who is still alive :/
Well, open hardware is pretty crippled. When you consider patents, almost across the board hardware innovation patents are a non-started for a small-ish open hardware company trying to cook their own gear. If you're successful enough, someone will sue you into the ground. Software on the other hand can be served from countries which don't have software patents and still get downloaded everywhere. Would x264/ffmpeg exist today if purely developed under US laws? Probably not, but who's to say...
Its hard to shut down an individual sending a scrap of code over the web vs. a small hardware shop shipping their devices through the mail. If anywhere 'open' hardware flourishes, it'll be China which has historically been more or less indifferent of patents in general.
Bye!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I25UeVXrEHQ
From beefy processors to graphics controllers, boot ROMs and binary blobs run in the silicon we base our systems upon. The code is not published and in the rare case that you are able to view the source it is only under strict NDA. This represents one of the biggest barriers to true open hardware.
this is incorrect! the giant barrier that prevents people from having true open hardware is the obscene cost of having your design made into a silicon chip. if you could suddenly get a one-off chip made for $100, we would all be running much different systems and few of them would be related to x86.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I think (hope) no one will disagree when I state that Linux won over BSD, at least in popularity. But what made it won? Was it Torvald charisma alone? The lawsuit that hit BSD? Simply the software quality? I think many would disagree about that, BSD was still more mature no matter what. Timing? yep sorry it seems gpl did had a big impact. Or a larger amount of programmer liked the idea.
APL is very different from GPL. The most successful GPL-program is gcc — which is waning now that there is clang, to which the evil KKKorporations can contribute without fear. You seem to conflate all open-source licenses together — and that's a mistake.
The MIT-licensed X11 is very "end user", Mozilla-licensed Libreoffice — even more so (do I need to mention firefox?) No, it is perfectly possible to have a popular open-sourced software offering. But adoption of GPL is a kiss of death.
What Stallman must've hoped for 30 years ago was the thinking like: "Ok, they use GPL, so we'll do so too to be able to use their code." What happened instead is: "Oh, they use GPL, so we'll have to implement the same functionality ourselves."
GPL is a failure, open source is not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
just shut up!
At the same time, many confidential information about chips protected by NDAs is often not justified.
Does giving all the details about a flash chip, its durability, sequences of operations for obtaining good data really help competitors ?
It is a bit like 3D chips, vendor swore for years that it was impossible to disclose programming information, because it would reveal
too much. Bullshit. Important features are patented anyway.
The only compelling reason for not disclosing anything is when you have something to hide, for example using a competitor's patented technology.
As much as I understand that complete hardware information will not be available for everything, pushing for more openness is legitimate.
Having provably secure USB flash drives would be great.
Dude wouldn't listen, and I gave up trying to educate him.
I was under the impression that sums up his particular strength and weakness. He isn't interested in the particulars of his grand vision that are impractical or impossible. With RMS it's always a "Damn the torpoedoes..." mentality.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Its true that Stallman's legacy is limited to hardware only but the causation is entirely wrong [bear with me]. The reason opensource flourished so well is that only partly because of GPL/other licenses. The real enabler IMO was availability of uncontrollable compiler collection that allowed developers unencumbered ability to code and publish. Not many people know this but Stallman was the guy behind creation of GCC. With the open source (& free as in speech) compiler the community had an ability to improve upon proprietary compilers that focus their support on whatever the monetary interests of the provider happens to be. Once ability to build your own code without the key chokepoint of 'agreements' is there, the rest of opensource movement became more plausible.
THIS critical piece is missing in h/w development. Almost anything semi decent [I know open source eda tools exist, but..] on EDA front costs 6 figures. Also the fact that there is a huge non recurring expense when making chips that requires a certain volume production to be profitable, also, this expense gets worse as geometries shrink. This is the root cause behind patents & other barriers to openness. the NRE costs can be reduced by sharing wafers and using legacy nodes but synthesis & verification still costs money. IMO the real solution to open hardware is community (or some deep pocketed neutral investor like Page/Musk) investing some effort in creating these tools in fully open manner.
The other path [I really hope] is as the geometries shrink the Fabs (TSMC/GloFo/etc) realize that the chip development costs are going to be so high that their market with shrink to a handful of big players. So to rekindle the silicon work they may start funding these open EDA tools thereby serving their own interests.
Just my 2 cents.
I respect what Stallman has contributed to free software, but at the same time, his views are ridiculous. He is to FLOSS what fundamentalists are to religion. His untenable ideals and overwrought goals drive people away, and do more to hurt the more reasonable open source options than to help free software.
No, RMS is straight fucking ignorant about hardware, and that whole e-mail exchange proves it.
How about you get Stallman's unwashed cock out of your mouth for a minute so you can possibly have a chance to smell his bullshit?
You would be amazed at some of the 'low level' libraries that GPU manufacturers have and license to other such companies. These companies have Math Phd's still trying to get better precision and faster computation at Sine and Cosine functions, etc... I'm sure they are not in a hurry to open source this type of research which took plenty of money and time.
I think it;s that he decided you wouldn't listen and gave up trying to educate you.
This doesn't affect me because I always talk in code anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Open source is just about ego--like you can debug any problem by looking at the source (in under ten seconds, of course).
Digitally signed flash firmware on flash drive:
https://www.kanguru.com/storage-accessories/kanguru-flashtrust-secure-firmware.shtml
Now he apparently uses a ThinkPad.
I use a Thinkpad X60 computer, in which the FSF installed a free initialization program (libreboot) and a free operating system (Trisquel GNU/Linux.) This is the first computer model ever to be sold commercially with a free initialization program and a free operating system, and thus the first computer product the FSF could endorse. (It was not sold that way by Lenovo, however.)
Before that, I used the Lemote Yeeloong for several years. At the time, it was the only laptop one could buy that could run a free initialization program and a free operating system. But it was never sold with a free operating system.
Sauce: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html
This reminds of labor unions claiming credit for us not working on weekends... Bullshit, in other words.
Sometimes I read a thread here and just spot the most amazing, untrue bullshit - like this line.
I've been in the office Monday through Saturday for the past 3 months - involuntarily. The project manager just had to send a simple email requesting additional resources when the goals on his timeline started slipping. HR and my direct boss walk over to me and tell me that I'm expected to be at work Monday through Saturday from 8am to 6pm. I don't get paid extra for the extra hours. I don't get comp time. I'm not allowed to use vacation days during crunch time. The contract I signed when I started here said nothing whatsoever about involuntary unpaid OT. My recourse is to find a new job (it's hard to interview on a Sunday) or initiate legal action which will end badly for me.
My neighbor is a UAW worker in a Ford plant. He gets Saturdays and Sundays off - except when they allow him to volunteer for weekend OT at 1.5x rate or even higher. I'm willing to bet his annual salary is higher than mine when you factor in his OT pay.
Please hop on the clue bus when it comes to unions. Please, I'm begging you.
"No, RMS is straight fucking ignorant about hardware, and that whole e-mail exchange proves it."
Not at all. Pay attention to the details:
Da Woot: "[T]here's no way you can have open source firmware for a proprietary undocumented ASIC."
RMS: "Okay. Is there a way to buy a USB flash drive that isn't field-reprogrammable, or to convince a company to make such a USB flash drive?"
Da Woot: "Fuck you dude, you're asking for the impossible and are clearly a moron."
It's clearly a reasonable thing to produce USB flash drives that are not field-reprogrammable. RMS has *long* held the opinion that devices that are not field-reprogrammable can reasonably run closed-source software, because they can then be viewed as single-purpose appliances. (Think of your microwave. It has non-field-upgradable software, too!) What's more, if you make it impossible to field-reprogram a device, you make it impossible to have that device's firmware changed from something that *might* be malicious, to something that is *definitely* malicious.
Another thing:
We've heard the "You can't make open-source drivers for $HARDWARE because that field moves way too quickly!" song for decades. In every case, the singer has been lying to us. Do you *honestly* think that gongkai somehow doesn't apply to the manufacturers of USB mass storage devices? I certainly don't. :)
This is a feature, not a bug. SOMEONE has to stand out at the extreme edge. I take the position that all IP should be abolished because the opposing force is so powerful, its the only logical counter to it. Someone somewhere has to stand up to greed and profit, no matter how Quixotic it may appear to be or the width of the spectrum shrinks and the extremes get much closer to each other.
Good-bye
It is lack of access to * the means of production*. Gee, where have I heard that before? But in this context it is true. And since it won't be given to us, we have to create our own. Uh oh... there's that 3D printing nonsense again. But... it is the only way to "democratize" things.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Perhaps you should focus your efforts closer to home?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
BSD existed since 1970-ies.
But was it free in 1984? Wikipedia says it didn't start to become free software until 1991. And was it a complete free operating system, entirely free of AT&T encumbrances, in 1992? Once Linux was combined with what the GNU project had produced by the early 1990s, it succeeded in part because of the legal uncertainty surrounding BSD prior to the 1993 settlement.
You control the silicon that postprocesses the signal.
The Commodore 64 computer's VIC-II GPU outputs S-Video signals using a 90/11 = 8.18 MHz pixel clock, which is 16/7 times the frequency of the color subcarrier. Put code on an FPGA that samples the luma and chroma signals at twice this rate, and it should be able to guess which color the VIC-II is producing. Then store lines of pixels in a circular buffer in block RAM feeding a line tripler circuit on the same FPGA. Kevin Horton did something like this for the NES.
Or clone the VIC-II. (If you dare.)
Then get an FPGA development board and write your CPU in Verilog.
The horrible, evil, freedom-hating BSD license does not allow me to redistribute the code without acknowledging who wrote it!
As the sainted Ayn Rand often said, only absolute freedom is freedom. If you can't commit genocide without some dirty stinky BSD hippies whining about it, you're not really free, are you? Down with BSD's freedom-hampering restrictions! Public domain (and CRELM® toothpaste) is the only true free license!
The sales of computers are going down last years, and there are more other devices in the age of "Internet of Things" that are harmful for the freedom of the users. Even simple climate control is not your device, but is designed to spy on your family habits, "phone home" - all in the name of optimizing your utility bills. In the US the practical disadvantage of this unfreedom can likely be just unsolicited junk mail, in other countries with higher corruption levels this data can be sold to burglars who will visit your home when the heating/AC is set on "vacation" level. Freedom of the users of the devices (including all 4 classic components) is much broader then just that of the computer operators, and the choice if free/non-free is not only about your philosophy, but be a matter of survival.
As for Richard Stallman - I just can not see, where is that his one mistake. For years there are continuing attempts by others to create "hardware GPL" but there is no universal solution (we use exactly the combination mentioned in the article: GPLv3 for software/firmware/FPGA and CERN OHL for the hardware) caused by fundamental differences of the software and hardware. His last year article http://www.wired.com/2015/03/r... provides a lot of practical instructions how to build free hardware in a not-yet-so-free hardware world, there are "levels of design".
Find the cpu thats fully understood.
Buy the motherboard thats been fully examined and found to be open and usable for a developers needs.
Tell the world about it on the web and grow a user community.
Move away from the devices and brands that expose IP's while selling an expensive VPN related product.
Stop buying tame and junk crypto turn key products that have trap doors and backdoors design in as sold and shipped.
Secure and understand what can be as a user and developer.
The cpu, motherboard, OS can still be secure, fully documented and developer ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
With Google's switch from Apache Harmony-based runtime libraries to GPL-with-Classpath-exception-based code, we have an ever-so-slight uptick in the copyleft nature of AOSP. True, the Classpath exception is a huge exception that makes it arguably lesser than the LGPL (Bradley Kuhn apparently half-seriously argued at the time of its creation for it to be called the "Least GPL"), but even if it's a slight shift, at least it's in the right direction. And it shows that Google at very least isn't actively working to diminish any further the usage of GPL code in Android.
But, yeah. The use of a new software stack rather than a standard glibc-based one has seriously rather counterproductively bifurcated the Linux world.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Stallman gets his bank account padded every time someone picks Libre software for her computer. By expanding into the Libre hardware realm, Stallman's bank account will grow even fatter. Can't you people wake up and see through Stallman's motives? He does not care about us or society. Microsoft and Apple has done more for the user than a thousand Stallman's in an ideal world ever could. Right now is a crucial time to lobby our schools, public sectors, and institutions to embrace Apple and Microsoft and stop supporting Stallman's profiteering. It's sickening. The man has no decency, he just cares about the bottom line while feeding us the illusion of choice and getting what we want. The day I see people choose Libre hard/software is the day our free market economy has died and gone to greed and delusion. If Libre software is embraced, that is the death of our freedom.
Generations of older idiots do not realize, that corporations are shafting you and laughing all the way to the bank based on *your* hardwork, and you just accept it. There is nothing wrong or shameful about asking for higher compensation, and joining a union to strength your demands by putting workers and executives on an even playing field, and all efforts to "fight" it are misguided and destructive.
FTFY.
Look, I don't mean to be rude in the above statement, but it really irritates me when people refer to younger generations as idiots, just because we have a different philosophy than you do.
In my view, BSD allows corporations to fork the code and never contribute back. They can essentially take everyone's hard work, say "So long and thanks for all the fish", and package up a proprietary version of it and sell it for oodles of money. They don't owe you a thing. They don't owe the open source project a thing. Just because some of them currently do contribute code/effort doesn't mean they will indefinitely. Once they have obtained what they want, what incentive do they have to keep working with the community?
The GPL, meanwhile, protects your hardwork. If you write free software (in RMS's terms; or open source if you prefer), you can still build a community around it and have anyone contribute, including corporations. You can use it for whatever you want, including commercial software (i.e., you can sell software that is GPL, that's not against the license). HOWEVER, there is one important exception: any changes/add-ons MUST be available under GPL license for others. While you can sell GPL software, you can't make it solely proprietary, ever. I look at it as demanding compensation -- if you worked hard (for free in most cases) to develop some open source library, and a corporation takes it to use in some product they sell, why should they solely profit off your work? Requiring them to give back to you and community -- so you can turn around and sell too if you wish -- keeps an even playing field. Everyone contributed so everyone gets it. No one can unilaterally decide they're done contributing back; it's a requirement of the license.
Imagine being the author of a library that becomes used in OS X, and then Apple says "Sorry, that's proprietary, you can't reverse engineer our code" -- they took your code, the code you wrote 99% of, and effectively removed your freedom to use your own library just because they made a few changes and reissued under a new license. BSD allows this; GPL doesn't.
The only thing GPL really requires is that changes also be released GPL, so everyone can use it. Otherwise, it's the same as BSD. How is that taking away freedom? You can do anything you want with GPL, including launch a commercial company and sell it, EXCEPT screw people over by taking your ball and going home. Does it not occur to you as being a little suspicious that corporations, after years working with GPL software, are starting to turn to BSD in some cases? You use it as an example of GPL's "failure", but I see it as an impending crisis among BSD software, where in a few years corporations will fork and close these libraries and leave BSD'd software to decay. Remember that old "extend-embrace-extinguish" memo? Did you not learn from history? BSD can't prevent that, but GPL can because of its viral nature.
Now if you really think corporations getting to take your code for proprietary stuff is important, then by all means pick BSD. I'm not going to sit here and tell you what to do with your own hard work. It's a free country. But stop spreading such lies about the GPL. The GPL protects your freedom by preventing others from taking away your freedom.
SOMEONE has to stand out at the extreme edge.
No, they don't. Extremists always do more harm than good.
Stallman is indeed a fundamentalist. His goals are just fine - but he's about as remote from what a typical software engineer is as it's possible to be. That's OK, he's the idealist - and that lets the rest of us be pragmatists.
GPL is great for complete software packages - emacs, gcc...that kind of thing. But for libraries, it sucks. That's why we have LGPL. Sadly, there is a lot of anti-LGPL rhetoric out there https://www.gnu.org/licenses/w...
I think we need something like that for OpenHardware. The ability to use a piece of OpenHardware design in a closed-hardware ensemble without hiding the open part of the design...putting a BeagleBone inside my (commercial) 3D printer perhaps.
Keep that in mind - while I consider why LGPL is a good thing for *parts* of systems.
I get paid for writing software - I need that money to by food, clothing, housing, transport, etc. When I put something out into the public domain it's because I expect to get a fair trade out of it - I give you my software - some of you give me back bug fixes, improvements, etc. My gift to you is repaid to me - possibly in just a small way - but possibly many, many times over...it's a fair trade for some kinds of software - but not for others.
Yet when I open-source a game (I've actually done this) - I got 300,000 downloads in the first month - a lot of thanks and ego-boosting praise - but almost zero actual tangible benefits in return (one guy - a musician - sent me a new, original music track). But if I open-source a library (and I've done that too, on many occasions), then with only a tenth the number of downloads - for years to come, my library was polished, fixed and improved - for free! That's because users of libraries are software engineers, and they are capable of helping out - players of games are typically not.
I learned my lesson - and I mostly OpenSource library code - or complete applications that programmers are likely use the most - these things give me a return on my work.
With a library, we need to allow the maximum number of people to use it in order to get constructive input. If I use GPL, it effectively causes all users of my library to have to license their application via GPL (or similar) too. That cuts out 100% of all commercial users and a large chunk of potential OpenSource users. The only people who can use my code are those who are working on GPL'ed applications - and those are a small minority. With LGPL, I can force the library sources to remain free - while allowing the maximum possible number of users to want to help with the maintenance. This gives me my best return on investment.
So it makes sense to have an LGPL-like license for hardware components - the BeagleBone inside my 3D printer design, for example. Keep the BeagleBone "open" and "free" while allowing me to use it in some larger project that I can sell to keep the lights on.
But for Stallman, this is a religious matter - he's trying to get me to use GPL on my library in an effort to leverage more GPL'ed applications out there. That's a nice goal - but it not one that a typical working programmer can rationally cope with. Closed source code pays the rent.
-- Steve
www.sjbaker.org
If I recall correctly, the Assembler source code listing for the original PC BIOS was included in the IBM Personal Computer Technical Reference, but not the source code for the ROM BASIC, licensed from Microsoft.
SOMEONE has to stand out at the extreme edge.
No, they don't. Extremists always do more harm than good.
You're either saying RMS isn't an extremist or he has done more harm than good. I disagree with both views. He's pretty crazy on some things. But without him there is no (GNU/) Linux, and probably no free software movement as we know it today. Sure open source would exist, but not the legally binding licensing that has helped to keep open source open.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Yep, you can see for yourself if you're interested in that sort of detail.
Is crap like that actually legal in the USA? No wonder your country's fucked.
Here in socialist Europe, as well as basic essentials for a civilised society such as universal health care, free at the point of delivery, and meaningful regulation of lethal weapons, we have a maximum 48 hour working week, seven weeks paid holiday a year, a right to a year's maternity/paternity leave and protection against being sacked for no reason. We have these things because worker's unions fought for them then people elected governments who made them universal.