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A new monthly column
Brave GNU World has started, with the mission to inform
everybody about new GNU software. Apparently dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda
does
not completely delete the contents of you hard-drive. You
should use
shred instead.
Paul Smith wrote in
to plug a Free lecture by Richard Stallman which is
going to be held tomorrow - Tuesday 23 March at 7pm at the
Commonwealth Institute in London. Finally, jbc
wrote in with "In his latest 'Ask Tim' piece, Tim
O'Reilly talks about the
differences between himself and RMS
in terms of how they view OSS/FSF licensing issues."
null -> zero (*blush*)
Basically, I had started to question a lot of the things that I had been so idealistic about for the previous 2-3 years. I was hoping that maybe one of the three speakers (ESR, BP, RMS), coming from vastly different backgrounds and beliefs, would talk sense. I hoped that at least one of them would rise above the primordial ooze of free software flaming and dorkiness and bring it all into perspective. I had hoped to find some reassurance somewhere, but unfortunately none of them came off particularly well- each one seemed to have their own particular brand of tunnel vision, megalomania, narrow-mindedness, and, well, just general yuckiness. It was rather disappointing. The audience wasn't much better- everyone seemed either insanely bitter and hostile, or posessed of the worst kind of subservient sheep mentality. It was like spending an hour in a mental institution- *everyone* was crazy. In particular, I'm not sure how anyone could have walked out of that room after an hour and still retained so much as an ounce of respect for RMS- and I mean that on both a personal and philosophical level. It was a very disheartening experience.
What this whole big long rant is leading up to is this: Tim is one of the very, very few voices of reason when it comes to free software. There are a handful of others: Eric Allman, perhaps Linus (although he makes very few public statements about free software "philosophy"), probably John Ousterhout, Guido (of Python fame), Jordan Hubbard...I'm sure there's a few more out there. Note that none of these people are particularly vocal in "the community" compared to people like ESR, BP, RMS, Alan Cox, Miguel, etc. Most of the widely acknowledged "leaders" of free software seem to have some sort of fatal flaw that prevents them from rising above the muck: they're drunk on their own pseudo-celeb status, they've idealized something or other to the point of ludicrousness ("hacker culture", the morality of software, MS-as-Evil-Empire...), or they're just plain jerks. People you'd go out of your way to avoid if you had to work with them or deal with them on a day-to-day basis. Unbalanced people who just never grew up in one way or another.
Anway, sorry for the rant. The message is, listen to the Tims of the world, and maybe don't pay so much attention to the {ESR,BP,RMS}s of the world. The Tims might not talk so much or so loudly, but it's usually because they actually spend some time thinking about what to say, rather than just reveling in the fact that people are listening to them.
The marketplace is properly an integral part of society, and as such contributes much to society. The problem is that some people have sought to separate it from society, putting it above society, and worshipping it as some sort of god.
Societies which pursue this fanatical view are destined to fail in the long run, just as the attempt to remove the market from society in the Soviet Union ended in tears. Those who take the sensible middle road, seeking neither to deify nor to destroy the market, will triumph in the long run.
So it is that the veils are falling.
Now that lots upon lots of money are to be made on the name of free software (bastardized as "open source", so as not to frighten CEOs of companies for whon freedom is anathema) the real faces are showing.
Naturally anyone with an eye in the pagan god called marketplace would prefer anything but GPL. "Let all software be free", they say, ("so that we can hide it later", they complete in their heads). Tim O'Reilly words on GPL can be easily translated into "GPL restricts my freedom to restrict your freedom, so it is not free". Worded this way, it is easy to see the sophism.
I am really worried now about our fate. It is pretty obvious that there is a character destruction campaign against Richard Stallman. The main goal seems to be to discredit Richard as a communist or a lunatic, to make GPL look like a delusional hippie allucination and to hide all FSF contribution to the present state of things.
If they have their way, the net result will be a far less happy world (albeit a far more lucrative).
Am I paranoid? Or, in the end, "money talks" is the only "road ahead"?
Tim O'Reilly's position that morality is incompatible with science is a breathtakingly unpleasant and dishonest position. Science may guide you on the consequences of particular behaviour, but it can't tell you which consequences are desirable or what behaviour is acceptable. O'Reilly caricatures all attempts to advocate ethical behaviour as religious posturing - as if all atheists are bound to act amorally.
When he argues that free software should be "teted in the marketplace", he doesn't feel the slightest need to justify his belief that this will lead to consequences in the common good; whatever consequences emerge, they will be good simply because they're the ones blessed by the magic market, even if it might seem to those who don't have faith in the market that they require unethical behaviour from the participants. So who's got religion now?
How he can pretend to imagine that his position and RMS's are not so different when moral arguments are at the heart of RMS's stance is beyond me. It's almost enough to turn me into a fundamentalist Stallmanist.
--
Xenu loves you!
I think it's a good idea to discourage people from raising the Nazis as examples. It's just too obvious and too emotive. I think the people who raised slavery in parts of Africa chose better.
--
Xenu loves you!
The marketplace has given us no ideas, no beauty, no creation. People have given us those things -- often in disregard of the marketplace which can offer only material rewards.
So, to hell with the marketplace. Even in the most utopian of marketplace ideals, it is dull and dead. Thankfully not everyone has given up on thought and, yes, morallity for the seductive void of the marketplace.
I know I certainly am not tired of moralizing :)
While I think Tim's ignorance of the moral/ethical side of free software is disappointing, he has a point:
Should it be "free software because we WANT to" or "free software because we HAVE to".
I want to create MORE free software.
I want to see MORE progress in technology and community sharing because of this movement.
BUT
I do NOT want to *FORCE* people to create free software.
RMS believes everything "MUST BE FREE". I agree with a lot of his philosophy, but that is one point where I must draw the line.
If we can find a way of NOT being a property-driven society, then I will by all means accept the view that "everything must be free".
-Stu
I like the way you ignored the rest of my post...
/. or O'Reilly's site. ;-) But if you don't understand why some sort of ethical basis for action is necessary..then I repeat my comment:
/. ACs on this point ;-) You just got in the way of a rant waiting to happen. ]
erm, anyway. What bothers me is the elevation of pragmatism over other concerns and the treatement of ethics and morality as something dirty to be avoided. (IMO, 'ethics' is a better term here) More than that; in taking this stance, people try to present themselves as being 'objective' (and therefore, presumably somehow better) when in fact they have made a decision as well. Denying that an ethical issue exists (even if you are correct) is an ethical decision. To pretend objectivity is hypocrisy of the nth degree.
On top of that...while I can understand pragmatism in software (it can be easily argued that there are more important moral questions, however much it may impact my life), I often get the feeling that this is part and parcel of a larger attitude of pure pragmatism. I could be wrong of course, it's difficult to judge people based on 5-line posts on
I'm sorry.
[ now that I think about it, O'Reilly is probably not guilty of this..heck I doubt you are either..I'd be quicker to indict random
And you *totally* missed my point about users vs creators. The GPL is an assertion of the rights of the creator of a piece of software to ensure that it is used in the way he or she intended. And even in the mindset that this is a moral issue, no-one, even RMS, is going to come around and *force* you to GPL your software (except for some very misguided people)--persuade, argue, cajole, perhaps.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
To my way of thinking, science is essentially a method of viewing and analysing the world. The ;-)
;-)
scientist does not take anything on faith, but rather relies on objective (to the extent possible)
facts.
I would argue that this is not the end-all and be-all of science; it just happens to be the correct way to go about advancing the 'greater good' as seen by scientists (deeper understanding of nature/universe/God depending on what time period you're talking about). Obviously not all scientists agree
In any event, this approach is very good at getting you the truth but doesn't tell you what to do with it.
The scientific approach to evaluating free software is to compare the results of projects based on
totally free software, GPL'd free software, open software, proprietary software, etc. If one sort of
licence or organisational scheme produces consistently better software (based on objective
criteria), it can possibly be considered the best way to develop software.
This gives you a full comprehension of which way is the most efficient way to develop software. Sweatshops are also exceedingly efficient. Free software is too. 'Scientific' correctness is orthogonal to rightness.
The view taken by Richard Stallman is that GPL'd software is inherently better, simply because
he believes it is right. Regardless of any evidence to the contrary, he will only use software which
fits his definition of free, because that is his religion. To his followers, then, he is the prophet of
the GNU faith. To the rest of us, he just seems a bit of a nutter.
No, you're confusing him with ESR. Stallman doesn't claim that free software is better than proprietary software (although it often is), he claims that free software is the Right Thing[tm] to do. I personally think that freeness and quality are not related. There's bad free software and good proprietary software. They have different strengths, etc, etc, but the question for Stallman is not whether one is objectively better but which one is right. Whether you agree with him or not, having made an ethical decision--even an unpopular one--does not automatically qualify one as a "nutter". If Stallman said that the GPL was given to him by little pixies, I think you might have a point.
PS If the Soviet Union had been levelled in the 1950s, the way Germany and Japan were in the
1940s, the world (especially Russia and Eastern/Central Europe) would probably be in much
better shape today.
To be honest, I don't have access to an alternate-universe machine to find out what would have happened if we had nuked Russia. But I suspect that the results would have included massive destruction within Russia (worse than Germany or Japan), horrendous [Russian] civilian casualties, etc, etc... *Perhaps* they would have rebounded like Germany and Japan, but that still doesn't mean that it would have been the 'Right Thing'.
btw, was Hitler's only mistake the invasion of Russia? Wouldn't it have been better for Fleming to get a patent on the production of penicillin?
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
A couple of..umm..interesting things in that O'Reilly article.
At bottom, Richard believes that the rights of
the users of software take precedence over
the rights of the creators of that software.
Yes, that's why when a creator puts his or her work under the GPL, it stays free ad infinitum, whereas a BSD license lets any of the users close the source off for their own uses. The users get a guarantee of freedom to see the code in the process but it does take away their 'right' to hide it.
like to say that Open
Source is science, not religion. Making source
code freely available is good not because of
some inalienable right belonging to the users of
software, but because it's good for the
creators of the software
Um. He must have a different understanding of how science work[ed|s] than I did. AFAIK, science has as a goal the furthering of human knowledge by sharing of information and discoveries. True, it doesn't work that way all the time (ego, greed, etc), but it works well enought that I would suggest that Stallman's position is grounded in a scientific ethic.
But for me, the choice of proprietary or Open
Source software is purely a pragmatic one.
I'm sorry.
Ultimately, the question you're asking...is one of
whether free software is a moral issue or a scientific
one.
Oh dear. [ using science in the sense of 'object judgement' here: ] I think that it was suggested at various points in the '50s (by Von Neumann and others? I'm getting this from a history of game theory that I read, feel free to thwack me if I'm wrong) that the 'scientific' thing for America to do was to bomb Russia back into the stone age before they got nuclear missiles, and just hope that the effects weren't devastating to us. I would agrue that science and objectivity have to give way to ethics and morality.
In the case of GNU/Linux, of course, we're lucky that the objective and the moral Right Things to do coincide.
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I'll disagree with Tim on this point: the GPL protects the community, not just the users.
Remember that in a vibrant open-source project, the distinction between the "users" and the "developers" is blurred. After all, developers also use, and the users often take up the developer's mantle when their use is hampered.
All of the best open-source projects can no longer be attributed to one man or one small group. For this reason, it's hard to identify "the developer" most of the time. In those cases where there is an exception, it seems to be due either to a very strong leader (Linus, for example) or to a very quiet project with few contributors.
Thus, the question of who "owns" the code (which Tim puts such stake in) is impossible to answer without looking at the community as a whole. In this situation, the GPL is best at preserving the community's best interests.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that I was under some obligation to respond to everything you said...
On top of that...while I can understand pragmatism in software (it can be easily argued that there are more important moral questions, however much it may impact my life), I often get the feeling that this is part and parcel of a larger attitude of pure pragmatism. I could be wrong of course, it's difficult to judge people based on 5-line posts on /. or O'Reilly's site. ;-) But if you don't understand why some sort of ethical basis for action is necessary..then I repeat my comment: I'm sorry.
Anytime you want to be less patronizing, I'll be waiting. First off, as you said, there are FAR more pressing issues than deciding the morality of software choices. But you seem to be saying that there are ethics involved when choosing software, and I think you are on crack for saying that. Sounds like RMS in his more zealous moments... There are no ethics involved when choosing software, whether free, open, or proprietary. None. It is not immoral to buy some proprietary software when it is heads and tails above the rest. It is not immoral to buy some proprietary software when it is the worst of the software (that's just stupid.) There just aren't any morals involved whatsoever. It's fscking software, not a debate on the morals of porn.
And you *totally* missed my point about users vs creators. The GPL is an assertion of the rights of the creator of a piece of software to ensure that it is used in the way he or she intended. And even in the mindset that this is a moral issue, no-one, even RMS, is going to come around and *force* you to GPL your software (except for some very misguided people)--persuade, argue, cajole, perhaps.
If the GPL is so damned free, and so good, can I, as a creator of a piece of software, remove the software that I originally placed under GPL if I decided to sell it later on? No you say? Not too free then, is it. Does the GPL allow me to sell my software at all (beyond the price of the medium of distribution)? What? No again? I don't really see how it is protecting my rights then...
The point of the article is that /dev/zero is not good enough, since it's possible to read what's "underneath" the zeros if you have the right equipment. Writing pseudorandom data is slightly better, and writing multiple passes of random data is even better. However, as someone else once said, the only truely secure deletion method is a smelter. :-)
I have to hand it to you, Bruce, you shoved some character there. Of course, I kind of thought the problem was evident pretty early on, but still, better late than never.
Good to see you're back to writing code. I bet ESR hasn't been doing all that much of that lately.
--Joakim Ziegler
Too bad his position is proven to be what we feared it was. "I fail to see the moral dimension" means that he has no morals in these issues. "A matter of science" is simply misleading. Science has very strong ethical guidelines, first of al, and secondly, it's mostly done for the furtherment of mankind in general, not to (for instance) sell a lot of books about UN*X administration.
Also, I resent the reference to RMS' position as religious. It's not religious, it's moral and ethical, and it's also consistent and well thought-through. Of course Tim doesn't want RMS to be right, Tim gets all his profits from Intellectual "property" monging, and RMS is staunchly anti-IP, and very good at pointing out why IP is an artificial restriction of people's rights, and has little to do with physical property laws.
So, Tim has an agenda, and it's all about money. RMS has an agenda too, and it's all about the freedom of the users. You choose which side you're on.
--Joakim Ziegler
The marketplace is a wonderful, Darwinian model. Let products, services, etc. flourish. Only the best ones will survive.
Keep in mind that best can mean a lot of things. WordPerfect has always been a crappy word processor. Yet it had the best customer support and that made it the best-selling program in its class until Microsoft came up with a better one.
Eugene
Your mind is your only judge of truth--and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. -- Ayn Rand
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
since it seemed to be a good way to make the idea of free software more palatable to the media and to timid corporate entities.
But now I'm starting to swing back in the other direction, because people are becoming fixated on "zero-cost", forgetting about the idea of being able to control your computing environment.
Should write an essay about this...
Capitalism is an ideology just as is socialism or many of the other *isms. In the US this ideology is so deeply ingrained that most people mistake it for an objective world-view. It certainly is nothing more one of the many ideologies.
When you read or hear the phrase,
"Let the marketplace decide."
substitute the phrase,
"Let the marketing department with the biggest budget decide for you and I."
No thanks!
I value freedom over short-term profits.
Cheers,
smithdog
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So, I wrote two more GPL-ed programs last week. You'll find them in the "contrib" directory of the next releases of Mailman and Webalizer. How many programs did Tim O'Reilly write last week?
The BSD license was originaly used because the software was paid for by the U.S. Government, out of our taxes. It made sense for everyone to be able to take that software private. It doesn't make nearly as much sense for my own work.
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I was trying to get Eric to lay off of Stallman for quite a long time, but he acted as if he wasn't really conscious that he was doing it. I tried to get Stallman on to the OSI board, the others opposed that.
I would never have started to work on Open Source if I'd understood Eric's intentions. Much of his agenda was not stated when he recruited me.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
He thinks that software should be free, even if its creators don't want it to be. (And so, for example, if you write some piece of software he likes, he thinks it is his right, and perhaps even his obligation, to clone it and make his version free.)
Is O'Reilly suggesting that Stallman is the only one who thinks we've got a right to clone other peoples' products? I don't think that's the case, because cloning, per se, is as popular among proprietary developers as among free ones. I mean, you'd have to walk an awful damn long way to find anybody at all who'd tell you you don't have a perfect right to clone somebody else's program. (All the way to Cupertino
Hmmph. Given the "And so . .
I'm not quite sure why O'Reilly has this thing going on about Stallman, anyway. [insert standard yeah-i-got-a-shelf-of-O'Reilly-books disclaimer]
-j
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Secondly, many thanks to Rob Malda (fear the taco) and Hemos for their recent decision regarding adding moderators. I am pleased I can do something to prevent the USENET effect on /. Once we got over the initial flood of ``gee, I seem to be getting the first post, where is everybody'' the amount of intelligent conversation really seems to have improved (and I'm someone who has my threshold at -99).
On to the O'Reilly article.
Some Open Source licenses, such as the Berkeley-style license used by FreeBSD, Apache, the X Window System, and much of the Internet infrastructure software--is truly free. You can do anything you like with it--including building a proprietary derivative that is not free--as long as you acknowledge the copyright of the creator.
The UC Berkeley licence has a serious problem: it dictates to your marketing strategy. If you intend to follow the licence, you must have a plug to Berkeley in every commercial. Of course, I don't think very many people do; when was the last time you saw it in a Sun commercial? However, I find the BSD licence disturbing because I believe in doing everything as morally and as ethically as possible, and the BSD licence makes that difficult.
Why do people like O'Reilly like licences such as the MIT licence (or the BSD/Apache/FreeType/&c. licence) which allow you to take formerly open code and turn it into something proprietary and closed? Because it lets you profit from other people's work. Sun Microsystems had a free operating system written for them by UC's bright and young students when they coopted 4BSD for SunOS 2. What did we get back from it? Nothing. In effect, companies, including O'Reilly's organisation, get something for nothing with such licences.
The GPL prevents this sort of abuse. You're free to take the code, compile it, and sell binaries, but you may not restrict other people's freedom to use what is my code! Likewise, I won't tell you what to do: you don't have to submit patches to me, and you don't even have to follow my dictums for advertising strategy.
There is also a pragmatic reason (which appears to be O'Reilly's modus operandi for making decisions) for using GNU style licences: it prevents the kind of code forking that's happend with BSD software. Compare SunOS 4.1 and NetBSD: they're quite different and incompatible. The only code fork of which I can think of that has happened to GPLd software is the emacs and xemacs split, which was more due to the different needs of a true X11-based editor and a grid-based text editor.
Be wary of those who want you to give them something for nothing but who do not give anything back in return. Licence your code with the GPL and rest assured no-one can steal your work or limit your freedom.
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
The marketplace has given us no ideas, no beauty, no creation. People have given us those things--often in disregard of the marketplace which can offer only material rewards.
I cannot agree more. People have made a god out of the supposed invisible hand of the marketplace. What does opensource have to do with the marketplace? If anything, the marketplace wants GNU copylefted software, not licences that leave you and your code splayed open for anyone to come and take a piece of your software for their own purposes without giving anything back in return. There is much more GPL'd software than MIT-style (or BSD-style, &c.) licenced software.
The marketplace has spoken. Bow down and do as it speaks. You shall GPL your software. You shall not use BSD licences. The Marketplace Has Spoken.
If anything, I see a trend away from competitive marketplaces: every large corporation seems to love a lack of competition--witness the recent surge in mergers even though 3 out of 4 mergers by one analyst's analysis are bad for stockholders, the corporation, their employees, and their customers (see recent article in the Journal).
In a true ``marketplace'', humans should be trafficked like anything else: children bought and sold and slaves available on the open market. After all, that's what people want! Cheap labor is important!
I do almost all of what I do because I believe it is right--not because I believe it will let me make lots of money or because I believe it will give me an advantage to gain earthly benefit.
Probably the largest financial transfer in the world--that of parents to their children--takes place outside of the marketplace and is governed only by the law of love. After all, there's no compelling financial interest to feed children, provide them a safe home, spend lots of time with the, give them a good education. &c. Why bother? Think about how much more money we could make if we all stopped reproducing!
I am simply glad there are people like Stallman who realise money is not all there is, and is not even related to happiness.
Cheers,
Joshua.
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
Yes, that's true, except that in theory, even if you overwrite as you describe, there is enough residual magnetetic information on the disk that someone who is really determined can still get the information off of it.
/dev/random would be better. Using shred is best. You may want to note that there are actually government standards for erasing sensitive data that programs like shred will often try to meet.
Someone like Drivesavers might be able to do that.
Using something like
tim oriely begins:
First off, I think that Richard thinks I differ
from him more than I do.
How could they differ more - the rest of the article goes on to talk only about the effiency of the open source development model, which RMS attached (quite well) in his critique of the apsl. i think this is just more of the redifining the question to get the answer you want.
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