Miscellaneous GNU News

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*)

Comments

The destruction of Stallman an all things FSF

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?

Marketplace

[Ian Bicking]

To quote from the O'Reilly piece:

The free movement of ideas always trumps restrictions on ideas in terms of innovation and quality. So let Open Source be tested in the marketplace, not in the pulpit!

Why do people so obsess over the marketplace? It's as though they feel it embodies everything -- reality, morality, existance. It serves to disempower people. When someone believes that something is right not because it is profitable, but because it is right, they are dismissed by the idea of the marketplace. When a people try to decide what they want from their society and economy (often through the government) they are said to hinder the marketplace, as though it has some higher moral standing.

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 :)

Science?

[Daniel]

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

Well, Tim explains his position...

[Radagast]

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.

Software Darwinism (Bravo, Tim!)

[ciurana]

I fully agree with your comments. Let the marketplace, free flow of ideas, and quality speak for what works and what doesn't.

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

The destruction of Stallman and all things FSF

[AMK]

Indeed. I was all for the original creation of the term "open source",
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...

Marketplace worship is an act of religous zealot.

[smithdog]

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

Uh, what?

[Venomous Louse]

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 . . ." there, I was sort of expecting what followed to in some way follow from, or depend on, the first part. The thing is, they're quite unrelated. If Stallman clones proprietary programs, that has nothing to do with making those programs free; he's making clones of those programs free. The original developers can continue to do as they please. GCC or no GCC, a lot of people are making a lot of money selling compilers.

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

The Marketplace: the new God of the new religion.

[jerodd]

Why do people so obsess over the marketplace? It's as though they feel it embodies everything--reality, morality, existance. It serves to disempower people. When someone believes that something is right not because it is profitable, but because it is right, they are dismissed by the idea of the marketplace. When a people try to decide what they want from their society and economy (often through the government) they are said to hinder the marketplace, as though it has some higher moral standing.

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. &ampc. 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.