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Stallman Responds to LinuxWorld GPL Article
A reader wrote to point out that RMS has responded to a recent LinuxWorld article by Stig Hackvan concerning the GPL. Interesting debate over what free means, amongst other topics.
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I could inject some philosophical stuff here, but I'm going to be alittle more simple - So what? Even if RMS is a communist with an attitude and wants to see all software licensed under the GPL.. does it matter? I'm looking at the whole picture here and I see alot of quality software being made, used, reused, and distributed. I don't know what you call it - but I call those results.
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Stig makes some powerful and interesting arguments, beginning with an undeniable truth: GPL is more limiting on individual choice as to what can be done with a work than, say, dedication of a work to the public domain.
While it is undoubtedly true that there may be good reasons for the GPL limitations (and there are), it is undeniable that there are limits, and in this sense, GPL software is less "free" than public domain or BSD licensing.
I think the issue has never been whether one form of licensure (or non-licensing dedication to the public domain) is more "free," but rather the very question posed by Stig:
If we take freedom as an absolute good, and any infringement of freedom as a wrongful limitation, then we must turn away from all licensure, and simply dedicate our works to the public domain. To the extent we are redefining the meaning of these words to suit our case, we are engaging in tautology, marketing or sophistry.
I believe RMS has done so here. The gaffeometer pins immediately upon the occurence of phraseology such as "the official definition." Even worse, the suggestion that one should avoid legitimizing copyright by using the nominally salutory phrase "intellectual property," however legally accurate the phrase might be, proves too much, and suggests that RMS statements may have focused too much more on the form than substance.[1]
But moreover, look what happens when we start adopting the pabulum as truth. RMS' definition of freedom would surprise many of the nation's founders, notwithstanding the quotation of populist cliches:
But just a few paragraphs later, we see the true nature of GPL:
In other words, at the end of the day, "what the GPL does" is to grant an author the right to "control activities that mainly affect other people." In other words, even accepting RMS statements on their face, what GPL does is about power, and not freedom.
Any exercise of a copyright pursuant to a license is the exercise of a power to exclude others from the exercise of certain enumerated rights, subject to the limitations of the Copyright Act.
Two anticipated objections to this analysis seem apparent:
But to accept either of these responses is to abandon the strongest arguments against intellectual property generally, namely, that:
It is one thing to say that Copyleft is a necessary defense in a world of proprietary software. It is another thing to claim that the assertion of a copyleft is consistent with freedom while insisting that an assertion of a copyright is inconsistent with freedom. The very argument RMS makes in one case would defeat the argument advanced by him and others against IP rights in the first place.
In short, the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the stark "my way or no way" response of RMS and the straw man he imputed to Stig. The truth is rather more interesting. I don't know what the truth is, but I belive, at least, that Stig asked the right question:
Are the particular choices we are making "striking the right balance?"
The issue isn't freedom versus power. Neither absolute is contemplated in any of the strategies advocated here -- the question is whether we are making the right choices?
To pretend otherwise is sophistry. We should not permit ourselves, or each other, to engage in convenient redefinitions of common words to advance a cause. We begin to sound to the unconvinced like rambling, pabulum spouting, true believers. And they would be right to write us off for advancing such nonarguments.
Let us accept the weaknesses and inconsistencies of our assumptions, and argue why they are better in an imperfect world, or let us abandon the weaknesses entirely, notwithstanding such good derived therefrom.
Stig raised some very important questions. It would be a mistake to ignore them, simply because they challenge many of our core assumptions. I do not suggest by any of this that Stig is correct in his conclusions; I am inclined instead to listen and learn. There may be a great response to Stig's essay somewhere, but regrettably, that answer will not be found in RMS' statement.
[1] The suggestion that "intellectual property" (IP) is "too big a generalization" because it lumps together disparate bodies of law such as copyright and trademark is logically indefensible. Certainly the phrase is broad (despite the fact that lawyers who practice it are deemed to practice a narrow specialty), encompassing far more disparate issues, such as right to publicity, moral rights and the right to be free from unfair competition.
But the law adequately characterizes a body of intengible personal property and related rights to exclude others from the freedom to perform certain acts unrelated to any particular object. Just as the phrase "programming language" reasonably distinguishes LOGO, C and Smalltalk from, say, a European Swallow, so can the phrase intellectual property distinguishes copyright and trademark from the both of those things.
With all due respect, the "my way or the highway" view that any phrase phrase with a salutory connotation for a thing one deems "bad" is incorrect, and any pejorative phrase for a thing one deems "good" is perfect tends to prove my point that Sophistry is in the air.
Let us not try to win the "newspeak" word wars, its well past 1984. Let us instead return to the real world, and fight the real fights. There is much to be done, and this pettiness just gets in the way and discredits us all.
At one point I found myself writing a small application, the use of which many people could potentially enjoy, and it occured to me as this small application was nearing completion, that I hadn't the faintest idea what licence would be the best for it.
I pondered the concept of charging for it. Certainly it was a useful little application, with great potential, however I already had a job, was making a decent amount of money, and had no real desire to go to the lengths necessary to collect money from potential buyers.
So I looked at the open licences, at the time, there were only really two, GPL and BSD. I'd like to tell you why I chose the GPL.
The GPL has a special place in my heart, for one particular reason. I love source. I really do, source code makes me feel all gooey. It is like being handed a book by a favorite author, in HTML. You have the chance, the opportunity to to take the story, and more properly the whole concept details by the story, and mould it as you will, it is as if the author has given you a gift, the gift of allowing you to contribute as an equal to their art.
I appreciate the giving of this gift. Certainly in technical terms it is nice to have the source code, to be able to fix bugs or add little features, but more properly it is a sign that the author believes that you have something worthy of contribution, something worth knowing, and having, something that may be of use to many people.
To provide a program only in binary form objectifies the relationship between you and the author into "User" and "Developer". You use the features I provide, the author adds more features if you request. To provide a program in source form makes every user a potential developer, and more importantly, every developer a potential user. They get the other end of the stick, you may come up with a feature they hadn't thought of, but find incredibly useful, everyone ends up on the same level.
So, therein is my justification of an Open Source licence, but why the GPL? Because it represents my belief in this paradigm. If I were to release under BSD, I would be saying:
"This program is provided, open source, to solve a problem. If you are developing a proprietry app, and you have this problem, I believe I have done a good job of solving it, and you would do well to use my code"
On a technical level, this gives us all better code, whether open source or not, we end up with that problem solved better. I chose the GPL because it says:
"This program is provided, open source, as a gift to the community, I wish you to be able to contribute to this source, to improve it, and I wish that others who choose to make use of the collaborative efforts of myself and the contributers would give the same gift in return"
In simpler terms, you want my source? I want your source. Gooey feelings all around.
You can't win a fight.
not being cleanly shaven
How many executives at major corporations have facial hair? Quite a few that I can think of, and I don't watch all that closely. I don't think that having facial hair makes you some kind of wierdo. I also think that there are plenty of clean shaven people who are total wierdos (I've seen plenty of pictures of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and other certifiable nuts with clean shaven faces).
Seriously, there is little merit in judging Richard Stallman (or anyone else) strictly on appearances. You could bathe him, shave him and put him in a 3-piece blue suit, but I seriously doubt it is going to change him or his message. Would you suddenly take him seriously if he started conforming to your anal-retentive standards? Do you really believe or trust someone just because they look like they just stepped off the pages of GQ?