You are positing that we are all actively trying to hurt people (as opposed to just being wrong.) So the GPL destroys freedom, riiiiiggghhhttt.... *PL0NK!*
The best counter-argument to that that I can think of is that it is only a matter of degree; the freedom to study, redistribute (etc) software is less important than the freedom not to be beaten to death by government clowns, say, but that does not mean that the software freedoms are not, in themselves, important.
I think that you've successfully summed it up right there. To most of these people, the freedoms given up by using proprietary software are no different then the freedoms given up when signing a mortgage, or a binding legal contract, or giving up rights to a pile of wheat that you farmed.
Yes I think there's a lot in that; it's a point that needs careful communication. The 'car-with-the-bonnet-welded-shut' and 'right to read' analogies are good ones.
Whoop! A somewhat thoughtful response, thanks in advance...
What users want is only partially relevant. I as the creator of the software get to decide the conditions of its use. If you don't want to go along with my conditions, you don't have to use my product. If my software is so good that people are willing to pay me every time they use it, then they should have the right to do so. And if so, then I should have the right to ask for that. If nobody's willing to pay, I'll just do something else. And I have to ask, what's wrong with me benefitting from the products I create?
Firstly, I don't dispute your right to release, or not, your own work under whatever license you see fit. There is nothing wrong with you benefitting from your work (sw you write, whatever.) What I think is wrong[A] is releasing non-Free software
[A] I think it is wrong not in the way that (say) murder is wrong, but in the way that (say) being a really mean and anti-social, but completely legal, Landlord is wrong. RMS uses the term 'anti-social' which is a much less provocative term than 'evil' or 'wrong'. A lot of the flame seems to be triggered by those words... I think this is one specific aspect of the argument that I need to think about in more detail, so thanks! Namely, whereabouts on the scale of genocide - not doing the washing up does 'writing non-Free SW' come?
I personally think it's far enough along the scale that it merits taking action in my life to avoid (a) doing Bad myself, and (b) assisting others in doing Bad Things (eg., supporting proprietary SW and it's use.) Hmmmm... food for thought!
Fundamentally, I see this as an issue of property rights. When I've worked hard (and invested in other ways, too) to produce something, I should have ownership of it. If someone wants to pay the asking price, I'll be willing to sell it. If nobody wants to pay that price, then maybe I'll license it for specific uses. Over time, perhaps I'll get what I want out of it that way. If it makes me fabulously wealthy, then I'll consider giving some of that back (what I earned) in the form of free software. Note I said giving. Giving is voluntary on the part of the property owner.
I agree with all this (that you have the right to do as you describe, and that giving is voluntary.)
If there's no property right, what is the motivation for people to create? [...]
Your question is moot. If there was no such motivation, the enormous and rapidly growing quantity (let alone quality arguments) of FSW would not exist. But it does.
I may, in my spare time, contribute to the FOSS community. But I'll do so out of the abundance that I have earned elsewhere. It would be generosity, not some ethical requirement. If I don't have any abundance, there won't be much left to give. My family comes first.
Right, and if you did contribute I would be suitably grateful (and in the right circumstances would pay for the SW, or services around it, if I find it useful.) So the question is then, "At what point between your family's survival, and point (x)('abundance'), would you feel able to say 'I now have enuogh surplus resources (time, money, whatever) that I now feel able to contribute some Free SW to the world'? So now we're just debating the point along that scale that we would each feel able to contribute! It's only a matter of where our different personalities / situations / environments lead us to set that point. Personally I don't have a family to support, and so it was perhaps less of a risk for me to make a conscious decision to work towards Free SW use both personally and professionally. Along the way I wrote Perl under IIS on NT, then under Apache on NT, then Apache on Linux. I was unemployed a couple of times after the boom, then again I went from GBP17000 to GBP30000 inside a year along the way, too. Of course it's not practical to suddenly decide one day "I'm going to quit my job, install Linux on all
Your claim that anyone who writes "non-free" software is somehow a misguided minion of evil is about as bad as it gets in this little oasis of stupidity-laced techno-activism.
So, how long have you been a Slashdot fan?
You might consider your "freedom" to look at my source code a fundamental one. That's fine.
With your permission, of course. I don't deny anyone's right to release their work under whatever license they choose
However, your freedom to call me an evil construct lacking a soul begins and ends with my right to write software and sell it for the highest price the market will bear. That is my freedom.
Steady on, I never called anyone any such thing. (Tangent - I don't believe in such a thing as a 'soul' but that's a flamewar for another day.) I agree that you have the freedom to write & sell whatever, however you like.
The very idea that you can stand there and equate your concept of freedom as applied to computer software to things like freedom of speech, freedom of association or the freedom to make a religious choice (ideas that people have fought and died for over the centuries) is insulting at best and retarded at worst.
So you say, but why do you think this? That is my (original) question. You're just emphatically repeating a statement about your opinion, which I already know, without explaining at which step of the chain of reasoning you and I part company.
But please don't insult my intelligence by implying I'm going to burn in hell (and yes, that's how you sound) because I happen to sell software for $19.99 a pop.
Hmmm, how I sound to you perhaps. The word 'issues' pops unbidden to mind.
You and everyone else (Stallman included) in the "join us or die" crowd sound so damn petulant and ridiculous preaching the evils of Microsoft (as if they were the only company in the planet that produces commercial software), quoting Ghandi and asking everyone "how evil do you feel today?" as if being able to type "make & make install" into a terminal somehow granted you a masters in philosophy, theology and politics. No shit, sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Your justification for yuor actions seems to be based on the criteria of what will make yuo most comfortable plus the utility of the proprietary software you've written being lost.
If your software fulfills a need, someone somewhere probably HAS already written a Free version of it. Secondly, you don't KNOW that you couldn't make a living from Free software. FWIW I'm about to start a new job paying approx. $65000 US equivalent (at current cable exchange rates, anyway:) where I'll be using, and hopefully contributing to, Free software such as Nessus, Nmap, and snort (and the GNU tools, the Linmux and BSD kernels, Firefox and Thunderbird, KDE, Gnome, etc etc.) Lots of other people in my field (network security) gain salaries (and their employers get the use of) the same Free software.
You ask me to refute the assertion that 'it is perfectly understandable that "intelligent, informed people" value their own happiness enough to give away some of their morality and write non-free, but "enjoyable to write" software.'. I can't refute it because it's demonstrably true that some (lots!) of people prefer to give away some of their Freedom. I'm not 100% sure that they do give away their morality, though, because SOME (a small fraction, possibly, but SOME) proprietary SW authors have actually thought about the moral issues and come to a different conclusion from me. I have a lot more respect for those who have an honest disagreement with me than those who have stuck with the first troll/strawman anti-Free SW argument they've come across and blindly use such to justify what is often basically laziness and fear of the unKnown. (Yes, I started in professional IT writing VB for, and supporting, Win 3.1. Getting from there to here (this comment comes courtesy of 100% Free SW) was a long slow process with a lot of hard work along the way. Luckily for me I enjoy learning new stuff,.. of course, I would still have had to learn newer VB and Windows tools, versions, database technologies etc etc that MS fancied flogging every second year had I stuck with that career path. And I only needed to learn Perl once (if that;)
I don't agree with your {current_situation} block BTW. You could certainly continue making a living whilst moving away from non-Free working practices. Come to that there are a lot of missing items from {ASSUMPTIONS}, #INCLUDE existingSociety.h perhaps...
I'm trying to help a Mac-using friend who's in China for a few months to get access to various blocked sites (Google Groups & the BBC, f'rinstance). He has a copy of the tor source & will be trying his first ever compile shortly I hope - he's a Mac head tho' so is perhaps a little wary of the CLI.) I wonder whether the actual tor proxy ports migth be blocked & also how the reported use of 'IPv9' (RFC 2xxx) might affect things. I know he's got a 10.x.x.x IP from the NSP,..
I've a friend who's in Beijing at present & would like to see the BBC, I'd be grateful for any mor info on this technique? (He has a copy of tor & is screwing up his courage to let me talk him thru' compiling something on his Mac for the first time ever;)
The difficulty you're having stems from the fact that you're trying to force us [...] into your mindset.
That seems unlikely, as I am not trying to force anyone to think anything.
The difference is we don't share your beliefs.
Well, DUH,.. re-read my comment please
I don't believe that it is your right or freedom to have unmitigated access to software I write.
Neither do I, re-read my comment
I don't believe that you have some vague "freedom" that is violated by proprietary software.
Here is the set of things I can do with Free software:
(use, examine, modify, redistribute).
Here is the set of things I can do with proprietary software:
(use (in a limited way))
Clearly therefore proprietary software allows me less freedom. Do you dispute this reasoning? Please show your working.
Conversely, I believe that I have the freedom to do whatever I wish with software I write. If that involves keeping it closed-source and selling it, then that is my freedom. If you do not like the fact that my software is closed-source, then you are free to not buy my software.
Well DUH, I agree with all this, please re-read my comment.
You say that we have not given you any good reason as to how we can morally develop proprietary software. I say you haven't given me any reason as to why writing proprietary software is immoral.
Removing freedom is Bad;proprietary software allows users less freedom than Free software; therefore, proprietary software (and it's support, production etc) is Bad. Quod est demonstrandum. Do you disgree with this reasoning? Why, and at which point do you disagree?
Yes, I have read RMS's papers. No, I don't agree with his reasoning.
I think we've established that already, could you explain why?
As another poster said, that FSM advocates somehow elevates software, which I view in nearly the same manner as the computer components I buy, to some human right... frankly it baffles me. I've tried to understand where I'm comming from, but it makes about as much sense as you screaming in a department store that you have a "right" to the latest TV, and that you shouldn't be forced to pay for it.
RMS and the philosophy pages on FSF.org clearly explain the difference between physical goods (TVs, hardware components) and the abstract representation of mathematical structures (programs). Which part of their explanation baffles you? It seems perfectly straightforward to me.
BTW when you say "I've tried to understand where I'm comming from, but it makes about as much sense as..." I'm guessing you meant something different.
Of course I respect your rights to license your software however you think best. My question is how people reconcile doing so with RMS' arguments about freedom.
If yuo re-read my comment you will see that I specifically say software Freedom is LESS significant than state torture (as an example) and of course child porn etc are up the same end of the scale.
Have I been poor before? I'll bet I've been a damn sight poorer than you ever were; I'm talking suburban garden dug up for vegetables, walking to school to save petrol, chocolate only at Easter... *cue violins*
I am not saying we shouldn't have principles. We should have principles. But we all have RESPONSBILITIES.
Right, and my QUESTION was, how do you draw the line? Perhaps next time you'll read and think a bit before hitting SUBMIT.
I'm really trying to avoid that conclusion because it would mean that the majority of programmers are actively amoral, in the sense of not caring what they do in order to feed their family (~ maqke lots of money). I'd much rather believe people write proprietary software because they are lazy (haven't bothered thinking about or researching these issues to any extent) ignorant (genuinely do not realise that there is any other way to do it.) Besides which, if I'd posted saying 'authors of proprietary software are ruthlessly mercenary, they realise what they're doing is wrong but just don't care" would be moderated '-1 Troll' PDQ...
On the recent Slashdot story about an interview with the MS people who worked on SP2, I for suggestions about asked how such presumably intelligent, well-intentioned & sincere people dealt with the cognitive dissonance of working on non-Free software. (Just lookin back to get the HREF I'm somewhat disturbed by the amount of time I must have put into all that lot.../me wonders what I'm getting into this time:) Obviously Microsoft developers are at one of the most extreme opposite ends of the spectrum from RMS, the FSF, and anyone releasing GPL'd software, but I think the question applies to anyone with enough technical understanding to grok the issue. How (to put it somewhat flamebaitily;) do they sleep at night?
Amongst the flames & trolls there were some detailed & reasonably thoughtful responses (including from someone who's got as 'Foe' - hi spectecjr:) - & the only argument I heard that stood up as not obvious Straw men, irrelevant, or based on a misunderstanding, was
that some developers do not consider the four freedoms described by the GNU philosophy page to be fundamental freedoms.
The best counter-argument to that that I can think of is that it is only a matter of degree; the freedom to study, redistribute (etc) software is less important than the freedom not to be beaten to death by government clowns, say, but that does not mean that the software freedoms are not, in themselves, important.
I have a bad feeling I'm getting into areas dealt with my philosophy-101; can anyone else (a) advance sensible reasons why intelligent, informed people might produce non-Free s/w, and (b) refutations of those reasons.
Please, no confusion with 'Open source' development advantages or disadvantages - I'm specifically interested in the purely MORAL arguments made by RMS.
Arguments such as 'my family has to eat', 'how would programs like Photoshop be developed if it was Free?', "I am free to distribute software I write under any license I like", etc etc, are missing the point. I'd hate to find myself deciding that the reason is that proprietary developers consciously dismiss the moral / ethical issues as uninteresting or irrelevant. I know there are a lot of people here working on proprietary as well as Free s/w and you can't all be trolls:)
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 1
But where do you (pesonally, or anmy other individual) draw the line? Presumably social standards are just a consensus of where otehrs draw the line. Is there evn such a thing as 'evil' or is it justa word meaning 'very, very, very disagreeable indeed'?
Why am I starting to sound like a first year philosophy student? Perhaps I picked the wrong year to quit smoking;)
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
on
New and Improved SETI
·
· Score: 1
So is the evil that Gates does, and that Allen did before he cashed out of Microsoft, outweighed by the good works done with some of the money thus acquired? Would robbing old ladies to fund SETI (or cancer research, or development aid, or...) be justified? What about robbing banks? With guns - or via fraud?
As several people pointed out during the recent elections, the lesser of two evils is still evil.
As is obvious from a glance at TFA, an unfortunate misattribution makes it appear that the submitter has plaigarised the Space.com story (obviously they didn't, if they had they'd have linked to a different story...)
I have a bad feeling that this is the point our so-far civil debate breaks down into "I'm right!" "No, you're not - *I'm* right!"
>>> You're not dealing with an obsolete profession in this case - the
>>> profession will still be there, but the market will not be willing to
>>> pay for that work.
>>>
>>
>> Seems to me that's a very good working definition of obsolete.
>
> Not really, because people still want that software - they're just
> becoming less and less willing to pay for it because Free Software has
> shown that there are thousands of 'marks' willing to give away their
> work for free.
>
Disclaimer - New Year's Day alcohol consumption is making my thought
processes foggier than usual. Thank you for bearing with me..
But that IS what 'obsolete' means. Lower, or non-existent, demand.
At the risk of degenerating into an argument about
definitions... Adam Smith anthropomorphised the apparently purposeful
action of markets as an 'invisble hand'. The hand does not care
why prices of software have fallen, or why consumer's propensity to
pay for particular goods or services has fallen. Lower prices may be
part of the reason consumers are willing to pay less for proprietary
software; or, it may be because of eth 'Open Source' arguments (better
development methodology, many eyes,.. quicker development/release
cycles, and so on). Partly it may be because the RMS / FSF / GNU
argument about the importance of FSW are sinking in. The breakdown of
motivations is a matter for marketing people and those working on
doctoral theses on the subject. At the end of the day, though, it
doesn't matter.
You assert that goods or services that become available for free
(beer) are being removed from market forces is profoundly and
fundamentally wrong. You may as well argue that the symbol 'zero' has
no place in mathematics. The precise reason why the market price of a
given product/service falls is of secondary importance.
> Take a look at this, for example...
>
> Blog post re: google's pleas for new database software
>
That article (which I read) is about 'Open Source' software. As I've
explained many times on this thread, I'm talking about Free
software. The OSS crowd argue that we should use it because it's
better quality. FSW advocates argue we should use IT because of those
moral issues.
>> FS is not just 'proprietary SW that is given away" - it is a different
>> product. Users want software that they aare free to use as they want.
>>
> Actually, they mostly just want software. Developers want software
> they can modify - and they're a special, separate class of user - not
> a general case.
>
You have already accepted that users will tend over time towards
free (beer) SW, which happens to mean Free (libre) SW. I'm not clear
what your point is here. (Mmmm... Laphroig single malt:) If the two
classes of SW were the same, there would be no way to distinguish
between them. And the proprietary firms would be safe, and no-one
would use FSW.
But they do.
>> Are you suggesting that FS is (or should be) illegal?! Shurely shome
>> mishtake..!
>
> No, I'm arguing that you can't claim that "the market has decided"
> when the price point for your product is free. That puts you outside
> of the bounds of the normal operation of the market -
Well, sorry, but I think you're fundamentally mistaken
there. Mechanisms that lower prices over time are a fundamental aspect
of the functioning of markets. Arguing about the motivations of the
developers is irrelevant.
> in a scenario officially known as predatory pricing, which is
>
HTML broken (Konquerer and Firefox, Mandrake GNU/Linux 10.1). And guess what? It _almost_ works in links! Except for the only bit I want to see, the time lapse stuff.
The Flash 'works' (FAGV of 'works') but (a) I'm on dialup, (b) I want a local copy and you can't get to the time lapse bits except through a separate falsh frontend - so you can't even 'view source' and run Javascript thru' one's mental parser to work out an HREF to wget.
Yep, that all rings true. A huge and long-term process of education is
needed to get typical home users to understand these issues. I suspect
most corporates fall into the category of 'pragmatic useage of
whatever provides most direct benefit for the firm', with a fair
amount of Microsoft inspired FUD beliefs about why OpenOffice.org /
Mozilla / Linux etc won't work in their particular environment.
The case of the Microsoft developers is what puzzles me, though. They
obviously know -of- FSW and presumably have a reasonable grasp of the
arguments. *shrug*.
Your argument seems to be that Adobe can make more money selling proprietary Photoshop than they could from a Free Photoshop. That may very well be correct. However (1) that doesn't affect the moral/ethical argument about the right/wrong -ness FSW; (2) So what? Ethics are not there to make life convenient; the non-existence of Photoshop does not falsify the argument that Free software is ethically superior to proprietary; (3) markets are not run by companies, but by consumers. Demand leads supply. If (when!) 80% of Photoshop's end users decide that they can get by with the features offered by a Free alternative, the market for proprietary Photoshop will be significantly reduced. I don't know much about graphics software but those that do tell me Photoshop is much better than the Gimp in terms of features, so this point may not be reached for some time.
Thus there will always be proprietry software, and I for one like it that way.
Do you really mean that if a program with equivalent functionality as Photoshop was available under a Free license, you would prefer to use the closed alternative with all the disadvantages that entails? (no source, dependence on the vendor for pathces, fixes & maintainance, all the other things the Open Source people will tell you about...)
if no-one could afford to make a living with FS, who the hell is developing it?
People with more free time than sense, typically. People who work other jobs to make ends meet.
I'm doing that right now, trying to set up my own company. It's not an efficient way to do anything - by the time you finish your day job, you've typically been wrung dry for the day.
Man if you spend as much time on these posts as I am, I'm not surprised you're wrung dry!:) Asserting that people who write FS have more free time than sense seems like just abuse, though. If it's so inefficient a method, FS would be poor quality, years behind the times, slow to fix bugs etc. Actually, ven if this were the case, the ethical argument still stands. (See that other story - yesterday?- about the difference between 'Open Souce' and 'Free'.)
You're not dealing with an obsolete profession in this case - the profession will still be there, but the market will not be willing to pay for that work.
Seems to me that's a very good working definition of obsolete. FS is not just 'proprietary SW that is given away" - it is a different product. Users want software that they aare free to use as they want.
If you really insist that "market forces" are at work, you might want to look up "predatory pricing", which is illegal. Either you operate within the market - and its laws - or you don't.
Are you suggesting that FS is (or should be) illegal?! Shurely shome mishtake..!
The BBC came through yet again with an excellent documentary on the free journal publishing movement - info here http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/publishorbedam ned.shtml. Hit the 'science' link on the left-hand-side navbar for details of the amazing breadth and depth of science coverage on Radio 4. (To b fair Radio 4 has far better coverage of anything factual than any of the other four main radio stations or main two TV channels. though BBC 3 and BBC 4 TV occaisionally have something good and BBC2's long-running Horizon series is still getting interviews with real, working scientists as well as 'science journalists',even tho' it has tended to get a bit sensationalist of late.
To listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/publish.r am 'Listen Again' service will happily send a RealAudio stream of the programme which mplayer --dump-stream will happily rip for you. (The Beeb say they can only offer streaming media because their rights agreements don't cover other formats:/ ) No, I'm not connected with Aunty Beeb in any way, I'm just a Radio 4 junkie:)
I don't recall the authors of most GPL'd software working for Red Hat, Mandrake, FreeBSD, whatever... So they're certainly not getting paid.
RedHat, Mandrake and the other distro companies are not the only people employing FS hackers. They're probably a minority in fact; apart from other IT companies such as IBM, Logica, KPMG,.. there are a lot of people paid to (eg) do security work who submit patches to Nessus or Nmap. No, I don't have any figures to back this up - but just check the mail addresses on the CVS commit logs of any reasonably well-known & usde project. Anyway, (a) if no-one could afford to make a living with FS, who the hell is developing it? (b) no-one has a god-given right to make a living in a particular professsion (c) it's irrelevant to the ethical & moral issues of free vs proprietary sw anyway.
RedHat AFAIK are 100% free, in the Debian style. There's still plenty of non-free sw about, some of it runs on GNU/Linux and/or BSD, what's your point?
So selling proprietary software is equivalent to "extorting money from the marketplace" to you?
Yes.
> If the authors did not want others using their work they would
>have released it under a different license.
You, however, are advocating that it is unethical and wrong to release proprietary software. Therefore my statement holds - because you're seeking a world where the authors of the real core of the work are giving a free-ride to people like you, who sell support or customize their hard work.
I'm not advocating the use of force to compell everyone to do so. Market forces will take care of it in the end. If the market won't support crippled software, that doesn't mean vendors aren't free to carry on trying to con people into buying their proprietary snakeoil. Nothing compels car manufacturers to allow owners to resell their vehicles, or lift the bonnet and make with the monkey wrenches. (Audi are trying bonnetless cars now I believe, let's hope the market tells them to get knotted.) The force of gravity does not remove people freedom to try flying from the 10th floor windows.
> I have no knowledge of RMS' financial status
>
Perhaps you should do some research. The info is out there on the
web. Look at the grants and awards he's been given - he has millions
of dollars.
Why should I research something that I don't give a fuck about? I'm
happy to take your word for it, but I couldn't care less except
insofar as it demonstrates that advocating / using Free software isn't
necessarily a one-way ticket to the workhouse. RMS' finances are
irrelevant to the question of ethical or moral aspects of proprietary
s/w.
>> but he certainly doesn't have tenure
>>
> If you reread my post you'll see that I said that he had tenure.
Ah, I see, my mistake - sorry. Still, as above - not relevant.
he *resigned* from MIT to work found the FSF/GNU. And what about
Linus, Larry Wall, Guido van Rossum, Monty Widenius, Miguel de Icaza -
of course for all these famous names I can think of there are tens of
thousands if not more 'ordinary joes'.
None of those are claiming that everyone should give away their work
for free, or that everyone should release their work under the GPL.
I also think you'll find that "tens of thousands if not more" is an
overexaggeration.
*sigh* the numbers really don't matter. In fact, even if *no-one*
could make a living from F.S., that wouldn't change the moral /
ethical argument. Ethics are not things designed to enable one to make
a living. They are tools for deciding what one considers to be right
or wrong.
>>You are correct, but that doesn't affect my falsification of your
>>statement that talented people don't work for free.
>>
> Sure it does. You just gave two false examples, which don't prove me
> wrong.
You've lost me. You said talented people don't work for free. I
pointed out RMS, you assert he's a zillionaire. But no-one paid RMS to
write emacs, gcc, or the GNU binutils (however much he's worth now)
and I've also pointed out a few of the better known F.S. projects out
there whose developers don't appear to be starving or short of
computers and bandwidth weith which to work. Therefore (unless you are
arguing that all these people are talentless, which I assume you're
not) your statement is incorrect.
Granted some sizeable proportion of the projects on Sourceforge are
crap *technically* some of those developers are fall into the set of
talented people AND the set of people who aren't paid to do their
work.
This is all irrelevant anyway (I shouldn't have let you lead me
down this tangent!) because (a) it is not neccessary to be paid to do
the right thing, and (b) demonstrably, people ARE paid to work on / with F.S.
Not to mention that you're
giving a tiny number of invalid specific examples in support of a
general-case argument - which is known as "Hasty Generalization" if
you're looking at the list of logical fallacies.
Touche;) see comment about tangent above... whilst we're spotting
fallacies, I fail to see the relevance of being paid or not to the
question of whether it is right or wrong to work on proprietary
software.
>> However (a) no-one is suggesting that software authors shouldn't get
>> paid - how do you think the tens or hundreds of thousands of free
>> software projects are supported?
>>
> Yes, you are.
No, I am not! You are claiming that what I'm saying IMPLIES
that devs shouldn't be paid, which is not the same thing. You are in
fact seeking to put words in my mouth. Let's see whether you are
correct in this claim...
> You're suggesting that programmers develop software
> which they are able to sell *once*.
No, _you_ are claiming that F.S. can only be sold once. I do not agree.
Proprietary software does NOT reduce the amount of freedom in the world. I see no such thing as "the freedom to copy and modify software someone else wrote" recognized as a human right by any world government.
It will be sad day when only the freedoms that count are those recognised by governments! The right to turn cartwheels around my house, or paint myself blue and sing extracts from 'The Magic Flute' whilst sitting on a purple sofa, or the right to put my underpants on my head and stick pencils up my nose, are not 'recognised as freedoms' by any government; but if you tried removed my freedom to do so, I would obviously be less free.
Sorry, but you're going to have to come up with better reasoning as to why you think this reduces your freedoms. Unless you're going to apply the same logic to murder being illegal - is that "reducing your freedom" and as such is wrong too?
I don't see where the logic falls down, please demonstrate. Someone who has less freedoms is de facto 'less free'. Freedom good. Therefore Free software Good. Therefore non-Free software Bad.
The freedom to murder is not comparable, as no-one grants permission to another party to murder them. (Actually there was that interesting case in Germany where a very strange man granted another party the right to kill him in some weird cannabalistic sex ritual; that probably counts as assisted suicide, and in fact I think the law has some interesting problems coming to terms with such a highly unusual situation. But this is neither here nor there.)
Let me repeat myself again, I do not advocate forcing all software to be free. I do not advocate infringing copyright by breaking the license of non-Free software. I advocate the use, development and distribution of Free software.
Working for a proprietry software shop reduces the freedom in the world? Please explain.
Each unit of proprietary software distributed reduces the amount of freedom in the world, because the user of that software does not have the freedom to use, examine, modify, redistribute it freely. (This is true for the period of time that they are using that software. Before they had that software, they were doing other things with their time, activities that presumably allowed them those freedoms. If they were previously using another bit of non-free software, you just extend the chain back in time to the point they first used proprietary software.) eg if they previously were a lazy student sitting at home watching TV, they had the right to take that TV to bits, work out how it functions, develop their own frobnositcator, and sell on the TV with their frobnosticator included, or set up business selling their own, Frobnosticator-Enhanced!Therefore, aiding in the production, distribution,.. of proprietary software reduces the amount of freedom in the world.
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You are positing that we are all actively trying to hurt people (as opposed to just being wrong.) So the GPL destroys freedom, riiiiiggghhhttt.... *PL0NK!*
*sigh* yet another poster violently agreeing with me. I don't dispute any of this and none of it addresses my question.
Yes I think there's a lot in that; it's a point that needs careful communication. The 'car-with-the-bonnet-welded-shut' and 'right to read' analogies are good ones.
Firstly, I don't dispute your right to release, or not, your own work under whatever license you see fit. There is nothing wrong with you benefitting from your work (sw you write, whatever.) What I think is wrong[A] is releasing non-Free software [A] I think it is wrong not in the way that (say) murder is wrong, but in the way that (say) being a really mean and anti-social, but completely legal, Landlord is wrong. RMS uses the term 'anti-social' which is a much less provocative term than 'evil' or 'wrong'. A lot of the flame seems to be triggered by those words... I think this is one specific aspect of the argument that I need to think about in more detail, so thanks! Namely, whereabouts on the scale of genocide - not doing the washing up does 'writing non-Free SW' come?
I personally think it's far enough along the scale that it merits taking action in my life to avoid (a) doing Bad myself, and (b) assisting others in doing Bad Things (eg., supporting proprietary SW and it's use.) Hmmmm... food for thought!
I agree with all this (that you have the right to do as you describe, and that giving is voluntary.)
Your question is moot. If there was no such motivation, the enormous and rapidly growing quantity (let alone quality arguments) of FSW would not exist. But it does.
Right, and if you did contribute I would be suitably grateful (and in the right circumstances would pay for the SW, or services around it, if I find it useful.) So the question is then, "At what point between your family's survival, and point (x)('abundance'), would you feel able to say 'I now have enuogh surplus resources (time, money, whatever) that I now feel able to contribute some Free SW to the world'? So now we're just debating the point along that scale that we would each feel able to contribute! It's only a matter of where our different personalities / situations / environments lead us to set that point. Personally I don't have a family to support, and so it was perhaps less of a risk for me to make a conscious decision to work towards Free SW use both personally and professionally. Along the way I wrote Perl under IIS on NT, then under Apache on NT, then Apache on Linux. I was unemployed a couple of times after the boom, then again I went from GBP17000 to GBP30000 inside a year along the way, too. Of course it's not practical to suddenly decide one day "I'm going to quit my job, install Linux on all
If your software fulfills a need, someone somewhere probably HAS already written a Free version of it. Secondly, you don't KNOW that you couldn't make a living from Free software. FWIW I'm about to start a new job paying approx. $65000 US equivalent (at current cable exchange rates, anyway :) where I'll be using, and hopefully contributing to, Free software such as Nessus, Nmap, and snort (and the GNU tools, the Linmux and BSD kernels, Firefox and Thunderbird, KDE, Gnome, etc etc.) Lots of other people in my field (network security) gain salaries (and their employers get the use of) the same Free software.
You ask me to refute the assertion that 'it is perfectly understandable that "intelligent, informed people" value their own happiness enough to give away some of their morality and write non-free, but "enjoyable to write" software.'. I can't refute it because it's demonstrably true that some (lots!) of people prefer to give away some of their Freedom. I'm not 100% sure that they do give away their morality, though, because SOME (a small fraction, possibly, but SOME) proprietary SW authors have actually thought about the moral issues and come to a different conclusion from me. I have a lot more respect for those who have an honest disagreement with me than those who have stuck with the first troll/strawman anti-Free SW argument they've come across and blindly use such to justify what is often basically laziness and fear of the unKnown. (Yes, I started in professional IT writing VB for, and supporting, Win 3.1. Getting from there to here (this comment comes courtesy of 100% Free SW) was a long slow process with a lot of hard work along the way. Luckily for me I enjoy learning new stuff,.. of course, I would still have had to learn newer VB and Windows tools, versions, database technologies etc etc that MS fancied flogging every second year had I stuck with that career path. And I only needed to learn Perl once (if that ;)
I don't agree with your {current_situation} block BTW. You could certainly continue making a living whilst moving away from non-Free working practices. Come to that there are a lot of missing items from {ASSUMPTIONS}, #INCLUDE existingSociety.h perhaps...
I'm trying to help a Mac-using friend who's in China for a few months to get access to various blocked sites (Google Groups & the BBC, f'rinstance). He has a copy of the tor source & will be trying his first ever compile shortly I hope - he's a Mac head tho' so is perhaps a little wary of the CLI.) I wonder whether the actual tor proxy ports migth be blocked & also how the reported use of 'IPv9' (RFC 2xxx) might affect things. I know he's got a 10.x.x.x IP from the NSP,..
I've a friend who's in Beijing at present & would like to see the BBC, I'd be grateful for any mor info on this technique? (He has a copy of tor & is screwing up his courage to let me talk him thru' compiling something on his Mac for the first time ever ;)
(use, examine, modify, redistribute).
Here is the set of things I can do with proprietary software:
(use (in a limited way))
Clearly therefore proprietary software allows me less freedom. Do you dispute this reasoning? Please show your working. Well DUH, I agree with all this, please re-read my comment. Removing freedom is Bad;proprietary software allows users less freedom than Free software; therefore, proprietary software (and it's support, production etc) is Bad. Quod est demonstrandum. Do you disgree with this reasoning? Why, and at which point do you disagree? I think we've established that already, could you explain why? RMS and the philosophy pages on FSF.org clearly explain the difference between physical goods (TVs, hardware components) and the abstract representation of mathematical structures (programs). Which part of their explanation baffles you? It seems perfectly straightforward to me.
BTW when you say "I've tried to understand where I'm comming from, but it makes about as much sense as..." I'm guessing you meant something different.
Of course I respect your rights to license your software however you think best. My question is how people reconcile doing so with RMS' arguments about freedom.
If yuo re-read my comment you will see that I specifically say software Freedom is LESS significant than state torture (as an example) and of course child porn etc are up the same end of the scale.
Have I been poor before? I'll bet I've been a damn sight poorer than you ever were; I'm talking suburban garden dug up for vegetables, walking to school to save petrol, chocolate only at Easter... *cue violins*
Right, and my QUESTION was, how do you draw the line? Perhaps next time you'll read and think a bit before hitting SUBMIT.I'm really trying to avoid that conclusion because it would mean that the majority of programmers are actively amoral, in the sense of not caring what they do in order to feed their family (~ maqke lots of money). I'd much rather believe people write proprietary software because they are lazy (haven't bothered thinking about or researching these issues to any extent) ignorant (genuinely do not realise that there is any other way to do it.) Besides which, if I'd posted saying 'authors of proprietary software are ruthlessly mercenary, they realise what they're doing is wrong but just don't care" would be moderated '-1 Troll' PDQ...
Amongst the flames & trolls there were some detailed & reasonably thoughtful responses (including from someone who's got as 'Foe' - hi spectecjr:) - & the only argument I heard that stood up as not obvious Straw men, irrelevant, or based on a misunderstanding, was that some developers do not consider the four freedoms described by the GNU philosophy page to be fundamental freedoms.
The best counter-argument to that that I can think of is that it is only a matter of degree; the freedom to study, redistribute (etc) software is less important than the freedom not to be beaten to death by government clowns, say, but that does not mean that the software freedoms are not, in themselves, important.
I have a bad feeling I'm getting into areas dealt with my philosophy-101; can anyone else (a) advance sensible reasons why intelligent, informed people might produce non-Free s/w, and (b) refutations of those reasons.
Please, no confusion with 'Open source' development advantages or disadvantages - I'm specifically interested in the purely MORAL arguments made by RMS.
Arguments such as 'my family has to eat', 'how would programs like Photoshop be developed if it was Free?', "I am free to distribute software I write under any license I like", etc etc, are missing the point. I'd hate to find myself deciding that the reason is that proprietary developers consciously dismiss the moral / ethical issues as uninteresting or irrelevant. I know there are a lot of people here working on proprietary as well as Free s/w and you can't all be trolls :)
Why am I starting to sound like a first year philosophy student? Perhaps I picked the wrong year to quit smoking ;)
As several people pointed out during the recent elections, the lesser of two evils is still evil.
As is obvious from a glance at TFA, an unfortunate misattribution makes it appear that the submitter has plaigarised the Space.com story (obviously they didn't, if they had they'd have linked to a different story...)
Disclaimer - New Year's Day alcohol consumption is making my thought processes foggier than usual. Thank you for bearing with me..
But that IS what 'obsolete' means. Lower, or non-existent, demand.
At the risk of degenerating into an argument about definitions... Adam Smith anthropomorphised the apparently purposeful action of markets as an 'invisble hand'. The hand does not care why prices of software have fallen, or why consumer's propensity to pay for particular goods or services has fallen. Lower prices may be part of the reason consumers are willing to pay less for proprietary software; or, it may be because of eth 'Open Source' arguments (better development methodology, many eyes,.. quicker development/release cycles, and so on). Partly it may be because the RMS / FSF / GNU argument about the importance of FSW are sinking in. The breakdown of motivations is a matter for marketing people and those working on doctoral theses on the subject. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't matter.
You assert that goods or services that become available for free (beer) are being removed from market forces is profoundly and fundamentally wrong. You may as well argue that the symbol 'zero' has no place in mathematics. The precise reason why the market price of a given product/service falls is of secondary importance.
That article (which I read) is about 'Open Source' software. As I've explained many times on this thread, I'm talking about Free software. The OSS crowd argue that we should use it because it's better quality. FSW advocates argue we should use IT because of those moral issues.
You have already accepted that users will tend over time towards free (beer) SW, which happens to mean Free (libre) SW. I'm not clear what your point is here. (Mmmm... Laphroig single malt :) If the two
classes of SW were the same, there would be no way to distinguish
between them. And the proprietary firms would be safe, and no-one
would use FSW.
But they do.
Well, sorry, but I think you're fundamentally mistaken there. Mechanisms that lower prices over time are a fundamental aspect of the functioning of markets. Arguing about the motivations of the developers is irrelevant.
The Flash 'works' (FAGV of 'works') but (a) I'm on dialup, (b) I want a local copy and you can't get to the time lapse bits except through a separate falsh frontend - so you can't even 'view source' and run Javascript thru' one's mental parser to work out an HREF to wget.
Way to go, JPL. :(
Yep, that all rings true. A huge and long-term process of education is needed to get typical home users to understand these issues. I suspect most corporates fall into the category of 'pragmatic useage of whatever provides most direct benefit for the firm', with a fair amount of Microsoft inspired FUD beliefs about why OpenOffice.org / Mozilla / Linux etc won't work in their particular environment. The case of the Microsoft developers is what puzzles me, though. They obviously know -of- FSW and presumably have a reasonable grasp of the arguments. *shrug*.
Do you really mean that if a program with equivalent functionality as Photoshop was available under a Free license, you would prefer to use the closed alternative with all the disadvantages that entails? (no source, dependence on the vendor for pathces, fixes & maintainance, all the other things the Open Source people will tell you about...)
To listen to the programme http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/rams/publish.r am 'Listen Again' service will happily send a RealAudio stream of the programme which mplayer --dump-stream will happily rip for you. (The Beeb say they can only offer streaming media because their rights agreements don't cover other formats :/ ) No, I'm not connected with Aunty Beeb in any way, I'm just a Radio 4 junkie :)
RedHat AFAIK are 100% free, in the Debian style. There's still plenty of non-free sw about, some of it runs on GNU/Linux and/or BSD, what's your point?
Yes. I'm not advocating the use of force to compell everyone to do so. Market forces will take care of it in the end. If the market won't support crippled software, that doesn't mean vendors aren't free to carry on trying to con people into buying their proprietary snakeoil. Nothing compels car manufacturers to allow owners to resell their vehicles, or lift the bonnet and make with the monkey wrenches. (Audi are trying bonnetless cars now I believe, let's hope the market tells them to get knotted.) The force of gravity does not remove people freedom to try flying from the 10th floor windows.Why should I research something that I don't give a fuck about? I'm happy to take your word for it, but I couldn't care less except insofar as it demonstrates that advocating / using Free software isn't necessarily a one-way ticket to the workhouse. RMS' finances are irrelevant to the question of ethical or moral aspects of proprietary s/w.
Ah, I see, my mistake - sorry. Still, as above - not relevant.
*sigh* the numbers really don't matter. In fact, even if *no-one* could make a living from F.S., that wouldn't change the moral / ethical argument. Ethics are not things designed to enable one to make a living. They are tools for deciding what one considers to be right or wrong.
You've lost me. You said talented people don't work for free. I pointed out RMS, you assert he's a zillionaire. But no-one paid RMS to write emacs, gcc, or the GNU binutils (however much he's worth now) and I've also pointed out a few of the better known F.S. projects out there whose developers don't appear to be starving or short of computers and bandwidth weith which to work. Therefore (unless you are arguing that all these people are talentless, which I assume you're not) your statement is incorrect.
Granted some sizeable proportion of the projects on Sourceforge are crap *technically* some of those developers are fall into the set of talented people AND the set of people who aren't paid to do their work.
This is all irrelevant anyway (I shouldn't have let you lead me down this tangent!) because (a) it is not neccessary to be paid to do the right thing, and (b) demonstrably, people ARE paid to work on / with F.S.
Touche ;) see comment about tangent above... whilst we're spotting
fallacies, I fail to see the relevance of being paid or not to the
question of whether it is right or wrong to work on proprietary
software.
No, I am not! You are claiming that what I'm saying IMPLIES that devs shouldn't be paid, which is not the same thing. You are in fact seeking to put words in my mouth. Let's see whether you are correct in this claim...
No, _you_ are claiming that F.S. can only be sold once. I do not agree.
The freedom to murder is not comparable, as no-one grants permission to another party to murder them. (Actually there was that interesting case in Germany where a very strange man granted another party the right to kill him in some weird cannabalistic sex ritual; that probably counts as assisted suicide, and in fact I think the law has some interesting problems coming to terms with such a highly unusual situation. But this is neither here nor there.) Let me repeat myself again, I do not advocate forcing all software to be free. I do not advocate infringing copyright by breaking the license of non-Free software. I advocate the use, development and distribution of Free software.
Each unit of proprietary software distributed reduces the amount of freedom in the world, because the user of that software does not have the freedom to use, examine, modify, redistribute it freely. (This is true for the period of time that they are using that software. Before they had that software, they were doing other things with their time, activities that presumably allowed them those freedoms. If they were previously using another bit of non-free software, you just extend the chain back in time to the point they first used proprietary software.) eg if they previously were a lazy student sitting at home watching TV, they had the right to take that TV to bits, work out how it functions, develop their own frobnositcator, and sell on the TV with their frobnosticator included, or set up business selling their own, Frobnosticator-Enhanced!Therefore, aiding in the production, distribution,.. of proprietary software reduces the amount of freedom in the world.