Ever owned a horse? No, I didn't think so. In many ways horses are easier than cars. But in some other crucial areas they are not. The maintenance on a horse is a daily chore. Don't maintain the horse correctly and it dies. Overwork the horse and it dies.
When you park you car in the garage at night do you brush it down?
Where I work we DON'T have this problem. Some minor glitches occur of course, but that's life. But we don't get crunchtime panic.
So what do we do that's different? I don't know 'cuz I haven't worked for some these chaotic outfits that everyone talks about. Here's some stuff that we do that might help however: the code base is divided into domains, then subdivided into feature sets; if the code in question isn't in your area, you generally don't work on it; only the feature lead checks in code related to a feature; bugs are assigned to individuals according to their area of expertise; if our code affects other areas or other domains, we alert people in those areas that we will be checking in, giving them enough time to freeze their view. Finally, and this may be a shock to some people, we actually have postponed handoff dates if we aren't ready to handoff.
'Because the market will bear the price' - well this shows that there isn't perfect competition. If there were then your customers could get an identical product from a competitor, who'd be happy to turn on the features for free.
That's not how it works in the real world. When your cost is $1 and your competitor is selling the identical product at $100, you do *not* undercut him by selling yours at $2. Instead you sell yours at $99. Eventually a price equilibrium will be found that balances what the customer is willing to pay and what the seller is willing to accept.
Besides which, we have three major and five or six minor competitors in our industry, and we ALL price our products the same way. So we can't be a monopoly. If one of these companies could get away with turning all features on at the entry price level, then the rest of us would have to follow suit. Some have tried this but failed. Our particular market is very resistant to lower prices. Yes it's true. In our market (like many others) a lower price implies cheaper quality.
eg one 128Mbyte memory module is pretty much identical to another at the same speed, there are no additional bells and whistles that can be offered
Have you every bought memory modules? You get what you pay for. Always buy the premium price point if you don't want to stand in line at Fry's returning it. That extra money doesn't get you any extra memory, but it does get you extra quality assurance.
Hmm, why do you not simply turn on all features by default?
The simple sarcastic answer is because the market will bear the price. But the reality is much more complicated.
a) You will never know the market demand for a feature if you don't offer it separately. Is a feature worth maintaining? Do you invest millions in development improving it? Does the customer even want it, or are they just saying yes to freebie?
b) If you offer every feature as a default then you cheapen the overall perceptions of those features. To the world outside of Slashdot, free equals cheap and you don't want your super premium system to get the monicker of "cheap".
c) Not every feature is applicable to every customer. Turning on a feature introduces a small but definite risk. This risk may translate into additional bugs, or additional pilot errors.
d) Like the IBM mainframes, these features are not necessarily software only, a few are tied to specific pieces of hardware.
e) Some features are mutually exclusive of others.
f) You want to recoup your investments in research and development. You can't do this by giving every customer the total package at the bottom price, and you will lose most of your customers if your only offering is the total package at the premium price.
and
g) Back to the simple sarcastic answer: the customer is willing to pay the price. As long as the buyer and seller can agree to a price in the absence of coercion, the price is just.
All commercial software should be warranted. [gasp!]
I am not advocating a law demanding such warrantees, rather, I am advocating that software companies stop committing fraud by marketing products while simultaneously disclaiming merchantibility.
If I buy a refrigerator and it does not keep my food cold I can return it and get my money back. If the manufacturer won't refund my money I can sue. If this same refrigerator explodes causing material damage to my home and my health, I can sue for major bucks. But not so with software. They all have this little warranty disclaimer saying if the product even *intentially* kills my dog I am S.O.L.
Before you all get your panties in a bind, please note that I said "commercial" software. Noncommercial software is a completely different matter.
"But no one would want to contribute to Open Source if they could get sued. Bullshit. No one but the seller gets sued. YOU are not the one selling the software. Remember when Odwalla got sued for tainted apple juice? It was Odwalla, the seller of the apple juice, that got sued, and not the Odwalla employees, or the apple growers, or the fertilizer salesmen selling manure to the apple growers, or the cattlemen selling manure to the fertilizer salesmen selling fertilizer to the apple growers, etc.
Now before all the libertarians and free marketeers jump all over me, let me stress again that this is a *fraud* issue. A company that sells a product is asserting that the product is fit to be sold. This is known as merchantibility. It's the cornerstone of the US Commercial Code, and much of Western Civilization's common law. Any disclaimers of merchantibility need to be be explicity to the consumer before purchase. Hiding them in fine print on the bottom of the box, or God forbid inside the box itself, is fraudulent.
Every other product on the store shelves is assumed to be fit to sell, EXCEPT for software. This is stupid. This needs to be changed. All warranty disclaimers for commercial products should be null and void unless they are written in three foot high blinking neon lights.
There's a lot of power in this scheme, but the average user just wants ease of use. They won't want to type in a SQL query. They don't want to type in anything. If the query isn't sitting there on the desktop waiting to be clicked on, the average user will never find it.
(and they don't want to talk to their computer. they really don't no matter how cool it looks in the movies. so forget voice commands)
Example: The time it takes to click down two directory levels and visually scan a list of twelve items is *faster* than pondering the appropriate query and typing it in. Queries are great large complex data sets, but they can be worse than useless on simple data sets, and abolutely disastrous if you don't know how to formulate a proper query.
Remember, there won't be any schema other than the default.
Why won't the new programs run on them? Unless Microsofts screws up big time, a different filesystem should be completely transparent to 99% of applications.
I've written a bunch of applications in my lifetime, and never once did I have to involve myself with the filesystem details. I mean, geez, there's a million apps out there right now that work on both FAT and NTFS, so why the big paranoia now?
What happens is if a component fails, and needs replacing, they cannot call IBM to get the replacement part, without forking over *loads* of money, as all guarantees and warranties become void
Imagine an Open Source business model working this way:
"Sorry Mr. Smith, we have to terminate your Redhat support contract."
"But why?"
"Because you downloaded a copy for Fred's workstation, instead of buying directly from us. Didn't you read your support license?"
That's not evidence of monopoly. One of the products I help build ships with about 100 different features, all of which are encrypted off. If a customer purchases a feature, a service rep goes out and turns it on.
Everyone in our industry does exactly the same thing. The tiny startup down the street with only ten employees does exactly the same thing. So we can't possibly be a monopoly.
Not offering a discount is in no way comparable to jacking up a price. If a company doesn't want to sign the Microsoft contract, they can always go down to CompUSA and buy their products through a retailer. As long as Microsoft offers its products at retail, they cannot use price jacking as a leverage.
So you don't buy software. Fine. I could care less if you did. But it's the people that DO buy software that pays the wages of those 10% to 25% of developers.
If no one buys their products then the market has spoken. So be it. But so far the software-as-product business model has been running rings around all the business models advocated by the Free Software community. I can count the currently successful Free Software companies on one hand.
This is not an indictment of Free Software. Rather it is an observation of the current state of affairs. Perhaps the future will be much different. Perhaps the future will see the elimination of software of an economic product.
(American cars no longer have this, but back in africa, car tires were hollow, and they have a balloon like tube that goes between them and the rims. The tube is the black thing that some poeple swim with, if you ever been to a latin american or african beach.)
American automobiles may not use innertubes any more, but American tractors and many American trucks still do. Nothing better than grabbing an innertube, a case of good beer, and floating down a river. (you hang the beer under the innertube so it keeps cold in the river)
Yes, the creation of intellectual property should be treated exactly the same as the creation of material property. But that doesn't justify a tax on writing software, rather it justifies the removal of the tax on building airplanes.
Of you have to tax something, tax the sales of the products. Tax Microsoft when it sells a copy of Windows and tax Boeing when it sells a new airplane.
Darwin is free. The APSL meets the four definitions of Free Software set down by RMS back in the day. The only thing keeping it from the official monicker of Free Software(tm) is the lack of imprimatur by RMS.
RMS doesn't like the APSL clause about commercial deployment of the software. Where this clause is tricky is that it does not treat internal commercial distribution of the software as a purely private matter. So when employee A installs a modified version of Darwin on employee B's workstation, he must make those modifications public.
Here is the Free Software definition. The APSL meets every criteria handidly:
Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms.
There's a lot more on The Free Software Definition page at GNU, but reading the last line above using Standard English one sees that the above is the *totality* of the definition. Everything else on that page is clarification or commentary. If users of Darwin have freedoms 0 through 3, then Darwin is Free Software.
In my experience, free software is helpful in making money doing consulting and custom programming, which is a significant source of overall programmer income.
So, is your argument then that all developers should be contractors? It may be true that 75% to 90% of programming involves in-house and custom work, but that's no reason to ignore and impoverish the remaining 10% to 25% who are in the business of software-as-a-salable-product.
Looking over my original post, I see I forget a word. The sentence in question should have read "...was the *apparent* insistence by GNU that the benefits of Free Software must be hushed up..."
You'll notice later down in my post that I do comment that GNU does mention the practical benefits here and there.
The behavior of GNU, as demonstrated by their choice of topics, articles and commentary, indicates a strong deemphasis on anything that doesn't focus on the words "free" or "freedom". I wasn't arguing that they should deemphasize freedom instead, but rather take freedom out of the vacumn they have put it in and start explaining the practical benefits of that freedom. Because frankly, if there are no benefits to freedom, why would I want it?
"At present, we have plenty of ``keep quiet'', but not enough freedom talk."
"We are failing to keep up with the influx of free software users, failing to teach people about freedom and our community as fast as they enter it."
"We have to say, ``It's free software and it gives you freedom!''--more and louder than ever before."
"The point that he missed is the point that ``open source'' was designed not to raise: the point that users deserve freedom."
"If you feel that freedom and community are important for their own sake--not just for the convenience they bring--please join us in using the term ``free software''"
"We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy. We want to be heard, not hidden behind a different view."
From "Live and let license", cited as a recommended reference in the previous article:
"When you hear this term, don't think development methodology, or price, think liberty."
"Open source implies a development methodology that is shared by both. Free software implies a license designed to ensure the four freedoms noted above."
These quotes show a marked deemphasis on the practical, economic and business benefits of Free Software. If it doesn't pertain to freedom, GNU seems hesitant to talk about it.
I don't have a problem with GNU using morality as the basis of its arguments, but I do have a problem when they place that morality in a vacumn isolated from the rest of reality.
Do you deny that the world is a better place when software is freely available to anyone who wants it?
Yep, zealotry is alive and well in the Free Software Community(tm). I made a criticism about some mindless mantra to be repeated over and over, and the peanut gallery automatically assumes I must be attacking their core belief system.
OTOH he may just want the amount of software freely available to increase as fast as possible, because of the benefits this brings.
Ooh! Another economic argument on behalf of Free Software. Heresy is breaking out all over!
It was not an economic argument: economics is about the use and development of the most efficient way to deliver goods from producers to consumers. Economic value is related to relative scarcity.
Scarcity has very little to do with something's value. Only when something is valued to begin with does scarcity enter the equation. Consider cocoanut-shit pies. I don't care how scarce cocoanut-shit pies are, they don't have a fraction of the value of the relatively abundant cocoanut-creme pies.
The previous post WAS about economics, as it discussed scarcity. Go read it again if you missed that whole section.
You are correct. The FDA doesn't care much if it merely crashes, so long as it doesn't harm the patient. I was simplifying matters greatly in my description. For this particular class of device, however, crashes occuring during certain modalities are considered regulatory issues.
While all the points he makes are true, and the economic beneifits of free software are obvious, that is not the primary moral justification for software being free.
One thing that has always puzzled me since the OSS-FS "divorce", was the insistence by GNU that the benefits of Free Software must be hushed up, hidden away and never referred to. To my mind this shifts GNU out of the realm of ideology and into the realm of religious zealotry.
People perform moral acts because they are motivated to. But the motivations leading to these moral acts vary from individual to individual. Some people will be moral simply because they're supposed to. Others will be moral because it helps other people. Still others will be moral because it helps themselves. It is the latter person that GNU insists we ignore. They find fault with the Open Source community for reaching out to the practical person.
GNU sometimes acts as if morality was impractical, or that practicality was immoral. But the fact of the matter is that morality is frequently the most practical of courses in the short term, and always in the long term. Yet you look through the reams and reams of pages at www.gnu.org and you might find three or four paragraphs mentioning the practical benefits of Free Software, almost as an aside.
Repeat after me, "When software is free, the world is a better place."
Yep, definitely zealotry. We are told not to think just do.
Politically, you have the statists on one side and the libertarians and anarchists on the other. Proponents from both sides argue that "their" way serves to distribute scarce resources in the most effective way, and that's what we want, no? -- effective distribution of scarce resources.
You've struck upon a very good analogy. Now let's extend it a bit. A capitalist and a libertarian will very often have identical economic beliefs: level playing field, minimal government intervention, free enterprise, etc. But capitalism and libertarianism are divided in much the same way that Open Source and Free Software are divided. A capitalist will argue his points on the practical side, citing an efficient allocation of scarce resources. A libertarian will argue his points on the moral side, citing freedom and choice. If all there was to life was economics, then the capitalist would be right and the libertarian would be blowing hot wind. And if all there was to life was morality in the absence of any practicality, then the it would be the capitalist blowing the hot wind. But life is more than just bare economics or morality in a vacumn, so both are right from a free market perspective. Capitalists and libertarians get along. They may quibble over a point here or a point there, but by and large they are good friends.
It too bad that Open Source and Free Software can't be similar allies. But I guess the leadership at GNU won't allow it.
Free software serves to reduce the scarcity of good code out there. It provides value without relying on scarcity as the source of that value.
Ooh, an argument couched in practicality:-)
So, you don't need economic arguments to defend the GPL.
Then what was that whole economic argument you just made all about?
Okay, let me conclude with one final point. The Open Source arguments rest solidly on a foundation of practicality. The Free Software arguments rest on a single premise. What if that premise is predicated on other premises that we have overlooked? What if it is incomplete? What if it is flawed? If so, then Free Software cannot be a moral absolute, and the Open Source arguments of practicality become even more important.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever owned a horse? No, I didn't think so. In many ways horses are easier than cars. But in some other crucial areas they are not. The maintenance on a horse is a daily chore. Don't maintain the horse correctly and it dies. Overwork the horse and it dies.
When you park you car in the garage at night do you brush it down?
Don't do XP, anything in engineering that says Requirements and Design don't come before implementation lose the right to be considered engineering.
Bingo. XP is just a spiral lifecycle stuck in maintenance mode.
Where I work we DON'T have this problem. Some minor glitches occur of course, but that's life. But we don't get crunchtime panic.
So what do we do that's different? I don't know 'cuz I haven't worked for some these chaotic outfits that everyone talks about. Here's some stuff that we do that might help however: the code base is divided into domains, then subdivided into feature sets; if the code in question isn't in your area, you generally don't work on it; only the feature lead checks in code related to a feature; bugs are assigned to individuals according to their area of expertise; if our code affects other areas or other domains, we alert people in those areas that we will be checking in, giving them enough time to freeze their view. Finally, and this may be a shock to some people, we actually have postponed handoff dates if we aren't ready to handoff.
Trouble is, we do NOT want the overhead of Wine. We want a native Linux/BSD/Unix quicktime player that is freely available for personal use.
'Because the market will bear the price' - well this shows that there isn't perfect competition. If there were then your customers could get an identical product from a competitor, who'd be happy to turn on the features for free.
That's not how it works in the real world. When your cost is $1 and your competitor is selling the identical product at $100, you do *not* undercut him by selling yours at $2. Instead you sell yours at $99. Eventually a price equilibrium will be found that balances what the customer is willing to pay and what the seller is willing to accept.
Besides which, we have three major and five or six minor competitors in our industry, and we ALL price our products the same way. So we can't be a monopoly. If one of these companies could get away with turning all features on at the entry price level, then the rest of us would have to follow suit. Some have tried this but failed. Our particular market is very resistant to lower prices. Yes it's true. In our market (like many others) a lower price implies cheaper quality.
eg one 128Mbyte memory module is pretty much identical to another at the same speed, there are no additional bells and whistles that can be offered
Have you every bought memory modules? You get what you pay for. Always buy the premium price point if you don't want to stand in line at Fry's returning it. That extra money doesn't get you any extra memory, but it does get you extra quality assurance.
I wasn't criticizing that hypothetical Redhat model.
Hmm, why do you not simply turn on all features by default?
The simple sarcastic answer is because the market will bear the price. But the reality is much more complicated.
a) You will never know the market demand for a feature if you don't offer it separately. Is a feature worth maintaining? Do you invest millions in development improving it? Does the customer even want it, or are they just saying yes to freebie?
b) If you offer every feature as a default then you cheapen the overall perceptions of those features. To the world outside of Slashdot, free equals cheap and you don't want your super premium system to get the monicker of "cheap".
c) Not every feature is applicable to every customer. Turning on a feature introduces a small but definite risk. This risk may translate into additional bugs, or additional pilot errors.
d) Like the IBM mainframes, these features are not necessarily software only, a few are tied to specific pieces of hardware.
e) Some features are mutually exclusive of others.
f) You want to recoup your investments in research and development. You can't do this by giving every customer the total package at the bottom price, and you will lose most of your customers if your only offering is the total package at the premium price.
and
g) Back to the simple sarcastic answer: the customer is willing to pay the price. As long as the buyer and seller can agree to a price in the absence of coercion, the price is just.
Time for your daily dose of Open Source Heresy...
All commercial software should be warranted. [gasp!]
I am not advocating a law demanding such warrantees, rather, I am advocating that software companies stop committing fraud by marketing products while simultaneously disclaiming merchantibility.
If I buy a refrigerator and it does not keep my food cold I can return it and get my money back. If the manufacturer won't refund my money I can sue. If this same refrigerator explodes causing material damage to my home and my health, I can sue for major bucks. But not so with software. They all have this little warranty disclaimer saying if the product even *intentially* kills my dog I am S.O.L.
Before you all get your panties in a bind, please note that I said "commercial" software. Noncommercial software is a completely different matter.
"But no one would want to contribute to Open Source if they could get sued. Bullshit. No one but the seller gets sued. YOU are not the one selling the software. Remember when Odwalla got sued for tainted apple juice? It was Odwalla, the seller of the apple juice, that got sued, and not the Odwalla employees, or the apple growers, or the fertilizer salesmen selling manure to the apple growers, or the cattlemen selling manure to the fertilizer salesmen selling fertilizer to the apple growers, etc.
Now before all the libertarians and free marketeers jump all over me, let me stress again that this is a *fraud* issue. A company that sells a product is asserting that the product is fit to be sold. This is known as merchantibility. It's the cornerstone of the US Commercial Code, and much of Western Civilization's common law. Any disclaimers of merchantibility need to be be explicity to the consumer before purchase. Hiding them in fine print on the bottom of the box, or God forbid inside the box itself, is fraudulent.
Every other product on the store shelves is assumed to be fit to sell, EXCEPT for software. This is stupid. This needs to be changed. All warranty disclaimers for commercial products should be null and void unless they are written in three foot high blinking neon lights.
There's a lot of power in this scheme, but the average user just wants ease of use. They won't want to type in a SQL query. They don't want to type in anything. If the query isn't sitting there on the desktop waiting to be clicked on, the average user will never find it.
(and they don't want to talk to their computer. they really don't no matter how cool it looks in the movies. so forget voice commands)
Example: The time it takes to click down two directory levels and visually scan a list of twelve items is *faster* than pondering the appropriate query and typing it in. Queries are great large complex data sets, but they can be worse than useless on simple data sets, and abolutely disastrous if you don't know how to formulate a proper query.
Remember, there won't be any schema other than the default.
Why won't the new programs run on them? Unless Microsofts screws up big time, a different filesystem should be completely transparent to 99% of applications.
I've written a bunch of applications in my lifetime, and never once did I have to involve myself with the filesystem details. I mean, geez, there's a million apps out there right now that work on both FAT and NTFS, so why the big paranoia now?
What happens is if a component fails, and needs replacing, they cannot call IBM to get the replacement part, without forking over *loads* of money, as all guarantees and warranties become void
Imagine an Open Source business model working this way:
"Sorry Mr. Smith, we have to terminate your Redhat support contract."
"But why?"
"Because you downloaded a copy for Fred's workstation, instead of buying directly from us. Didn't you read your support license?"
That's not evidence of monopoly. One of the products I help build ships with about 100 different features, all of which are encrypted off. If a customer purchases a feature, a service rep goes out and turns it on.
Everyone in our industry does exactly the same thing. The tiny startup down the street with only ten employees does exactly the same thing. So we can't possibly be a monopoly.
Quit a bit different eh?
No, not at all.
Not offering a discount is in no way comparable to jacking up a price. If a company doesn't want to sign the Microsoft contract, they can always go down to CompUSA and buy their products through a retailer. As long as Microsoft offers its products at retail, they cannot use price jacking as a leverage.
So you don't buy software. Fine. I could care less if you did. But it's the people that DO buy software that pays the wages of those 10% to 25% of developers.
If no one buys their products then the market has spoken. So be it. But so far the software-as-product business model has been running rings around all the business models advocated by the Free Software community. I can count the currently successful Free Software companies on one hand.
This is not an indictment of Free Software. Rather it is an observation of the current state of affairs. Perhaps the future will be much different. Perhaps the future will see the elimination of software of an economic product.
(American cars no longer have this, but back in africa, car tires were hollow, and they have a balloon like tube that goes between them and the rims. The tube is the black thing that some poeple swim with, if you ever been to a latin american or african
beach.)
American automobiles may not use innertubes any more, but American tractors and many American trucks still do. Nothing better than grabbing an innertube, a case of good beer, and floating down a river. (you hang the beer under the innertube so it keeps cold in the river)
Now that the last missing component of The GNU System will be released, we will finally get the "The GNU System" as originally described.
Will it then be okay to refer to LiGNuX as just plain "Linux"?
Yes, the creation of intellectual property should be treated exactly the same as the creation of material property. But that doesn't justify a tax on writing software, rather it justifies the removal of the tax on building airplanes.
Of you have to tax something, tax the sales of the products. Tax Microsoft when it sells a copy of Windows and tax Boeing when it sells a new airplane.
RMS doesn't like the APSL clause about commercial deployment of the software. Where this clause is tricky is that it does not treat internal commercial distribution of the software as a purely private matter. So when employee A installs a modified version of Darwin on employee B's workstation, he must make those modifications public.
Here is the Free Software definition. The APSL meets every criteria handidly:
There's a lot more on The Free Software Definition page at GNU, but reading the last line above using Standard English one sees that the above is the *totality* of the definition. Everything else on that page is clarification or commentary. If users of Darwin have freedoms 0 through 3, then Darwin is Free Software.
In my experience, free software is helpful in making money doing consulting and custom programming, which is a significant source of overall programmer income.
So, is your argument then that all developers should be contractors? It may be true that 75% to 90% of programming involves in-house and custom work, but that's no reason to ignore and impoverish the remaining 10% to 25% who are in the business of software-as-a-salable-product.
csh is GNU software? Since when? I thought Bill Joy wrote csh.
Looking over my original post, I see I forget a word. The sentence in question should have read "...was the *apparent* insistence by GNU that the benefits of Free Software must be hushed up..."
You'll notice later down in my post that I do comment that GNU does mention the practical benefits here and there.
The behavior of GNU, as demonstrated by their choice of topics, articles and commentary, indicates a strong deemphasis on anything that doesn't focus on the words "free" or "freedom". I wasn't arguing that they should deemphasize freedom instead, but rather take freedom out of the vacumn they have put it in and start explaining the practical benefits of that freedom. Because frankly, if there are no benefits to freedom, why would I want it?
Where or when did GNU say this?
:
Please provide proof.
From "Why ``Free Software'' is better than ``Open Source''''
"At present, we have plenty of ``keep quiet'', but not enough freedom talk."
"We are failing to keep up with the influx of free software users, failing to teach people about freedom and our community as fast as they enter it."
"We have to say, ``It's free software and it gives you freedom!''--more and louder than ever before."
"The point that he missed is the point that ``open source'' was designed not to raise: the point that users deserve freedom."
"If you feel that freedom and community are important for their own sake--not just for the convenience they bring--please join us in using the term ``free software''"
"We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy. We want to be heard, not hidden behind a different view."
From "Live and let license", cited as a recommended reference in the previous article
"When you hear this term, don't think development methodology, or price, think liberty."
"Open source implies a development methodology that is shared by both. Free software implies a license designed to ensure the four freedoms noted above."
These quotes show a marked deemphasis on the practical, economic and business benefits of Free Software. If it doesn't pertain to freedom, GNU seems hesitant to talk about it.
I don't have a problem with GNU using morality as the basis of its arguments, but I do have a problem when they place that morality in a vacumn isolated from the rest of reality.
Do you deny that the world is a better place when software is freely available to anyone who wants it?
Yep, zealotry is alive and well in the Free Software Community(tm). I made a criticism about some mindless mantra to be repeated over and over, and the peanut gallery automatically assumes I must be attacking their core belief system.
OTOH he may just want the amount of software freely available to increase as fast as possible, because of the benefits this brings.
Ooh! Another economic argument on behalf of Free Software. Heresy is breaking out all over!
It was not an economic argument: economics is about the use and development of the most efficient way to deliver goods from producers to consumers. Economic value is related to relative scarcity.
Scarcity has very little to do with something's value. Only when something is valued to begin with does scarcity enter the equation. Consider cocoanut-shit pies. I don't care how scarce cocoanut-shit pies are, they don't have a fraction of the value of the relatively abundant cocoanut-creme pies.
The previous post WAS about economics, as it discussed scarcity. Go read it again if you missed that whole section.
You are correct. The FDA doesn't care much if it merely crashes, so long as it doesn't harm the patient. I was simplifying matters greatly in my description. For this particular class of device, however, crashes occuring during certain modalities are considered regulatory issues.
While all the points he makes are true, and the economic beneifits of free software are obvious, that is not the primary moral justification for software being free.
:-)
One thing that has always puzzled me since the OSS-FS "divorce", was the insistence by GNU that the benefits of Free Software must be hushed up, hidden away and never referred to. To my mind this shifts GNU out of the realm of ideology and into the realm of religious zealotry.
People perform moral acts because they are motivated to. But the motivations leading to these moral acts vary from individual to individual. Some people will be moral simply because they're supposed to. Others will be moral because it helps other people. Still others will be moral because it helps themselves. It is the latter person that GNU insists we ignore. They find fault with the Open Source community for reaching out to the practical person.
GNU sometimes acts as if morality was impractical, or that practicality was immoral. But the fact of the matter is that morality is frequently the most practical of courses in the short term, and always in the long term. Yet you look through the reams and reams of pages at www.gnu.org and you might find three or four paragraphs mentioning the practical benefits of Free Software, almost as an aside.
Repeat after me, "When software is free, the world is a better place."
Yep, definitely zealotry. We are told not to think just do.
Politically, you have the statists on one side and the libertarians and anarchists on the other. Proponents from both sides argue that "their" way serves to distribute scarce resources in the most effective way, and that's what we want, no? -- effective distribution of scarce resources.
You've struck upon a very good analogy. Now let's extend it a bit. A capitalist and a libertarian will very often have identical economic beliefs: level playing field, minimal government intervention, free enterprise, etc. But capitalism and libertarianism are divided in much the same way that Open Source and Free Software are divided. A capitalist will argue his points on the practical side, citing an efficient allocation of scarce resources. A libertarian will argue his points on the moral side, citing freedom and choice. If all there was to life was economics, then the capitalist would be right and the libertarian would be blowing hot wind. And if all there was to life was morality in the absence of any practicality, then the it would be the capitalist blowing the hot wind. But life is more than just bare economics or morality in a vacumn, so both are right from a free market perspective. Capitalists and libertarians get along. They may quibble over a point here or a point there, but by and large they are good friends.
It too bad that Open Source and Free Software can't be similar allies. But I guess the leadership at GNU won't allow it.
Free software serves to reduce the scarcity of good code out there. It provides value without relying on scarcity as the source of that value.
Ooh, an argument couched in practicality
So, you don't need economic arguments to defend the GPL.
Then what was that whole economic argument you just made all about?
Okay, let me conclude with one final point. The Open Source arguments rest solidly on a foundation of practicality. The Free Software arguments rest on a single premise. What if that premise is predicated on other premises that we have overlooked? What if it is incomplete? What if it is flawed? If so, then Free Software cannot be a moral absolute, and the Open Source arguments of practicality become even more important.