>Shut the fuck up if all you are going to do is >whine and bash someone. If you cannot debate >issues publicly in a civil manner, then just >stick to writing code and keep your mouth shut.
I agree wholeheartedly with your post. There is no doubt that the salient feature of the last two ESR essays has been that there should be backroom, closed negotiations with ESR as a conduit between business and "us", whoever the hell "we" are. I admire his maintenance of the Jargon File and his undoubted ability to communicate but I fear and distrust the goal of "selling" Linux to business. Selling implies specific ownership being exchanged. ESR and his "Open Source" buddies seem to be acting as poorly-paid middle men. ps. please disregard all of the above comments: as I disagree with ESR's viewpoint I am undoubtedly one of his immature Slashdot kiddies.
Black and tan.....you must be a brit. The black and tans were the British Army scum that burnt half our towns during the revolution. Black berets and tan uniforms.
Attacks on the "political maturity" of the participants in these debates are a nauseating type of intellectual censorship. It reminds me of Lenin's comments on the "infantilism" of those that disagreed with him. Any opinion piece of this sort that ignores why Stallman insists on the name (in order to highlight the "Free" contribution of the GNU project in contrast to the "Open" contributions) and argues instead about the personal qualities of those involved is attempting to sidestep the main issues and turn it into a WWF version of debate. Boo!!! he's bad and immature!
Biochip arrays that detected differences in EXTRACTED DNA are cool, but not quite the same as waving something at someone and immediately having their sequence. Hybrid chip technology is well under development now, but tricoders......gimme a break! Science is exciting enough without exaggeration.
This is a serious misinterpretation. Communist anarchists cannot be described as Marxists except by the wildest bending of definitions. Even before the First International there was considerable disagreement between communist anarchists and Marxists. This was a fundamental difference over the role of authority which has been played out ever since through the Russian and Spanish revolutions and their aftermaths.
Didn't Tucker have some ideas about how it was the system of currency that was the problem? If I remember correctly he thought that the proper value of any article should be determined not by a market, but by how long it took to produce it, with some weighting factors for skill. There were communities established somewhere in the states that traded in "time notes" at Time Stores and I think some of them may have lasted several years. Yet another of the US's many socialists!!
I think you have made a pertinent extension of the IP debate in this forum. It is interesting how companies like Monsanto build their business on technologies developed at public cost ( note all the government funding of fundamental molecular biology ) and then insist on exclusive monopolistic practices for their extensions. If their acquisitive logic were fairly extended they would be paying royalties to many people and institutions - or more likely the whole scientific enterprise would have collapsed under the weight of lawyers. It gets even more worrying when you consider that these companies produce the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers and are very busy buying up rare seed stocks.
>but how would programmers expect to make a living >if everything they coded was given away for free? >You could say you'd sell it, but wouldn't that >violate free software? Aw, c'mon! You mean that you haven't read the multiple explanations of free(beer) vs. free(speech)? That said, your questions about how to make a living are valid. But, yes, people do make a good living as consultants. There's always a need to fix and tailor for individual needs and a well-trained hacker can always find a job. I am not sure from your post if you are defending Apple's licence as a "realistic compromise". But if you are then I suggest that you are far less likely to make a living from a world where it is the norm than from either a free-software utopia or the current ultra-proprietary one. I really did not like the end of your post though, you appear to be attempting to dismiss all those who have a legitimate worry about the trend to "Open" Source as "high-school and college _kids_. Well, gramps(or granny), this does not automatically dismiss their ideas and it is more than possible that many of those that you characterize in this way do not in fact belong to the group. Spare us the ad hominem denigrations!
So, the statistic used is the size of the packages in bytes. Is this reasonable? Are there some things which are large, easier to program, less essential? Also, are there things which are more central to the development? Instances of the latter might be gcc or emacs. More interestingly why does everyone care so much? The explanation offered by Christiansen is that it is disrespectful of the FSF to minimize the contributions of the many who have contributed. I can accept that as a legitimate reason. But is that why everyone is keen on it? It is serendipitous for the "Open Source" zealots and ideologues that this attack should come at a time when they are attempting to leverage their way into the business world.
"Show me somewhere a group all of whose members are there with the same motivations, values, and goals and I'll show you a group that is at the very least unlikely to be individualistic enough to do any really superb hacking...." Well, perhaps I have been careless in the use of the word "motivations" as you are obviously casting it to mean "motivations, values and goals" with the obvious intent of extending it to mean similar in all respects and I don't think that suits my argument. I mean that for a network/association/community to be functional there has to be some sort of shared objective - a non-violable principle. To be sure there will be differences in how this can be attained or furthered, but at least it should be agreed as the reason for common association. Until recently I would have shown you the Linux community. Note that these motivations do not have to be IDENTICAL merely non-contradictory. That is what I would guess is the minimal state for a working community. If however such a group exists and attracts new members who are interested in being in the group for the benefits that it confers it does not necessarily follow that it will survive. It is an evolutionary process. The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business. No, they don't fit your restrictive definition either. They are not identical. However they do have a shared common goal. The obtaining of profit. This is not the goal that I would argue has motivated the development of Linux and the GNU utilities. They are in many ways inimical. Your point about the other types of licenses is partially true. There are other ways of effecting a statement of freedom. However, unless they semantically reduce to the essential aspects of the GPL then the stage is set for a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. I hope that I am wrong, but I predict that there will be an expolsion of development on top of Linux, an acquisition of new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.
Obviously, you disagree with both RMS and ESR. I include the latter here as he claims that hackers are motivated primarily by egoboo, not by money. Linux and the tools surrounding it are good because they are written by people who do it mostly for the pure love of producing something excellent. They are not drones whose vision of life exclusively consists of "graduate and get a [gasp!] job!". As to getting paid for working on Linux, that's cool, as the RedHat setup suggests, as long as the relationship is of a company supporting a hacker that controls the project they work on. That way the commercial pressure to produce the latest and greatest does not take pride of place. Your last point is probably the least worth responding to, however: You assume that "enlarging" is a good thing. Why? You also assume that some sort of plusralism in the motivations of a group is all right. Why? You can surely (if you sit down for a few minutes in a quiet spot and hurt your head with some thinking) observe that groups with a coherent purpose usually manage to work better. You allude to a definition of freedom not exactly the same as RMS' (with a humorous Aaaagh! at the end of it - ha ha! What a clever substitute for an argument!) and fail to explain exactly what that definition is. Is it in fact non-freedom? Is it the freedom to change Linux into a system that relies upon utilities and applications that are not as Free as those distributed under the GPL? Anyway, I'd better get back to my job now;)
Perhaps ESR has a coded message in this report. He gives us "Some plain truth" and then goes on to tell us that reality is complicated. This might lead a cynic to speculate that his plain truth is too simple. Following further down this path, an examination of the idea that all that business can do is "throw money or refrain from throwing money" could lead to unsettling predictions at variance with his own bland assurances.
So, how could this innocuous tossing about of money affect us? Well, it could: 1. cause the talented to work on projects that were of interest to the suits 2. siphon hackers out of the community as experts in Linux doing the bidding of the suits 3. change the composition of the community by attracting those that are not interested in the primary goal of freedom.
The last is perhaps the more fundamental. Licences such as the GPL are not a magic panacea that will protect Free Software forever and ever throughout the ages. They only have force in law as long as there are a sufficient number of people who have resources to conduct possibly lengthy and expensive legal battles. It requires that those people be motivated, organized and clear in their minds as to what is worth defending.
Well, I remain unconvinced that your viewpoint adds clarity to an analysis of whether RMS or ESR are correct. One of the problems with too much abstraction is that one tends to lose sight of reality. The arguments that result from this sound logical, rational and reasonable yet the results often turn out to be ludicrous, inefficient and unwanted. John Ralston Saul attacked this attitude in "Voltaire's Bastards". He details how technocrats that abstract too far created complex, logical models and systems within which they could sound perfectly reasonable. It is only apparent to those outside of these systems that the models are a bad fit to reality. Exactly the same problems pertain to the free-market zealots. They really are utopian idealists who believe that somehow or other order will emerge from economic chaos. The fact that no economy exists that allows the "free-hand" to operate does not deter them. Nor are they deterred by the fact that the world's most dominant economy has a MASSIVE amount of government intervention in the market through the pentagon subsidy system. So to return to the point at hand: what is the evidence that physically exists about Free Software? To my admittedly biased viewpoint it seems that RMS through the uncompromising, utopian, idealistic mechanism of the GPL has created the niche that we all inhabit in this community. I don't want to change from this or accept anything in its place that is motivated by a consideration of, or kow-towing to a goal which is inimically pitted against my interests. My interests are in having a good, cheap OS. The interests of those companies that don't want to use the GPL are as you have pointed out, SOLELY in making a profit. Their raison d'etre is to exploit me. Many, many clever, intelligent and resourceful hackers have built this structure. Now that it is of value many, many devious, greedy entrepeneurs want to sell it back to us. It got as good as this through being Free. It will get better through being Free. I aplogize for the strident tone of these responses to you, but I can't believe that this may be all thrown away in front of my very eyes.
Interesting historical FACT!!!. I have to say that I think the big lie here really is that there is some sort of opposition between being pragmatic and being idealistic. A failure to follow the ideals that are so ably articulated by RMS will lead to a pragmatic failure also. Either the "Open Source" advocates believe in the idea of freedom and think that they can fool business by not calling it that or else they see a rich resource that they can now plunder. Establishing themselves as the curators of the accumulated collective work of generations of idealistic, utopian hackers puts them in a position to "sell" it to business.
"Profit is not evil" you say. And how true this is. As you rightly point out it is merely an abstracted measure of something else, in this case "how well you're doing". Unfortunately in focussing on an ill-formed caricature of the objections that many have to big-business you elide some of the important points of these arguments. Your rant in favour of "free-market economics" ignores the fact that profits which measure how-well-you're-doing can be based on BAD things or GOOD things. BAD things (to define my terms) include profiting off other people starving, getting sick, having to do unpleasant things (like sexual or physical prostitution). So if one merely applies your pollyannaish definitions that refuse to look at the actual results of the mechanisms of profit then one might feel as you do that everything in the garden is rosy. But then you're not the one that is coping with the toxins produced from the manufacture of your PC and you didn't slave in a factory to produce the McDonald's Happy Toy which is probably cutely adorning your PC. (Or maybe you do pay some of the environmental price in Windsor). Anyway this nasty reply is motivated by your patronizing assumption that "people don't understand that profits aren't bad, oh they are so stupid, why can't they see it's a measure" rant. Perhaps you would like to step back and assume that RMS is not the "idealist utopian" who is pitted against the "pragmatic utilitarian". Perhaps you would like, for the sake of argument, to see what happens if you follow the idea that particular systems tend to evolve to particular classes of outcomes. You make the interesting assumption that freedom can be something that is not "all or nothing" or "COMPLETE". Isn't that like being a little bit pregnant or half dead? In this same paragraph you talk about RMS having a moral view that is not "economically justified". Freedom does not need economic justification, it is an end in itself and as soon as it is forgotten as the primary motivation for the Linux community then the profit-mongers instead of being partially useful symbionts and occasional parasites will be farmers herding the user sheep for their own gain. You buy completely into the false dichotomy of "utilitarian" versus "idealistic". Sometimes idealism is utilitarian and pragmatic.
Slashdot Mirror
>Shut the fuck up if all you are going to do is
>whine and bash someone. If you cannot debate
>issues publicly in a civil manner, then just
>stick to writing code and keep your mouth shut.
Is this irony?
I agree wholeheartedly with your post. There is no doubt that the salient feature of the last two ESR essays has been that there should be backroom, closed negotiations with ESR as a conduit between business and "us", whoever the hell "we" are. I admire his maintenance of the Jargon File and his undoubted ability to communicate but I fear and distrust the goal of "selling" Linux to business. Selling implies specific ownership being exchanged. ESR and his "Open Source" buddies seem to be acting as poorly-paid middle men.
ps. please disregard all of the above comments: as I disagree with ESR's viewpoint I am undoubtedly one of his immature Slashdot kiddies.
Black and tan.....you must be a brit. The black and tans were the British Army scum that burnt half our towns during the revolution. Black berets and tan uniforms.
Attacks on the "political maturity" of the participants in these debates are a nauseating type of intellectual censorship. It reminds me of Lenin's comments on the "infantilism" of those that disagreed with him. Any opinion piece of this sort that ignores why Stallman insists on the name (in order to highlight the "Free" contribution of the GNU project in contrast to the "Open" contributions) and argues instead about the personal qualities of those involved is attempting to sidestep the main issues and turn it into a WWF version of debate. Boo!!! he's bad and immature!
Biochip arrays that detected differences in EXTRACTED DNA are cool, but not quite the same as waving something at someone and immediately having their sequence. Hybrid chip technology is well under development now, but tricoders......gimme a break! Science is exciting enough without exaggeration.
Why believe that this is for real?
> communist anarchism (Marxism);
This is a serious misinterpretation. Communist anarchists cannot be described as Marxists except by the wildest bending of definitions. Even before the First International there was considerable disagreement between communist anarchists and Marxists. This was a fundamental difference over the role of authority which has been played out ever since through the Russian and Spanish revolutions and their aftermaths.
Didn't Tucker have some ideas about how it was the system of currency that was the problem? If I remember correctly he thought that the proper value of any article should be determined not by a market, but by how long it took to produce it, with some weighting factors for skill. There were communities established somewhere in the states that traded in "time notes" at Time Stores and I think some of them may have lasted several years. Yet another of the US's many socialists!!
Yes, government is better. We have some democratic control over it.
I think you have made a pertinent extension of the IP debate in this forum. It is interesting how companies like Monsanto build their business on technologies developed at public cost ( note all the government funding of fundamental molecular biology ) and then insist on exclusive monopolistic practices for their extensions. If their acquisitive logic were fairly extended they would be paying royalties to many people and institutions - or more likely the whole scientific enterprise would have collapsed under the weight of lawyers.
It gets even more worrying when you consider that these companies produce the herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers and are very busy buying up rare seed stocks.
>but how would programmers expect to make a living
>if everything they coded was given away for free?
>You could say you'd sell it, but wouldn't that
>violate free software?
Aw, c'mon! You mean that you haven't read the multiple explanations of free(beer) vs. free(speech)?
That said, your questions about how to make a living are valid. But, yes, people do make a good living as consultants. There's always a need to fix and tailor for individual needs and a well-trained hacker can always find a job. I am not sure from your post if you are defending Apple's licence as a "realistic compromise". But if you are then I suggest that you are far less likely to make a living from a world where it is the norm than from either a free-software utopia or the current ultra-proprietary one.
I really did not like the end of your post though, you appear to be attempting to dismiss all those who have a legitimate worry about the trend to "Open" Source as "high-school and college _kids_. Well, gramps(or granny), this does not automatically dismiss their ideas and it is more than possible that many of those that you characterize in this way do not in fact belong to the group. Spare us the ad hominem denigrations!
So, the statistic used is the size of the packages in bytes. Is this reasonable? Are there some things which are large, easier to program, less essential? Also, are there things which are more central to the development? Instances of the latter might be gcc or emacs.
More interestingly why does everyone care so much? The explanation offered by Christiansen is that it is disrespectful of the FSF to minimize the contributions of the many who have contributed. I can accept that as a legitimate reason. But is that why everyone is keen on it? It is serendipitous for the "Open Source" zealots and ideologues that this attack should come at a time when they are attempting to leverage their way into the business world.
"Show me somewhere a group all of whose members
are there with the same motivations, values, and
goals and I'll show you a group that is at the
very least unlikely to be individualistic enough
to do any really superb hacking...."
Well, perhaps I have been careless in the use of the word "motivations" as you are obviously casting it to mean "motivations, values and goals" with the obvious intent of extending it to mean similar in all respects and I don't think that suits my argument. I mean that for a network/association/community to be functional there has to be some sort of shared objective - a non-violable principle. To be sure there will be differences in how this can be attained or furthered, but at least it should be agreed as the reason for common association.
Until recently I would have shown you the Linux community. Note that these motivations do not have to be IDENTICAL merely non-contradictory. That is what I would guess is the minimal state for a working community. If however such a group exists and attracts new members who are interested in being in the group for the benefits that it confers it does not necessarily follow that it will survive. It is an evolutionary process. The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business. No, they don't fit your restrictive definition either. They are not identical. However they do have a shared common goal. The obtaining of profit. This is not the goal that I would argue has motivated the development of Linux and the GNU utilities. They are in many ways inimical. Your point about the other types of licenses is partially true. There are other ways of effecting a statement of freedom. However, unless they semantically reduce to the essential aspects of the GPL then the stage is set for a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. I hope that I am wrong, but I predict that there will be an expolsion of development on top of Linux, an acquisition of new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.
Obviously, you disagree with both RMS and ESR. I include the latter here as he claims that hackers are motivated primarily by egoboo, not by money. Linux and the tools surrounding it are good because they are written by people who do it mostly for the pure love of producing something excellent. They are not drones whose vision of life exclusively consists of "graduate and get a [gasp!] job!". As to getting paid for working on Linux, that's cool, as the RedHat setup suggests, as long as the relationship is of a company supporting a hacker that controls the project they work on. That way the commercial pressure to produce the latest and greatest does not take pride of place. ;)
Your last point is probably the least worth responding to, however:
You assume that "enlarging" is a good thing. Why? You also assume that some sort of plusralism in the motivations of a group is all right. Why? You can surely (if you sit down for a few minutes in a quiet spot and hurt your head with some thinking) observe that groups with a coherent purpose usually manage to work better. You allude to a definition of freedom not exactly the same as RMS' (with a humorous Aaaagh! at the end of it - ha ha! What a clever substitute for an argument!) and fail to explain exactly what that definition is. Is it in fact non-freedom? Is it the freedom to change Linux into a system that relies upon utilities and applications that are not as Free as those distributed under the GPL? Anyway, I'd better get back to my job now
Perhaps ESR has a coded message in this report. He gives us "Some plain truth" and then goes on to tell us that reality is complicated. This might lead a cynic to speculate that his plain truth is too simple. Following further down this path, an examination of the idea that all that business can do is "throw money or refrain from throwing money" could lead to unsettling predictions at variance with his own bland assurances.
So, how could this innocuous tossing about of money affect us? Well, it could:
1. cause the talented to work on projects that were of interest to the suits
2. siphon hackers out of the community as experts in Linux doing the bidding of the suits
3. change the composition of the community by attracting those that are not interested in the primary goal of freedom.
The last is perhaps the more fundamental. Licences such as the GPL are not a magic panacea that will protect Free Software forever and ever throughout the ages. They only have force in law as long as there are a sufficient number of people who have resources to conduct possibly lengthy and expensive legal battles. It requires that those people be motivated, organized and clear in their minds as to what is worth defending.
Time to stop my "less sophisticated rantings".
Crush.
Well, I remain unconvinced that your viewpoint adds clarity to an analysis of whether RMS or ESR are correct. One of the problems
with too much abstraction is that one tends to lose sight of reality. The arguments that result from this sound logical, rational and
reasonable yet the results often turn out to be ludicrous, inefficient and unwanted. John Ralston Saul attacked this attitude in
"Voltaire's Bastards". He details how technocrats that abstract too far created complex, logical models and systems within which
they could sound perfectly reasonable. It is only apparent to those outside of these systems that the models are a bad fit to reality.
Exactly the same problems pertain to the free-market zealots. They really are utopian idealists who believe that somehow or other
order will emerge from economic chaos. The fact that no economy exists that allows the "free-hand" to operate does not deter them.
Nor are they deterred by the fact that the world's most dominant economy has a MASSIVE amount of government intervention in the
market through the pentagon subsidy system.
So to return to the point at hand: what is the evidence that physically exists about Free Software? To my admittedly biased viewpoint
it seems that RMS through the uncompromising, utopian, idealistic mechanism of the GPL has created the niche that we all inhabit in
this community. I don't want to change from this or
accept anything in its place that is motivated by a consideration of, or kow-towing to a goal which is inimically pitted against my
interests. My interests are in having a good, cheap OS. The interests of those companies that don't want to use the GPL are as you
have pointed out, SOLELY in making a profit. Their raison d'etre is to exploit me. Many, many clever, intelligent and resourceful
hackers have built this structure. Now that it is of value many, many devious, greedy entrepeneurs want to sell it back to us. It got as
good as this through being Free. It will get better through being Free. I aplogize for the strident tone of these responses to you, but I
can't believe that this may be all thrown away in front of my very eyes.
Interesting historical FACT!!!. I have to say that I think the big lie here really is that there is some sort of opposition between being pragmatic and being idealistic. A failure to follow the ideals that are so ably articulated by RMS will lead to a pragmatic failure also. Either the "Open Source" advocates believe in the idea of freedom and think that they can fool business by not calling it that or else they see a rich resource that they can now plunder. Establishing themselves as the curators of the accumulated collective work of generations of idealistic, utopian hackers puts them in a position to "sell" it to business.
"Profit is not evil" you say. And how true this is. As you rightly point out it is merely an abstracted measure of something else, in this case "how well you're doing". Unfortunately in focussing on an ill-formed caricature of the objections that many have to big-business you elide some of the important points of these arguments. Your rant in favour of "free-market economics" ignores the fact that profits which measure how-well-you're-doing can be based on BAD things or GOOD things. BAD things (to define my terms) include profiting off other people starving, getting sick, having to do unpleasant things (like sexual or physical prostitution). So if one merely applies your pollyannaish definitions that refuse to look at the actual results of the mechanisms of profit then one might feel as you do that everything in the garden is rosy. But then you're not the one that is coping with the toxins produced from the manufacture of your PC and you didn't slave in a factory to produce the McDonald's Happy Toy which is probably cutely adorning your PC. (Or maybe you do pay some of the environmental price in Windsor). Anyway this nasty reply is motivated by your patronizing assumption that "people don't understand that profits aren't bad, oh they are so stupid, why can't they see it's a measure" rant. Perhaps you would like to step back and assume that RMS is not the "idealist utopian" who is pitted against the "pragmatic utilitarian". Perhaps you would like, for the sake of argument, to see what happens if you follow the idea that particular systems tend to evolve to particular classes of outcomes. You make the interesting assumption that freedom can be something that is not "all or nothing" or "COMPLETE". Isn't that like being a little bit pregnant or half dead? In this same paragraph you talk about RMS having a moral view that is not "economically justified". Freedom does not need economic justification, it is an end in itself and as soon as it is forgotten as the primary motivation for the Linux community then the profit-mongers instead of being partially useful symbionts and occasional parasites will be farmers herding the user sheep for their own gain. You buy completely into the false dichotomy of "utilitarian" versus "idealistic". Sometimes idealism is utilitarian and pragmatic.