And if you have understood this story, you will now see that the solution to "The restriction problem" is not "Public Domain".
I'm quite familiar with the differences between the GPL and public domain, and the implications of those differences, thanks. No slow explanation is required.
What you're missing is that not all code is written by someone wanting recognition and/or profit. Some people might give things away generously, not feeling the need for credit; this has happened for years, hence the amount of public domain software available. (I'm not sure I'd count "giving credit" as a serious restriction of the freedom, either; it's nothing like as restrictive as the GPL, etc.) Other times, perhaps the work was publicly funded and carried out at a university, in which case surely the public is entitled to benefit from it as they see fit.
You're just not thinking wide enough here. I've seen people actually propose on/. that it should be a legal requirement for all publicly funded code to be specifically GPL'd. Why? It's just another licence agreement, which restricts what I can do with the fruits of my tax money. Unsurprisingly, that post was followed by numerous replies from people who'd thought about it, pointing this out.
The same argument still holds here. If the GPL matches your wishes for your code, then by all means use it; you wrote the code, you should have the right to choose. Just please don't try to force it on anyone else who doesn't want to be involved in a GPL project, or represent it as something it's not (free software).
Sure there is [more to programming than objects]...in academia.
But academics and R&D departments are where the new ideas come from. We already have several OO languages, each of which changes everything and yet somehow stays the same. None of these is really a radical departure from status quo, none of them is going to make a dramatic improvement to productivity.
What we need today are genuine new ideas finding their way into the industry, so that the ones that work in practice can establish themselves and the ones that only work in theory can be set aside. We don't need C#JavaInteropVB++.NET.
In the corporate world, people use languages with a track record of being able to meet the balance between performance and the ability to meet deadlines.
VB.NET has no track record. It's nothing like old VB, as any VB6 developer suffering the pain of moving can tell you.
C# has no track record, except for its uncanny resemblance to Java.
C++ with managed extensions has no track record, aside from the C++ part.
Visual J#? After the "track record" of Visual J++, I'd be amazed if anyone serious goes near it.
If you want to talk about track records in a commercial setting, let's talk about C, C++, Perl, Java and VB6. The new Microsoft languages and the.NET architecture beneath them aren't even on the scale.
There's a fabulous little tool called Metapost, which is basically TeX's usual Metafont adapted slightly to produce.eps outputs and with a few extra helpful macros, things like drawing arrows rather than just lines.
It's not for everyone, or every type of graphic, but if you want diagrams in a PostScript format that is easy to insert into LaTeX documents... I'm not aware of any flashy editors, but it's awesomely powerful, and very easy to get good results after a little study up front.
I'm a *developer* for a high-end CAD package. Software developer, not a CAD-operator. Out of ~750 developers on our main product (including the CAE, CAM components), I would hazard a guess that 10% are PhDs.
FWIW, I work at a company that writes mathematical libraries, which are typically used by companies writing CAD/CAM/CAE software. I don't know if this applies across the whole company, but certainly among the teams I work with, PhDs seem to be almost universal.
Ph.D.s are really and truly only intended for the people really and truly motivated enough to get them without second thoughts. These are the people heading up the design labs, and not the people who got the Ph.D. because it was "something to do after college."
When I left university around four years ago (with a BA in maths and a postgrad diploma in CS) I considered doing a PhD, but decided against it, for several good reasons:
I didn't feel passionately enough about a single area of research to invest three years of my life in it.
I wanted to make some real money, not survive on a student-style shoestring budget.
The "opportunity cost": by doing a PhD for three years, I'd have given up three years of valuable commercial experience.
Ironically, after four years in the programming industry, I can think of several areas I'd be interested in researching to that level. I have rediscovered my geekhood recently, having wondered if I'd been corrupted into a day-job guy with no passion for his subject any more. Hell, I'm the kind of guy who's ambitious enough that he would want to run the R&D department, and start pushing the improvements down the line to people like me today.
And yet now, I'll probably never do a PhD. The student lifestyle was great for four years, but I wouldn't want to live it again now; it wouldn't be the same. I could conceivably do a PhD part-time, but unless it was based on something I could work on during my main job and write up later, it would leave no time for my other interests, so that's out.
I'm starting to wonder whether I've missed out on something good here, but now I'll probably never know.
But the corporate systems aren't either the problem or the victim here. If you're patched up and properly firewalled, you won't get either worm. (If you're not...)
The problem is the millions of home or small business PCs that are not administered by people who are paid to spend their time monitoring the security mailing lists, installing numerous patches and verifying their correctness, monitoring critical systems to ensure they aren't compromised, and otherwise making security a full-time job.
Some of these people are informed and smart. They install patches regularly, run personal firewalls, etc. These people aren't the problem either.
But the rest, the ones whose systems aren't protected, the ones who are going to get the "white worm", are the ones who are going to be causing the problems with MSBlast.
Now, the ethics of releasing a worm like this are obviously questionable. The practical benefits, however, could be pretty significant if it's done well. I don't think this is as black and white an issue as either side is making out on this thread.
Patching my system, are you? What know you of patches? For eight years have I applied patches to this system. My own counsel will I keep, on what is to be patched!
I'm sorry, but you're so stereotypically open-source-biased it's scary.
Microsoft Word got where it is precisely because it was better than the opposition, and for a long time. Microsoft's position today may be dominant, and they may abuse it, but you don't get to 90+% market share by being mediocre. You get there because no-one else has an alternative worth using for so long that most of the market switches.
And please stop equating closed source with the sort of service you get from one or two large companies. I work as a software developer, on what you'd probably call a closed source project. We write technical libraries to sell to other software developers, who typically make end user products themselves. Our company and the service it offers are nothing like what you describe.
If one of our clients has a problem, they get straight through to skilled support staff, who are in direct contact with the dev team if need be. Typical turnaround for a critical bug is same day (that's everything from first contact through to shipping a fixed library that's been through several hours of tests to verify its correctness). This happens because we have a team of professionals who take their job, their products and the service they provide seriously.
And we're not alone. For a more mainstream example, consider that Apple has been known to release patches for vulnerabilities in common Unix tools faster than even the open source community since OS X came out.
Frankly, I find your generalisations about closed source problems to be unfounded and your implications about the attitude of closed source developers offensive. Open source clearly has some advantages. I use it and I have nothing against you if you wish to support it. But closed source doesn't imply all the problems that certain organisations exhibit today, and open source doesn't imply all the benefits of a major project like Linux or Mozilla. If you're going to compare the two, at least do so fairly based on typical examples, or what's the point?
Your comments about voting machines are an excellent argument for opening the source code, and no argument at all for free-as-in-RMS software. That's straw man #1.
Your thinly veiled attacks on Microsoft are typical pro-free-software comments that ignore the way the vast majority of closed source, commercial software doesn't have this problem. That's straw man #2.
I did not call RMS a communist. That's straw man #3.
I will not play with straw men.
And what I'm saying is that it is in the best interests of users and society as a whole to have a good product. That's the motivation behind a generally free market economy, with controls on monopolies etc; it's not some ideal world order, it's a means to a useful end. If you're arguing that we should use an inferior product for some philosophical reason, you need a much more convincing case than anything I've heard here so far.
And of course "the land of the free" really means that everyone is raping and pillaging and doing whatever the hell they damn well please, since after all that's what free really means, doesn't it?
Please take the time to read other posts in a thread before replying yourself. As I've now said several times, complete freedom is not necessarily a good thing, which is why we have laws.
The GPL is there to do that. [...] It keeps everyone on equal ground so that no one can impede the freedom of others.
That's a matter of perspective. Again, as other posters and I have now pointed out several times, the original code is free under many licenses. If it's given away with a BSD licence, or made completely public domain, nothing anyone does can take away the right to use that code from others, or restrict anyone else in what they can do with it. The thing about the GPL is that it doesn't just affect the original code, it places restrictions on what can be done with derivative works. In that sense, the original code wasn't really free at all.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that physical property and intellectual property should be treated the same way in law. I'm merely pointing out that both are, to an extent, artificial constructions. The principled arguments I often see here relating to IP could typically also apply to PP, the only difference being that we intuitively accept the latter, while some people dislike the former.
Regarding the drugs issue, of course the lack of patents isn't the only thing killing research in some countries, but it's surely a significant factor. China's hardly short of resources, yet look at its vulnerability to SARS recently. China also has almost non-existent IP concepts within its legal system. I don't think these are disconnected facts, though of course you're free to disagree.
As for the office suites issue... Why should Microsoft Office define what constitutes an office suite? There used to be several major contenders for the office word processor: WordStar, WordPerfect, MS Word, Ami/Word Pro, etc. There is no reason an open source word processor couldn't develop a more productive tool than MS Word; it's not as though there's no scope for improvement. My point is that, perhaps rather hypocritically, they don't tend to innovate, but merely copy MS Word, and generally not very well. If Microsoft can come up with useful improvements to past products -- and whatever your feelings about their licensing/pricing policies, they certainly have come up with a few widely popular improvements over the years -- then why on earth would I support an approach that would kill them off, in favour of one that would on current evidence produce an inferior product?
(I realise that there are other alternatives to produce text documents, and I have a lot of respect for (La)TeX, both as a useful tool and as an example of a properly engineered piece of software. I don't think it's a great example of typical output from an open source product today for several reasons, though, and as such I'd discount it from the comparison.)
Any of the popular open licences ensures that the code stays free. I can't take someone's GPL'd, BSD'd or otherwise licenced code and somehow remove it from the community, or prevent someone else from using or extending it themselves.
The GPL also imposes restrictions on what I can do after I've decided to use the code, however. It doesn't just affect the code it originally covered, it affects anything I add to it as well, even though that extra material is a result of my own efforts and nothing to do with the existing code. This isn't keeping the original code free -- it already is -- it's just forcing me to make my additional code available as well, whether I want to or not.
If the original code were truly "free", I could use it in this way, and do as I wished with a derived work. This doesn't affect anyone else's ability to use the original "free" code in any way. With the GPL, this is not so, and thus calling GPL'd software "free" is deeply misleading.
And today we fight to protect our legal system, which in turns protects our physical property. It's the same principle, just in a more evolved context.
My property doesn't stay mine "just because". It stays mine because there is a social agreement that it belongs to me, now enshrined in our laws. It stays mine because there will be consequences if someone else tries to take it.
The problem with your analogy, from my own ethical point of view, is that in your case, there is a "victim" in the current situation: an animal dies to become food. I don't think closed source code suffers hurt feelings by not being released.:-)
My point was now to argue either for or against free-as-in-RMS software. It was that the reason many people here disagree with RMS isn't that they don't understand what he's saying, it's that they don't buy his arguments. To follow your analogy, it's as if he's trying to convince me to become a vegetarian even if accepting my place in the food chain and eating a balanced diet currently keeps me healthier, and without the animal rights argument.
A Right is something that is non-negotiablee and in theory we shouldn't even need to pass a law or write it down to claim it.
Unfortunately, that's a rather unhelpful definition. Who decides what rights you have, or do not have? You? Your Founding Fathers? Your Constitution? As someone not living in the US, I really couldn't care less about these things, so how do I know what your "inalienable rights" are?
The only inalienable rights you truly have are those you're prepared to stand up and protect, by any means necessary. Anything else can be taken from you.
And yes, according to my definition, you can do something as stupid as sign away your "rights" to things. With freedom also comes responsibility for your actions. As I said, complete freedom all the time isn't necessarily a good idea, and the law is there to mitigate it.
If you stop and think about it, physical property is no more legitimate than intellectual property. Both are concepts created by the legal system, because without them anyone could try to take anything without compensation, and it was recognised when the laws were created that allowing this was not in the interests of society. It just happens that the idea of physical property has been around much longer and you're more comfortable with it. Saying "information wants to be free" because you can just copy the data is like saying that your car wants to be free because you left it unattended and I know how to pick the locks and hot wire it.
If you really think drugs would still be developed, at the same rate and with the same effectiveness, without the protection that patents and such offer, try living in a country that doesn't have them and see how much serious R&D goes on there. It ain't a whole lot.
Ditto for mainstream software. Sure, there would still be a big bespoke market, but there'd be little incentive for anyone to develop new and improved mainstream apps. You'd just wind up with an effective monopoly by the longest established community developments, and if you didn't like them, too bad. That's no better for end users than a world where 95% of desktops run MS Office.
In fact, the open source office suites are almost universally clones of MS Office, with very few new features worth talking about. For all its ills, Microsoft has at least introduced useful new functionality in the various Office apps over the years. So I'd suggest that killing mainstream commercial development and relying on community efforts would be counterproductive; the mainstream commercial stuff is often what drives the community to develop free-as-in-beer alternatives.
It makes no sense to define freedom as you do where it means that anyone can do anything.
Of course it does; that is exactly what the word "freedom" means.
Of course, complete freedom for everyone all the time is not necessarily a good thing. That's why we have a legal system that defines what is not an acceptable action so everyone knows where they stand.
But the GPL does compel me to behave in certain ways if I use the "free" code. That's my point. As your dictionary definition suggests, free implies a lack of compulsion, and yet this "free" code carries extra requirements with it.
No, I don't think we do. You keep implying that we don't see RMS's philosophical point, and that we think he's making some claim about "free-as-in-RMS" software being better than "non-free" software. I assure you, we (or at least I) understand his arguments perfectly; we (I) just disagree with them.
The problem is that most of us aren't going to accept that free-as-in-RMS software is a good thing if it can't produce better products than the current commercial (or other, free-as-in-beer) offerings. He claims that non-free stuff is inherently evil, IP has to go, etc. But unfortunately, if free-as-in-RMS doesn't come up with the goods, I see no reason to agree with him. As long as that's the case, clearly the commercial software world, current IP laws and other targets of RMShate do offer an advantage to the community as a whole, so why should we give them up just to match his code of ethics?
[RMS] is a real bad-ass programmer. He wrote Emacs and GCC, among other things.
You might want to give a little more background when you make that claim. Neither Emacs nor GCC, as they stand today, are entirely down to RMS.
Emacs was originally something RMS wrote based on TECO. IIRC it was James Gosling (of Java fame) who first provided an implementation that ran on Unix, though Stallman later rewrote it from scratch.
RMS was also the primary developer of GCC early on, but today's system has moved on way beyond the original, and a lot of the good stuff that's been added since and made GCC what it is today has nothing to do with RMS. Writing a simple C compiler and writing today's GCC are different things entirely.
So yes, he's certainly a talented developer who's prepared to put his compiler where his mouth is, but I think we should keep such things in perspective. He's not the only guy on the block with those credentials, not by a long way.
Free is free, and anythoing that compromises that is less than perfect.
The problem with that, of course, is that GPL'd software isn't really free (as in speech). It's just a different set of requirements governing distribution and modification, and it relies just as much on copyright law for protection as any closed source, commercial product.
If some code were completely free, then anyone could take it, compile it, change it, give away the results in any form they wanted, incorporate into a paid-for product with or without the source, or otherwise do as they wished.
The GPL is a great way for people with a shared philosophy to gain mutual benefit from their labours. I have absolutely nothing against that, or their right to protect their agreement via the legal system should that become necessary. If they produce software that is better than commercial alternatives, and choose to give it away, good for them. If not, well, we users can always choose to spend our money buying an alternative we prefer.
But please, calling this "free software" is just as much a misleading propaganda term as calling copyright infringement "intellectual property theft". It's about time a better term was coined.
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I'm quite familiar with the differences between the GPL and public domain, and the implications of those differences, thanks. No slow explanation is required.
What you're missing is that not all code is written by someone wanting recognition and/or profit. Some people might give things away generously, not feeling the need for credit; this has happened for years, hence the amount of public domain software available. (I'm not sure I'd count "giving credit" as a serious restriction of the freedom, either; it's nothing like as restrictive as the GPL, etc.) Other times, perhaps the work was publicly funded and carried out at a university, in which case surely the public is entitled to benefit from it as they see fit.
You're just not thinking wide enough here. I've seen people actually propose on /. that it should be a legal requirement for all publicly funded code to be specifically GPL'd. Why? It's just another licence agreement, which restricts what I can do with the fruits of my tax money. Unsurprisingly, that post was followed by numerous replies from people who'd thought about it, pointing this out.
The same argument still holds here. If the GPL matches your wishes for your code, then by all means use it; you wrote the code, you should have the right to choose. Just please don't try to force it on anyone else who doesn't want to be involved in a GPL project, or represent it as something it's not (free software).
But academics and R&D departments are where the new ideas come from. We already have several OO languages, each of which changes everything and yet somehow stays the same. None of these is really a radical departure from status quo, none of them is going to make a dramatic improvement to productivity.
What we need today are genuine new ideas finding their way into the industry, so that the ones that work in practice can establish themselves and the ones that only work in theory can be set aside. We don't need C#JavaInteropVB++.NET.
VB.NET has no track record. It's nothing like old VB, as any VB6 developer suffering the pain of moving can tell you.
C# has no track record, except for its uncanny resemblance to Java.
C++ with managed extensions has no track record, aside from the C++ part.
Visual J#? After the "track record" of Visual J++, I'd be amazed if anyone serious goes near it.
If you want to talk about track records in a commercial setting, let's talk about C, C++, Perl, Java and VB6. The new Microsoft languages and the .NET architecture beneath them aren't even on the scale.
There's a fabulous little tool called Metapost, which is basically TeX's usual Metafont adapted slightly to produce .eps outputs and with a few extra helpful macros, things like drawing arrows rather than just lines.
It's not for everyone, or every type of graphic, but if you want diagrams in a PostScript format that is easy to insert into LaTeX documents... I'm not aware of any flashy editors, but it's awesomely powerful, and very easy to get good results after a little study up front.
FWIW, I work at a company that writes mathematical libraries, which are typically used by companies writing CAD/CAM/CAE software. I don't know if this applies across the whole company, but certainly among the teams I work with, PhDs seem to be almost universal.
When I left university around four years ago (with a BA in maths and a postgrad diploma in CS) I considered doing a PhD, but decided against it, for several good reasons:
Ironically, after four years in the programming industry, I can think of several areas I'd be interested in researching to that level. I have rediscovered my geekhood recently, having wondered if I'd been corrupted into a day-job guy with no passion for his subject any more. Hell, I'm the kind of guy who's ambitious enough that he would want to run the R&D department, and start pushing the improvements down the line to people like me today.
And yet now, I'll probably never do a PhD. The student lifestyle was great for four years, but I wouldn't want to live it again now; it wouldn't be the same. I could conceivably do a PhD part-time, but unless it was based on something I could work on during my main job and write up later, it would leave no time for my other interests, so that's out.
I'm starting to wonder whether I've missed out on something good here, but now I'll probably never know.
It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.
But the corporate systems aren't either the problem or the victim here. If you're patched up and properly firewalled, you won't get either worm. (If you're not...)
The problem is the millions of home or small business PCs that are not administered by people who are paid to spend their time monitoring the security mailing lists, installing numerous patches and verifying their correctness, monitoring critical systems to ensure they aren't compromised, and otherwise making security a full-time job.
Some of these people are informed and smart. They install patches regularly, run personal firewalls, etc. These people aren't the problem either.
But the rest, the ones whose systems aren't protected, the ones who are going to get the "white worm", are the ones who are going to be causing the problems with MSBlast.
Now, the ethics of releasing a worm like this are obviously questionable. The practical benefits, however, could be pretty significant if it's done well. I don't think this is as black and white an issue as either side is making out on this thread.
Patching my system, are you? What know you of patches? For eight years have I applied patches to this system. My own counsel will I keep, on what is to be patched!
Heh... Wonder how many people have e-mailed BillG and asked "Where did windowsupdate.com go today?"
I'm sorry, but you're so stereotypically open-source-biased it's scary.
Microsoft Word got where it is precisely because it was better than the opposition, and for a long time. Microsoft's position today may be dominant, and they may abuse it, but you don't get to 90+% market share by being mediocre. You get there because no-one else has an alternative worth using for so long that most of the market switches.
And please stop equating closed source with the sort of service you get from one or two large companies. I work as a software developer, on what you'd probably call a closed source project. We write technical libraries to sell to other software developers, who typically make end user products themselves. Our company and the service it offers are nothing like what you describe.
If one of our clients has a problem, they get straight through to skilled support staff, who are in direct contact with the dev team if need be. Typical turnaround for a critical bug is same day (that's everything from first contact through to shipping a fixed library that's been through several hours of tests to verify its correctness). This happens because we have a team of professionals who take their job, their products and the service they provide seriously.
And we're not alone. For a more mainstream example, consider that Apple has been known to release patches for vulnerabilities in common Unix tools faster than even the open source community since OS X came out.
Frankly, I find your generalisations about closed source problems to be unfounded and your implications about the attitude of closed source developers offensive. Open source clearly has some advantages. I use it and I have nothing against you if you wish to support it. But closed source doesn't imply all the problems that certain organisations exhibit today, and open source doesn't imply all the benefits of a major project like Linux or Mozilla. If you're going to compare the two, at least do so fairly based on typical examples, or what's the point?
Your comments about voting machines are an excellent argument for opening the source code, and no argument at all for free-as-in-RMS software. That's straw man #1.
Your thinly veiled attacks on Microsoft are typical pro-free-software comments that ignore the way the vast majority of closed source, commercial software doesn't have this problem. That's straw man #2.
I did not call RMS a communist. That's straw man #3.
I will not play with straw men.
And what I'm saying is that it is in the best interests of users and society as a whole to have a good product. That's the motivation behind a generally free market economy, with controls on monopolies etc; it's not some ideal world order, it's a means to a useful end. If you're arguing that we should use an inferior product for some philosophical reason, you need a much more convincing case than anything I've heard here so far.
No, the answer is public domain.
I've always seen the distinction. That's kinda my point: you can disagree with RMS's position without failing to understand his motivation.
Please take the time to read other posts in a thread before replying yourself. As I've now said several times, complete freedom is not necessarily a good thing, which is why we have laws.
That's a matter of perspective. Again, as other posters and I have now pointed out several times, the original code is free under many licenses. If it's given away with a BSD licence, or made completely public domain, nothing anyone does can take away the right to use that code from others, or restrict anyone else in what they can do with it. The thing about the GPL is that it doesn't just affect the original code, it places restrictions on what can be done with derivative works. In that sense, the original code wasn't really free at all.
Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that physical property and intellectual property should be treated the same way in law. I'm merely pointing out that both are, to an extent, artificial constructions. The principled arguments I often see here relating to IP could typically also apply to PP, the only difference being that we intuitively accept the latter, while some people dislike the former.
Regarding the drugs issue, of course the lack of patents isn't the only thing killing research in some countries, but it's surely a significant factor. China's hardly short of resources, yet look at its vulnerability to SARS recently. China also has almost non-existent IP concepts within its legal system. I don't think these are disconnected facts, though of course you're free to disagree.
As for the office suites issue... Why should Microsoft Office define what constitutes an office suite? There used to be several major contenders for the office word processor: WordStar, WordPerfect, MS Word, Ami/Word Pro, etc. There is no reason an open source word processor couldn't develop a more productive tool than MS Word; it's not as though there's no scope for improvement. My point is that, perhaps rather hypocritically, they don't tend to innovate, but merely copy MS Word, and generally not very well. If Microsoft can come up with useful improvements to past products -- and whatever your feelings about their licensing/pricing policies, they certainly have come up with a few widely popular improvements over the years -- then why on earth would I support an approach that would kill them off, in favour of one that would on current evidence produce an inferior product?
(I realise that there are other alternatives to produce text documents, and I have a lot of respect for (La)TeX, both as a useful tool and as an example of a properly engineered piece of software. I don't think it's a great example of typical output from an open source product today for several reasons, though, and as such I'd discount it from the comparison.)
Any of the popular open licences ensures that the code stays free. I can't take someone's GPL'd, BSD'd or otherwise licenced code and somehow remove it from the community, or prevent someone else from using or extending it themselves.
The GPL also imposes restrictions on what I can do after I've decided to use the code, however. It doesn't just affect the code it originally covered, it affects anything I add to it as well, even though that extra material is a result of my own efforts and nothing to do with the existing code. This isn't keeping the original code free -- it already is -- it's just forcing me to make my additional code available as well, whether I want to or not.
If the original code were truly "free", I could use it in this way, and do as I wished with a derived work. This doesn't affect anyone else's ability to use the original "free" code in any way. With the GPL, this is not so, and thus calling GPL'd software "free" is deeply misleading.
And today we fight to protect our legal system, which in turns protects our physical property. It's the same principle, just in a more evolved context.
My property doesn't stay mine "just because". It stays mine because there is a social agreement that it belongs to me, now enshrined in our laws. It stays mine because there will be consequences if someone else tries to take it.
The problem with your analogy, from my own ethical point of view, is that in your case, there is a "victim" in the current situation: an animal dies to become food. I don't think closed source code suffers hurt feelings by not being released. :-)
My point was now to argue either for or against free-as-in-RMS software. It was that the reason many people here disagree with RMS isn't that they don't understand what he's saying, it's that they don't buy his arguments. To follow your analogy, it's as if he's trying to convince me to become a vegetarian even if accepting my place in the food chain and eating a balanced diet currently keeps me healthier, and without the animal rights argument.
Unfortunately, that's a rather unhelpful definition. Who decides what rights you have, or do not have? You? Your Founding Fathers? Your Constitution? As someone not living in the US, I really couldn't care less about these things, so how do I know what your "inalienable rights" are?
The only inalienable rights you truly have are those you're prepared to stand up and protect, by any means necessary. Anything else can be taken from you.
And yes, according to my definition, you can do something as stupid as sign away your "rights" to things. With freedom also comes responsibility for your actions. As I said, complete freedom all the time isn't necessarily a good idea, and the law is there to mitigate it.
If you stop and think about it, physical property is no more legitimate than intellectual property. Both are concepts created by the legal system, because without them anyone could try to take anything without compensation, and it was recognised when the laws were created that allowing this was not in the interests of society. It just happens that the idea of physical property has been around much longer and you're more comfortable with it. Saying "information wants to be free" because you can just copy the data is like saying that your car wants to be free because you left it unattended and I know how to pick the locks and hot wire it.
If you really think drugs would still be developed, at the same rate and with the same effectiveness, without the protection that patents and such offer, try living in a country that doesn't have them and see how much serious R&D goes on there. It ain't a whole lot.
Ditto for mainstream software. Sure, there would still be a big bespoke market, but there'd be little incentive for anyone to develop new and improved mainstream apps. You'd just wind up with an effective monopoly by the longest established community developments, and if you didn't like them, too bad. That's no better for end users than a world where 95% of desktops run MS Office.
In fact, the open source office suites are almost universally clones of MS Office, with very few new features worth talking about. For all its ills, Microsoft has at least introduced useful new functionality in the various Office apps over the years. So I'd suggest that killing mainstream commercial development and relying on community efforts would be counterproductive; the mainstream commercial stuff is often what drives the community to develop free-as-in-beer alternatives.
Of course it does; that is exactly what the word "freedom" means.
Of course, complete freedom for everyone all the time is not necessarily a good thing. That's why we have a legal system that defines what is not an acceptable action so everyone knows where they stand.
But the GPL does compel me to behave in certain ways if I use the "free" code. That's my point. As your dictionary definition suggests, free implies a lack of compulsion, and yet this "free" code carries extra requirements with it.
No, I don't think we do. You keep implying that we don't see RMS's philosophical point, and that we think he's making some claim about "free-as-in-RMS" software being better than "non-free" software. I assure you, we (or at least I) understand his arguments perfectly; we (I) just disagree with them.
The problem is that most of us aren't going to accept that free-as-in-RMS software is a good thing if it can't produce better products than the current commercial (or other, free-as-in-beer) offerings. He claims that non-free stuff is inherently evil, IP has to go, etc. But unfortunately, if free-as-in-RMS doesn't come up with the goods, I see no reason to agree with him. As long as that's the case, clearly the commercial software world, current IP laws and other targets of RMShate do offer an advantage to the community as a whole, so why should we give them up just to match his code of ethics?
You might want to give a little more background when you make that claim. Neither Emacs nor GCC, as they stand today, are entirely down to RMS.
Emacs was originally something RMS wrote based on TECO. IIRC it was James Gosling (of Java fame) who first provided an implementation that ran on Unix, though Stallman later rewrote it from scratch.
RMS was also the primary developer of GCC early on, but today's system has moved on way beyond the original, and a lot of the good stuff that's been added since and made GCC what it is today has nothing to do with RMS. Writing a simple C compiler and writing today's GCC are different things entirely.
So yes, he's certainly a talented developer who's prepared to put his compiler where his mouth is, but I think we should keep such things in perspective. He's not the only guy on the block with those credentials, not by a long way.
The problem with that, of course, is that GPL'd software isn't really free (as in speech). It's just a different set of requirements governing distribution and modification, and it relies just as much on copyright law for protection as any closed source, commercial product.
If some code were completely free, then anyone could take it, compile it, change it, give away the results in any form they wanted, incorporate into a paid-for product with or without the source, or otherwise do as they wished.
The GPL is a great way for people with a shared philosophy to gain mutual benefit from their labours. I have absolutely nothing against that, or their right to protect their agreement via the legal system should that become necessary. If they produce software that is better than commercial alternatives, and choose to give it away, good for them. If not, well, we users can always choose to spend our money buying an alternative we prefer.
But please, calling this "free software" is just as much a misleading propaganda term as calling copyright infringement "intellectual property theft". It's about time a better term was coined.