Only people who don't value software freedom, don't like reading posts in their entirety or in context, and don't hesitate to point out those shortcomings publicly. While I don't agree with the original poster's reaction to the ISP, I do think that software freedom is worth paying for and worth cherishing in its own right.
They mean gratis, not necessarily freedom.
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Fedora Core 6 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Fluendo now offers a free MP3 plugin for GStreamer that has the necessary patent license for end users.
They mean gratis, not that this plugin necessarily gives you the freedoms of free software (for those of you who live in countries saddled with software patents). You could install and run this plugin but doing so would be installing non-free software on your machine. For the rest of you, the Fluendo GStreamer MP3 plugin is free software, licensed under the MIT X11 license. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, talked about this during the first GPLv3 conference when discussing what was then known as the "Liberty or Death" clause of the upcoming GPL. The GPL strives to not only create software freedom (the freedom to share and modify computer programs) but defend it in the face of new threats like software patents (patents on algorithms used in computer software):
The need for this provision was underlined by a recent article talking about a GStreamer plugin which includes source code distributed under an X11 license, or so it says. But then when you read further you see, in fact, that that's not the whole of the license; there's a patent license involved also, and that, in fact, it's not free software at all! And this was presented as a way of making things better for our community. So you believe that a non-free program can make things better for people, that it's a step forward, as the author of the article I read did, then you might think what they did was great. But if your goal is to make sure--is to defend user's freedom, to establish a community of freedom, to spread the idea that freedom is important, than you cannot accept the idea that such a thing is a positive step. It's a surrender, not an amelioration. And so the "Liberty or Death" article of the GPL is just as important as it ever was.
I discussed this some more at the time on my blog.
Focusing on a part of the first suggestion—buying lobbyists to make your case to Congress—what's to prevent the lobbyists you hire from playing both sides of the field, telling you what you want to hear (that they're working in your interests) until the money runs out then going back to their other client (some large corporate copyright holder) telling them what they want to hear?
Under this situation your purchased friends could bleed you dry of your $100M windfall knowing that you can't raise more. Then they return to business as usual representing the corporate book, music, and movie publishers. Whatever portion of the $100M they get is essentially a nice bonus for the lobbyists you chose to hire.
In exchange for buying some well-connected mouthpieces you get little in return for illustrating your faith and validation of a system built to favor the wealthy. Maybe you end up participating in a bidding war for Congresspeople's ears, raising their price a little bit.
On a more personal level, it will become impossible for anyone who supports buying lobbyists to be taken seriously if they later criticize government run by those who can afford the most lobbyists.
And the superior tagging one can get with Ogg versus what one can use with MP3. I also enjoy using the same set of tags on FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files.
And that 4 years is a long time in patent law; the US patent regime might move from a first-to-"invent" to a first-to-file system (in other words, let the largest corporate lawyers prevail). Patenting trivial variations to extend the life of an expired patent might become popular for software patents (as I'm told they are for drug patents).
Given that Microsoft was fined 280m euros, perhaps this tactic backfired.
I wondered how much that was in terms of Microsoft's income; could they afford this easily or would it really change minds? According to Gervase Markham, Microsoft made £14 million a day from Microsoft Windows client licenses alone. 280 million Euros is about £188 million today, so Microsoft will need to spend roughly half a month's worth of Windows license fees to pay off that fine. So, challenging the fine with the lawyers Microsoft is already paying (and have no intention of firing) makes a lot of financial sense. Countries around the world have shown by example that they will either back down or stifle themselves from making Microsoft do something Microsoft doesn't want to do. Therefore, there's nothing lost in trying to reduce the fine.
When the fine was announced, Neelie Kroes was quoted as saying "The fine is at a substantial level to induce Microsoft to comply. They have to behave.".
Your views neglect to account for how much say Europeans have had, the history of patenting in Australia, and most importantly, what could happen if more people get involved in the decisions of their governments. Patent regimes are not natural, they are designed, proposed, and adopted (sometimes by force). It's time the people get busy and become more interested in this fight before they lose more freedom to express themselves. Software developers can tell the stories and I've found through my experience with radio that people will listen to those stories. But if those who know the stories remain silent and accept a myth that software patents are somehow inevitable and immutable, you have chosen to resign yourself to a horrible fate.
The arguments against software patents are profound and significant, particularly those from RMS whose views are at the heart of this/. thread. I'll leave it to you to visit the audio-video archive at the GNU.org website and hear him talk about them. You should familiarize yourself with them so that you can refute them and earn a +5 Insightful rating rather than just giving up, suggesting we have no counterarguments to offer, and letting oppressors have their way.
The Linux kernel went through a time when it was remarkably useless to most people for most jobs, even for the early adopters who would later use the kernel in GNU/Linux servers. Should we have written off the Linux kernel the way you're writing off the Hurd? Perhaps when the hackers working on the Hurd get it to a point where more people can get involved, others will contribute according to their strengths.
The Hurd project is working on a different design than other kernels most people use. Unlike the Linux kernel which, as I understand it, had the benefit of traveling on well-trodden ground by being a monolithic kernel, the Hurd's design is more complex and harder to debug but poses greater promise to do things we aren't doing system-wide right now with GNU/Linux. Considering that we are the beneficiaries of all of their work being done for us without fee or expectation, I think we can afford to be patient and supportive.
Finally, Richard Stallman has said numerous times he does not want to be lumped into the open source movement (thus he would probably object to being called part of "the OSS scene"). He makes that clear every time he speaks on the topic of free software and in his essays and letters to the editor because the movement he founded reaches different philosophical responses than those offered by the open source movement, even while members of both movements get along and the movements are not opponents.
How should he have better conveyed that the question was unimportant and how should he have better conveyed why it was unimportant?
Most people already know how to make money and they do it without programming computers. People already know that not every activity they take on needs to make them money. When computing was young, people in computing made money by selling their expertise just like plumbers, mechanics, electricians, and carpenters do (just to name a few expert professions). I can see how you would think his answer was a dodge if you are under the impression that indeed all of your computer-related work must make money. And if you think that's so, it's your job to come up with ways to make that happen. It isn't someone else's job to come up with a business plan for you.
There is no need to be parsimonious with your gratitude. You say that as if we must choose between giving thanks to both the community and RMS and Torvalds. By the standard you endorse we end up essentially saying "what have you done for me lately?" instead of valuing both the community including both men for their work in the past and their continued work on things that matter.
After all, even by the silly logic of valuing what is and not what was, Torvalds and RMS both deserve thanks; Linus Torvalds is still involved in Linux kernel development, despite not writing all of the code in his fork of that kernel. Richard Stallman is the author of the most widely used free software licenses—the GNU GPL, the GNU LGPL, and the free documentation license the GNU FDL. And when it comes to the GPL (the subject of the talk at the heart of this/. thread), Eben Moglen says "there is no other copyright license in the world that is so strongly identified with the achievements, and the philosophy, of a single public figure".
It would be nice if the FSF actually noticed trends that damage people's understanding of the GPL and did something about them. For example, many programs place the GPL in the role of a click-through license. This makes no sense whatsoever, and leads people to think that the GPL is a EULA and that it applies to *users* of GPL'd sofware. On top of that, it lends credence to the notion that click-through licenses are worth something.
The FSF is not the copyright holder to a lot of GPL-covered software (probably most GPL-covered software). So there is only so much they can do. Their lack of litigiousness is a benefit to society. We would be worse off if they spent their resources suing people to convince them of the righteousness of their argument like the RIAA does. But to say the FSF doesn't "notice trends damage people's understanding of the GPL and [do] something about them" or that the "FSF doesn't do jack" is simply wrong.
Members of the FSF (including GPL author Richard Stallman, Prof. Eben Moglen, and former FSF Executive Director Brad Kuhn) have gone on speaking tours taking questions from all comers, including during dinner after the talk. The talks are often recorded and available online in formats one can play with free software licensed to share verbatim in any medium, even commercially. I feel privileged to have been at the 2006 recent FSF member meeting in Cambridge where I met Prof. Moglen and heard him speak. I was so impressed with his talk, I later aired it on my radio show and I share copies of it with people on my blog.
Can software installers ask people to click to agree to the GPL? If I get some software under the GPL, do I have to agree to anything?
Some software packaging systems have a place which requires you to click through or otherwise indicate assent to the terms of the GPL. This is neither required nor forbidden. With or without a click through, the GPL's rules remain the same.
Merely agreeing to the GPL doesn't place any obligations on you. You are not required to agree to anything to merely use software which is licensed under the GPL. You only have obligations if you modify or distribute the software. If it really bothers you to click through the GPL, nothing stops you from hacking the software to bypass this.
You said:
They [the FSF] claim that any application utilizing MySQL as its SQL database is combining the two applications into a new program and thus either a) becomes subject to the GPL or b) must purchase a commercial license from MySQL. Gee, what could make them want to interpret it that way? Yet while MySQL is flaunting this definition all over the place, the FSF has done nothing to correct them.
What, exactly, constitutes a derivative work in software hasn't been completely argued and drawn out in court yet. This, taken in combination with the FSF not being a copyright holder on MySQL, makes it unreasonable to expect the FSF to correct any misunderstanding MySQL exhibits in their licensing. But the FSF has made numerous statements about what they think on the issue of linking and derivative works. Prof. Eben Moglen, counsel to the FSF, even filed a friend of the court brief to Judge Saris in the MySQL v. NuSphere/Progress case. John Palfrey reported that Judge Saris referred to Moglen's brief and a counter brief as "classic book-ends" because they had drawn opposite conclusions on the matter of what is a derivative work. Judg
According to Jack Valenti, former spokesman for the MPA, in a talk he gave on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few years ago at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Movie Festival, one should not be able to make their own backups. Consumers should buy another copy of the media because Hollywood studios (his former clients) invested so much money in making those movies. Nothing was said about the investment consumers spend in buying copies of the movies and the consumer's desire to not see that investment lost to sticky-fingered kids mishandling costly DVD collections. For Valenti, copying and illicit distribution is framed as "piracy" and "theft"; Valenti was clear to position copyright infringement to be exactly like shoplifting. He didn't once call it by the name the courts use: copyright infringement. Valenti thought it right and proper for Congress to extend the term of copyright again during Pres. Clinton's term, thus denying some works entry into the public domain through expiring copyright (most notably, one of Valenti's former clients' earliest movies). The MPA strongly backs increasingly punitive laws which punish copyright infringement more harshly than other illegal acts like rape.
The FSF doesn't place any of these restrictions on my use of their copyrighted programs. The FSF licenses are written to allow sharing and the FSF never stands in my way of making a backup copy for my personal use. The FSF's speakers I've heard (including Prof. Moglen, RMS, and Brad Kuhn) are against copyright term extensions. They frame copyright infringement as copyright infringement, speaking out against conflations of real piracy and theft. I don't recall anyone from the FSF advocating for more punitive measures to be taken against copyright infringers, but I do recall reading about the FSF working with GPL infringers to amicably resolve the infringement so that nobody pays a fine, goes to trial or prison, or is necessarily publicly embarrassed about their infringement. Even for works that express a political point of view or convey artisic merit, the FSF isn't out to nail the public to the wall as an example in order to scare us into compliance. Instead, the FSF asks us to examine the merit of the laws, consider what copyright law was meant to achieve in the first place, and to consider that there can be bad laws which don't deserve our respect because they stand in the way of building community or transforming a dog-eat-dog society into a place we'd rather live.
I don't think the FSF and MPA treat us the same way despite working under the same copyright regime. I also don't think these two organizations have the same influence over how that copyright regime works in the US or abroad. I think the FSF shows us by example that we can choose not to become harsh like the big book, movie, and music publishers are. By the way, for all of their continued rants against what they call "piracy", one wonders just how ineffective their MPA's measures are since they apparently can't contain the "problem". One also wonders if stopping copyright infringement is the MPA's goal in the first place.
Indeed, Stallman vs. Torvalds is giving Torvalds quite a bit too much credit and higher billing than he deserves.
But it's hardly surprising for a publication which calls Linux an operating system instead of a kernel. Also, I don't think this has much to do with profit-making as it's quite possible to make profit doing free software work (writing free software, changing free software, and handling customer issues regarding free software). I go into more detail on these points on my blog.
You have edited out the interesting part of what I said (and without any indication that you did so) in order to stump for proprietary vaporware. Running a proprietary Writely does nothing to address my concerns.
The GNU Project won't run proprietary software except for the purpose of writing a free replacement (in which case it is necessary to make sure the free replacement can serve as a genuine substitute for the proprietary program), but the GNU Project doesn't say you have to behave the same way. Representatives from the FSF go on speaking tours and give their audiences compelling reasons to convince them that free software is a better choice (there are archives of their talks online; I recommend Eben Moglen's recent talk at the 2006 FSF member meeting, Brad Kuhn's talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and RMS' talk for a software exposition in Curitiba). I think you'll discover that your needs go beyond what proprietors use as talking points (often working to restrict discussion to license price and sets of features). To make free software a compelling choice, the GNU Project has worked on practical free software programs you might use directly or benefit from indirectly.
Freedom and ability are different things; one's freedom of speech isn't about the breadth of their vocabulary or how well they state their ideas, it's about what they have permission to say. Sometimes objectors conflate freedom and ability and then use that conflation to accuse those pursuing freedom of not delivering ability. One constructive response I've heard from the FSF is to talk about free software in education, pointing out that computer users in school are particularly well served by an exclusively free software computer system because they have permission to fully understand what the computer is doing all while using actual production-quality code in use around the world. Students are thus given an opportunity to turn permission into skill.
Although you mean price when you say "free", it is interesting to note what Google's online services deprive you of.
I'm not free to run Writely on my own LAN so that my LAN users don't have to reveal the content of their documents to Google. For all I know, Google will leak a user's information and I'd rather not give them so much information to work with. They say they "take security very seriously" in their Writely tour but I can't prevent a disgruntled Google employee from distributing copies of information I've written with Writely except to not give them that information in the first place.
I'm also not free to modify Writely to suit my needs. So if I want to run the service on a machine in my house and provide that service to myself over the Internet, I can't make sure that the program does what I want it to do.
Most of the services Google offers are unimaginative and simply not attractive when one considers that they're indexing everything you do with them so that they can build saleable profile on you and possibly inadvertantly leak information to others. I'd rather run locally-hosted free software programs like OpenOffice.org.
If your blog isn't already hosted on Google, won't you have to give Google your blog login and password so that Writely can save data directly to your blog?
I believe that is what I'm doing—from the perspective of the effect of that behavior on the users.
I don't mind paying for free software, in fact I've done so for individual programs as well as entire free operating systems. But I refuse to believe that the effect on users is unimportant or that one can't run a business by distributing and building upon free software. Plenty of large and small businesses (including my own) would prove me wrong by their mere ongoing existence. I would rather do business in an ethical way which means respecting my clients software freedoms while meeting their needs for a fee.
You're taking the views of the FSF beyond what they actually are saying - note, for example, that glibc remains LGPL'd, the base libraries for GNOME are also LGPL'd - and you're also ignoring network effects.
I think you should read the entire essay I linked to and I think you'll see that due consideration has been given to network effects and increasing use without treating proprietors like charities.
Is Freedom Freedom if you have to practice it in a cage?
Pursuing an advance of one's rights always means making choices that restrict one from what's available. This is natural when one is rejecting what's available on the grounds that it doesn't meet one's needs in some substantive way. Thus your question tries to encourage us to dismiss a pursuit of freedom on the grounds that choice is more valuable; you'll never be able to do everything you want with non-free software and building a world where you have increased freedom takes restraint, time, and effort.
Users can pool their money together to buy the services of a programmer then copy the program they paid someone to write and each enjoy a copy. It's not that users are prohibited from doing this, as you say, but that this not yet widely done. But in time I think this will be done more commonly, just as people hire other professionals to do technical tasks requiring specific knowledge. Not that long ago it was hard to open the phonebook and find an ISP. Today, it's not so hard to do this. These things can and do change.
If you pool your money with someone to buy a copy of a proprietary program you can't legally make a copy of that program despite that you both put in money to pay for that license (and that this sale of a license is a sale that otherwise wouldn't have happened). This is not an issue with commercial free software.
Inspection matters for everyone; some inspection jobs are easy and anyone can do them. Translating programs into another human language (French, English, etc., not programming language) requires inspection. Proprietary software doesn't allow this because that would mean being licensed to make a derivative work. Inspection also matters if one user wants to ask a more technical user to just help answer questions, the same way you hire a plumber or electrician (or ask a family member to help with these tasks).
Choice can be a scam that can railroad you out of something more important, such as your software freedom.
For some time, web users who wanted a (then) modern GUI web browser had Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator to choose from. You only need two alternatives to have "choice" but here one had three to pick from.
None of these choices respect a user's software freedom because all of those programs are proprietary.
Such a simplistic view purposefully rejects the effect on the user; which is precisely why we should discuss and pursue user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify published software.
That's why the phrase "open-source" was developed. Unless you are Richard Stallman, you don't want to have to write long articles explaining what you mean by free.
So instead, we have confusion over what "open source" means. That term is no more clear and comes with its own long essay on what the term means (a 10-part definition, last I looked, which is longer than the definition of free software). At least with the FSF you get respectful descriptions of how things are complete with references and quotes to back up the claims. The OSI is far more disdainful and less professional in its description of the difference between the free software and open source movements. From the essay describing the difference between the two movements: (emphasis mine)
The official definition of ``open source software,'' as published by the Open Source Initiative, is very close to our definition of free software; however, it is a little looser in some respects, and they have accepted a few licenses that we consider unacceptably restrictive of the users. However, the obvious meaning for the expression ``open source software'' is ``You can look at the source code.'' This is a much weaker criterion than free software; it includes free software, but also includes semi-free programs such as Xv, and even some proprietary programs, including Qt under its original license (before the QPL).
That obvious meaning for ``open source'' is not the meaning that its advocates intend. The result is that most people misunderstand what those advocates are advocating. Here is how writer Neal Stephenson defined ``open source'':
Linux is ``open source'' software meaning, simply, that anyone can get copies of its source code files.
I don't think he deliberately sought to reject or dispute the ``official'' definition. I think he simply applied the conventions of the English language to come up with a meaning for the term. The state of Kansas published a similar definition:
Make use of open-source software (OSS). OSS is software for which the source code is freely and publicly available, though the specific licensing agreements vary as to what one is allowed to do with that code.
Of course, the open source people have tried to deal with this by publishing a precise definition for the term, just as we have done for ``free software.''
But the explanation for ``free software'' is simple--a person who has grasped the idea of ``free speech, not free beer'' will not get it wrong again. There is no such succinct way to explain the official meaning of ``open source'' and show clearly why the natural definition is the wrong one.
[...] in order for FOSS to win-out, it may need some non-FOSS code in the short term. That's always been the case.
To win what, exactly—popularity? For free software advocates popularity is not a goal. Freedom is a goal, a goal that is not achieved by installing non-free software on one's computer.
Even in the essay discussing the LGPL (formerly known as the "Library GPL" now known as the "Lesser GPL") one can see the FSF making this point:
Proprietary software developers, seeking to deny the free competition an important advantage, will try to convince authors not to contribute libraries to the GPL-covered collection. For example, they may appeal to the ego, promising "more users for this library" if we let them use the code in proprietary software products. Popularity is tempting, and it is easy for a library developer to rationalize the idea that boosting the popularity of that one library is what the community needs above all.
But we should not listen to these temptations, because we can achieve much more if we stand together. We free software developers should support one another. By releasing libraries that are limited to free software only, we can help each other's free software packages outdo the proprietary alternatives. The whole free software movement will have more popularity, because free software as a whole will stack up better against the competition.
ESR, Eric S. Raymond, is not associated with "FOSS". FOSS is a term used when one wants to give credit to both the Free Software and Open Source movements without favoring either. ESR is a proponent of the Open Source movement and one of the people who started the Open Source Initiative over a decade after the GNU Project and the Free Software movement had been going.
The Free Software movement advocates exclusively for free software because only free software respects users software freedoms (the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software). The Free Software movement examines these issues in terms of ethics, speaks to all computer users, and takes a far broader view than the Open Source movement which never discusses user's freedoms and examines these issues in terms of a developmental process that is chiefly aimed at businesses.
The OSI has given a remarkably disrespectful view of the differences between the two movements, reducing the difference to "ideological tub-thumping" in their FAQ. The Free Software Foundation has a far more informative and respectful view in an essay on the differences between the two movements.
To address the thread-starter's comment in this/. thread, Opera isn't being ignored by just people in discussions like this. It's ignored by users as well; Opera is remarkably unpopular.
I'll offer some reasons why I ignore Opera:
Opera is proprietary software. I value my software freedom, so I'm not willing to lose it by using software that doesn't respect my freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the program any time I want for any reason I want. I refuse to discuss free and proprietary software as though they have an equivalent effect on the user by framing the issue exclusively on technical features or cost.
Opera doesn't obey the CSS3 I'm interested in (if it implements anything in CSS3 at all). I understand that CSS3 isn't official, but with Gecko I get support for some CSS3 selectors that let me do nice things such as fast tabs with:target. I don't use MSIE, but there is a clever set of JS scripts to add some CSS3 support and fix some of the bugs in MSIE.
Opera doesn't have the rich set of extensions I can find for Firefox. This is probably a corollary to the first point about software freedom.
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Only people who don't value software freedom, don't like reading posts in their entirety or in context, and don't hesitate to point out those shortcomings publicly. While I don't agree with the original poster's reaction to the ISP, I do think that software freedom is worth paying for and worth cherishing in its own right.
They mean gratis, not that this plugin necessarily gives you the freedoms of free software (for those of you who live in countries saddled with software patents). You could install and run this plugin but doing so would be installing non-free software on your machine. For the rest of you, the Fluendo GStreamer MP3 plugin is free software, licensed under the MIT X11 license. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, talked about this during the first GPLv3 conference when discussing what was then known as the "Liberty or Death" clause of the upcoming GPL. The GPL strives to not only create software freedom (the freedom to share and modify computer programs) but defend it in the face of new threats like software patents (patents on algorithms used in computer software):
I discussed this some more at the time on my blog.
Focusing on a part of the first suggestion—buying lobbyists to make your case to Congress—what's to prevent the lobbyists you hire from playing both sides of the field, telling you what you want to hear (that they're working in your interests) until the money runs out then going back to their other client (some large corporate copyright holder) telling them what they want to hear?
Under this situation your purchased friends could bleed you dry of your $100M windfall knowing that you can't raise more. Then they return to business as usual representing the corporate book, music, and movie publishers. Whatever portion of the $100M they get is essentially a nice bonus for the lobbyists you chose to hire.
In exchange for buying some well-connected mouthpieces you get little in return for illustrating your faith and validation of a system built to favor the wealthy. Maybe you end up participating in a bidding war for Congresspeople's ears, raising their price a little bit.
On a more personal level, it will become impossible for anyone who supports buying lobbyists to be taken seriously if they later criticize government run by those who can afford the most lobbyists.
And the superior tagging one can get with Ogg versus what one can use with MP3. I also enjoy using the same set of tags on FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files.
And that 4 years is a long time in patent law; the US patent regime might move from a first-to-"invent" to a first-to-file system (in other words, let the largest corporate lawyers prevail). Patenting trivial variations to extend the life of an expired patent might become popular for software patents (as I'm told they are for drug patents).
I wondered how much that was in terms of Microsoft's income; could they afford this easily or would it really change minds? According to Gervase Markham, Microsoft made £14 million a day from Microsoft Windows client licenses alone. 280 million Euros is about £188 million today, so Microsoft will need to spend roughly half a month's worth of Windows license fees to pay off that fine. So, challenging the fine with the lawyers Microsoft is already paying (and have no intention of firing) makes a lot of financial sense. Countries around the world have shown by example that they will either back down or stifle themselves from making Microsoft do something Microsoft doesn't want to do. Therefore, there's nothing lost in trying to reduce the fine.
When the fine was announced, Neelie Kroes was quoted as saying "The fine is at a substantial level to induce Microsoft to comply. They have to behave.".
Your views neglect to account for how much say Europeans have had, the history of patenting in Australia, and most importantly, what could happen if more people get involved in the decisions of their governments. Patent regimes are not natural, they are designed, proposed, and adopted (sometimes by force). It's time the people get busy and become more interested in this fight before they lose more freedom to express themselves. Software developers can tell the stories and I've found through my experience with radio that people will listen to those stories. But if those who know the stories remain silent and accept a myth that software patents are somehow inevitable and immutable, you have chosen to resign yourself to a horrible fate.
/. thread. I'll leave it to you to visit the audio-video archive at the GNU.org website and hear him talk about them. You should familiarize yourself with them so that you can refute them and earn a +5 Insightful rating rather than just giving up, suggesting we have no counterarguments to offer, and letting oppressors have their way.
The arguments against software patents are profound and significant, particularly those from RMS whose views are at the heart of this
The Linux kernel went through a time when it was remarkably useless to most people for most jobs, even for the early adopters who would later use the kernel in GNU/Linux servers. Should we have written off the Linux kernel the way you're writing off the Hurd? Perhaps when the hackers working on the Hurd get it to a point where more people can get involved, others will contribute according to their strengths.
The Hurd project is working on a different design than other kernels most people use. Unlike the Linux kernel which, as I understand it, had the benefit of traveling on well-trodden ground by being a monolithic kernel, the Hurd's design is more complex and harder to debug but poses greater promise to do things we aren't doing system-wide right now with GNU/Linux. Considering that we are the beneficiaries of all of their work being done for us without fee or expectation, I think we can afford to be patient and supportive.
Finally, Richard Stallman has said numerous times he does not want to be lumped into the open source movement (thus he would probably object to being called part of "the OSS scene"). He makes that clear every time he speaks on the topic of free software and in his essays and letters to the editor because the movement he founded reaches different philosophical responses than those offered by the open source movement, even while members of both movements get along and the movements are not opponents.
How should he have better conveyed that the question was unimportant and how should he have better conveyed why it was unimportant?
Most people already know how to make money and they do it without programming computers. People already know that not every activity they take on needs to make them money. When computing was young, people in computing made money by selling their expertise just like plumbers, mechanics, electricians, and carpenters do (just to name a few expert professions). I can see how you would think his answer was a dodge if you are under the impression that indeed all of your computer-related work must make money. And if you think that's so, it's your job to come up with ways to make that happen. It isn't someone else's job to come up with a business plan for you.
There is no need to be parsimonious with your gratitude. You say that as if we must choose between giving thanks to both the community and RMS and Torvalds. By the standard you endorse we end up essentially saying "what have you done for me lately?" instead of valuing both the community including both men for their work in the past and their continued work on things that matter.
After all, even by the silly logic of valuing what is and not what was, Torvalds and RMS both deserve thanks; Linus Torvalds is still involved in Linux kernel development, despite not writing all of the code in his fork of that kernel. Richard Stallman is the author of the most widely used free software licenses—the GNU GPL, the GNU LGPL, and the free documentation license the GNU FDL. And when it comes to the GPL (the subject of the talk at the heart of this /. thread), Eben Moglen says "there is no other copyright license in the world that is so strongly identified with the achievements, and the philosophy, of a single public figure".
The FSF is not the copyright holder to a lot of GPL-covered software (probably most GPL-covered software). So there is only so much they can do. Their lack of litigiousness is a benefit to society. We would be worse off if they spent their resources suing people to convince them of the righteousness of their argument like the RIAA does. But to say the FSF doesn't "notice trends damage people's understanding of the GPL and [do] something about them" or that the "FSF doesn't do jack" is simply wrong.
You said:
What, exactly, constitutes a derivative work in software hasn't been completely argued and drawn out in court yet. This, taken in combination with the FSF not being a copyright holder on MySQL, makes it unreasonable to expect the FSF to correct any misunderstanding MySQL exhibits in their licensing. But the FSF has made numerous statements about what they think on the issue of linking and derivative works. Prof. Eben Moglen, counsel to the FSF, even filed a friend of the court brief to Judge Saris in the MySQL v. NuSphere/Progress case. John Palfrey reported that Judge Saris referred to Moglen's brief and a counter brief as "classic book-ends" because they had drawn opposite conclusions on the matter of what is a derivative work. Judg
According to Jack Valenti, former spokesman for the MPA, in a talk he gave on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few years ago at Roger Ebert's Overlooked Movie Festival, one should not be able to make their own backups. Consumers should buy another copy of the media because Hollywood studios (his former clients) invested so much money in making those movies. Nothing was said about the investment consumers spend in buying copies of the movies and the consumer's desire to not see that investment lost to sticky-fingered kids mishandling costly DVD collections. For Valenti, copying and illicit distribution is framed as "piracy" and "theft"; Valenti was clear to position copyright infringement to be exactly like shoplifting. He didn't once call it by the name the courts use: copyright infringement. Valenti thought it right and proper for Congress to extend the term of copyright again during Pres. Clinton's term, thus denying some works entry into the public domain through expiring copyright (most notably, one of Valenti's former clients' earliest movies). The MPA strongly backs increasingly punitive laws which punish copyright infringement more harshly than other illegal acts like rape.
The FSF doesn't place any of these restrictions on my use of their copyrighted programs. The FSF licenses are written to allow sharing and the FSF never stands in my way of making a backup copy for my personal use. The FSF's speakers I've heard (including Prof. Moglen, RMS, and Brad Kuhn) are against copyright term extensions. They frame copyright infringement as copyright infringement, speaking out against conflations of real piracy and theft. I don't recall anyone from the FSF advocating for more punitive measures to be taken against copyright infringers, but I do recall reading about the FSF working with GPL infringers to amicably resolve the infringement so that nobody pays a fine, goes to trial or prison, or is necessarily publicly embarrassed about their infringement. Even for works that express a political point of view or convey artisic merit, the FSF isn't out to nail the public to the wall as an example in order to scare us into compliance. Instead, the FSF asks us to examine the merit of the laws, consider what copyright law was meant to achieve in the first place, and to consider that there can be bad laws which don't deserve our respect because they stand in the way of building community or transforming a dog-eat-dog society into a place we'd rather live.
I don't think the FSF and MPA treat us the same way despite working under the same copyright regime. I also don't think these two organizations have the same influence over how that copyright regime works in the US or abroad. I think the FSF shows us by example that we can choose not to become harsh like the big book, movie, and music publishers are. By the way, for all of their continued rants against what they call "piracy", one wonders just how ineffective their MPA's measures are since they apparently can't contain the "problem". One also wonders if stopping copyright infringement is the MPA's goal in the first place.
Indeed, Stallman vs. Torvalds is giving Torvalds quite a bit too much credit and higher billing than he deserves.
But it's hardly surprising for a publication which calls Linux an operating system instead of a kernel. Also, I don't think this has much to do with profit-making as it's quite possible to make profit doing free software work (writing free software, changing free software, and handling customer issues regarding free software). I go into more detail on these points on my blog.
You have edited out the interesting part of what I said (and without any indication that you did so) in order to stump for proprietary vaporware. Running a proprietary Writely does nothing to address my concerns.
The GNU Project won't run proprietary software except for the purpose of writing a free replacement (in which case it is necessary to make sure the free replacement can serve as a genuine substitute for the proprietary program), but the GNU Project doesn't say you have to behave the same way. Representatives from the FSF go on speaking tours and give their audiences compelling reasons to convince them that free software is a better choice (there are archives of their talks online; I recommend Eben Moglen's recent talk at the 2006 FSF member meeting, Brad Kuhn's talk at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and RMS' talk for a software exposition in Curitiba). I think you'll discover that your needs go beyond what proprietors use as talking points (often working to restrict discussion to license price and sets of features). To make free software a compelling choice, the GNU Project has worked on practical free software programs you might use directly or benefit from indirectly.
Freedom and ability are different things; one's freedom of speech isn't about the breadth of their vocabulary or how well they state their ideas, it's about what they have permission to say. Sometimes objectors conflate freedom and ability and then use that conflation to accuse those pursuing freedom of not delivering ability. One constructive response I've heard from the FSF is to talk about free software in education, pointing out that computer users in school are particularly well served by an exclusively free software computer system because they have permission to fully understand what the computer is doing all while using actual production-quality code in use around the world. Students are thus given an opportunity to turn permission into skill.
Although you mean price when you say "free", it is interesting to note what Google's online services deprive you of.
I'm not free to run Writely on my own LAN so that my LAN users don't have to reveal the content of their documents to Google. For all I know, Google will leak a user's information and I'd rather not give them so much information to work with. They say they "take security very seriously" in their Writely tour but I can't prevent a disgruntled Google employee from distributing copies of information I've written with Writely except to not give them that information in the first place.
I'm also not free to modify Writely to suit my needs. So if I want to run the service on a machine in my house and provide that service to myself over the Internet, I can't make sure that the program does what I want it to do.
Most of the services Google offers are unimaginative and simply not attractive when one considers that they're indexing everything you do with them so that they can build saleable profile on you and possibly inadvertantly leak information to others. I'd rather run locally-hosted free software programs like OpenOffice.org.
If your blog isn't already hosted on Google, won't you have to give Google your blog login and password so that Writely can save data directly to your blog?
I believe that is what I'm doing—from the perspective of the effect of that behavior on the users.
I don't mind paying for free software, in fact I've done so for individual programs as well as entire free operating systems. But I refuse to believe that the effect on users is unimportant or that one can't run a business by distributing and building upon free software. Plenty of large and small businesses (including my own) would prove me wrong by their mere ongoing existence. I would rather do business in an ethical way which means respecting my clients software freedoms while meeting their needs for a fee.
I think you should read the entire essay I linked to and I think you'll see that due consideration has been given to network effects and increasing use without treating proprietors like charities.
Pursuing an advance of one's rights always means making choices that restrict one from what's available. This is natural when one is rejecting what's available on the grounds that it doesn't meet one's needs in some substantive way. Thus your question tries to encourage us to dismiss a pursuit of freedom on the grounds that choice is more valuable; you'll never be able to do everything you want with non-free software and building a world where you have increased freedom takes restraint, time, and effort.
Users can pool their money together to buy the services of a programmer then copy the program they paid someone to write and each enjoy a copy. It's not that users are prohibited from doing this, as you say, but that this not yet widely done. But in time I think this will be done more commonly, just as people hire other professionals to do technical tasks requiring specific knowledge. Not that long ago it was hard to open the phonebook and find an ISP. Today, it's not so hard to do this. These things can and do change.
If you pool your money with someone to buy a copy of a proprietary program you can't legally make a copy of that program despite that you both put in money to pay for that license (and that this sale of a license is a sale that otherwise wouldn't have happened). This is not an issue with commercial free software.
Inspection matters for everyone; some inspection jobs are easy and anyone can do them. Translating programs into another human language (French, English, etc., not programming language) requires inspection. Proprietary software doesn't allow this because that would mean being licensed to make a derivative work. Inspection also matters if one user wants to ask a more technical user to just help answer questions, the same way you hire a plumber or electrician (or ask a family member to help with these tasks).
No, the definition of freedom is not choice.
Choice can be a scam that can railroad you out of something more important, such as your software freedom.
For some time, web users who wanted a (then) modern GUI web browser had Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Netscape Navigator to choose from. You only need two alternatives to have "choice" but here one had three to pick from.
None of these choices respect a user's software freedom because all of those programs are proprietary.
Such a simplistic view purposefully rejects the effect on the user; which is precisely why we should discuss and pursue user's freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify published software.
So instead, we have confusion over what "open source" means. That term is no more clear and comes with its own long essay on what the term means (a 10-part definition, last I looked, which is longer than the definition of free software). At least with the FSF you get respectful descriptions of how things are complete with references and quotes to back up the claims. The OSI is far more disdainful and less professional in its description of the difference between the free software and open source movements. From the essay describing the difference between the two movements: (emphasis mine)
To win what, exactly—popularity? For free software advocates popularity is not a goal. Freedom is a goal, a goal that is not achieved by installing non-free software on one's computer.
Even in the essay discussing the LGPL (formerly known as the "Library GPL" now known as the "Lesser GPL") one can see the FSF making this point:
ESR, Eric S. Raymond, is not associated with "FOSS". FOSS is a term used when one wants to give credit to both the Free Software and Open Source movements without favoring either. ESR is a proponent of the Open Source movement and one of the people who started the Open Source Initiative over a decade after the GNU Project and the Free Software movement had been going.
The Free Software movement advocates exclusively for free software because only free software respects users software freedoms (the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify software). The Free Software movement examines these issues in terms of ethics, speaks to all computer users, and takes a far broader view than the Open Source movement which never discusses user's freedoms and examines these issues in terms of a developmental process that is chiefly aimed at businesses.
The OSI has given a remarkably disrespectful view of the differences between the two movements, reducing the difference to "ideological tub-thumping" in their FAQ. The Free Software Foundation has a far more informative and respectful view in an essay on the differences between the two movements.
To address the thread-starter's comment in this /. thread, Opera isn't being ignored by just people in discussions like this. It's ignored by users as well; Opera is remarkably unpopular.
I'll offer some reasons why I ignore Opera: