Hmmm. I was under the impression that the anarchist faction in Spain was mostly of the syndical anarchist faction (as was, I believe, Bakunin), but I'll take your word for it, though early Marxists tended to classify themselves as anarchists on the basis of the "withering away of the state."
In the latter part of the last century there were at least four different schools of anarchist thought:
communist anarchism (Marxism);
syndical anarchism;
individualist anarchism;
Christian anarchism (Tolstoy; more accurately called pacifist anarchism).
All shared the labor theory of value, whose sole remaining proponents nowadays are the socialists. This may be the source of your confusion; Tucker was usually classified as an individualist anarchist. The communist anarchists -- the ones involved in the Haymarket Riots -- sneered at the individualist anarchists and called them "Boston anarchists" -- since Tucker's magazine Liberty was published in Boston.
Contemporary political classifications don't always fit historical situations too well. (In fact, some political classifications don't fit the contemporary situation too well.)
> many orphans and widows had no source of income other than copyright licencing fees.
While that's certainly a noble reason, it doesn't apply today.
I dunno. The estates of AA Milne, CS Lewis, RA Heinlein and others might not agree with you so readily.
In any case, the classic view of copyright is that it does not protect an idea per se -- e.g. the peaceful tranquillity of a wooded valley in the summer etc. -- but rather its particular expression in specific poetry, prose, music, painting, or whatnot.
What about artistic integrity? Are the activist film directors completely out of line when they sue distributors for cutting their movie in a way which -- in their opinion -- destroys its artistic integrity? What rights does an artist have over his creation? What rights does a programmer have over his code?
Personally I have no exhaustive answer to those questions, but I definitely can't accept the view that the creator of a poem or a sonata or a program has no more fundamental property rights with regard to it than does the first passerby who notices it.
The whole issue of intellectual property rights -- of which this is a part -- was discussed quite heatedly around the turn of the century by such anarchists and radical individualists as Tucker, Lysander Spooner, and others. The debate is discussed in a superb paper by libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy at http://www.digiweb.com/igeldard/LA/heritage/intelp ro.htm.
> It would certainly be better then letting an anonymous group with random agendas loose on your site.
Just a minute. I thought the whole open software community -- hey, really the whole internet -- is "an anonymous group" of individuals "with random agendas." Rob let us loose on his site the minute he decided to allow comments.
This seems like a pretty good first cut at a system, anyway; and if you want to filter 'em yourself, go over to the preferences page and set your threshhold to, say, -32768.
By the way, the "user prefs" page is pretty nifty; this is the first time I've visited it. If you don't like stories about Apple or hamsters or the CDA, you can filter 'em out. Neat!
The whole issue of "modification" is kind of dicey when it comes to text documents, especially in a society overrun with lawyers. For example, when RMS writes an exhortation to produce more open documentation, he has to specifically point out that sections of a manual dealing with philosophy (e.g. the FSF philosophy) should not be modified, but technical sections should be changed to reflect any new features you have added to the code.
This is all very well, and completely in accordance with both common sense and common courtesy -- otherwise one might edit one of RMS' essays to imply that he supported, say, racism or military dictatorship, which would constitute libel and fraud by any imaginable standard. But I'm not sure that this can be stated in any sort of ironclad legal way. (Indeed, events of the Year of Monica suggest that it may be impossible to state anything in a really ironclad legal way.)
And of course, if you can make whatever random changes to the license document you wish when redistributing it, then any license terms become immediately unenforcible.
Perhaps it would be for the best if we just tried to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and remembered Linus' recent comment on the subject:
My personal opinion is that licenses should first be read as moral obligations, and after that they should be gone over by lawyers. -- Linus Torvalds, March 1999
> In what ways are intellectual property rights on software advantageous?
I'm not sure they are, or if they are, the question deserves a much longer discussion than is appropriate here.
But the point is that whatever the practical or metaphysical reality may be, the corporations that we would like to see open their source code believe that their source code is valuable intellectual property, as is evident in the various "commercial open software" licenses, and a standard license of some sort that accomodated that belief would be preferable to the current cascade of differing semi-hemi-demi-open-source licenses we're getting now.
These corporations are unlikely to be persuaded to reveal what they currently regard as their Trade Secret Above All Trade Secrets by any sort of moral or philosophical argument about the nature of ideas, so let's just accept that and move on.
Thanks, Bruce, for a useful and detailed summary of the issues.
Presumably the printed version will include the actual license text; oddly, it's not as easy to find current, definitive versions of the various licenses on the 'net as one would think (or at least I've not found it as easy as I thought). Are you planning to add them to the page?
[slightly off-topic] The summary of the Great Qt License Struggle was interesting but I found its presentation a little one-sided (quite legitimately; it's your book, after all). In the great 'net tradition of presenting all eighteen sides of a two-sided question, do you know if Troll Tech has posted anywhere a (non-PR sanitized) account of the process from their point of view?
This is an excellent summary of the possible problems with licenses which try simultaneously to capture revenue for the originator and to exploit the productivity of internet-wide bazaar-style hacking.
What we really can't tell in advance, though, is which of these putative issues will prove to be a real problem and which will remain purely theoretical. And until we have several years of experience with different "commercial open software" licenses, any conclusions about how the hacker community (or the lawyer community, or indeed the user community) will behave under conditions X, Y, and Z will be purely speculative.
Netscape, after a year, seems to offer a couple of tentative observations:
For all the brouhaha about the license when it was first released, licensing details don't seem to have had much effect on who participates and who doesn't.
Although initial enthusiasm seems to have worn off, enough talented hacking is still going on that significant progress (some fairly spectacular, according to its advocates) resulted from the source release.
It was not the "magic bullet" some had hoped, but as far as one can tell, everyone at Netscape still believes it was (and is) an outstandingly good idea.
All we can really do is enjoy the new flood of source washing in and try not to spend too much time quibbling about exact license terms. (By and large, corporations will listen more closely to the lawyer they're paying hundreds an hour to than to J. Random Hacker anyway, and there's not much we can do about that.) It'll be fascinating, though, to watch the commercial license situation shake itself out. But it'll take patience.
I have a serious problem with the assumption that "free" software automatically refers to "free according to the FSF", because it seems to me that the GPL sacrifices important freedoms in some areas in an attempt to preserve it in others.
But the term "copyleft" was specifically invented by RMS, at least as far as I know, and it's discussed extensively at the FSF web site, so I regard RMS and the FSF as having a legitimate claim on the word.
As near as I can see, this license would not be regarded by the FSF as a "copyleft", but they're the ones to be the judge of that.
There is, however, a crying need for a standardized open software license that simultaneously makes source available for hacking, allows contributing hackers credit for their work, does not require the original source (person or company) to sacrifice all of their intellectual property rights, and protects the originating source against litigation in this crazy lawyer-ridden society. Netscape, IBM, Apple, and Sun are all struggling with this, and doubtless more is to come. If O'Reilly wants to host another Grand Summit, this would be a good topic. The sooner we have a uniform "Commercial Open Software" license that we all understand, the sooner we can stop quibbling about this nonsense and get back to hacking.
Craig
My personal opinion is that licenses should first be read as moral obligations, and after that they should be gone over by lawyers. -- Linus Torvalds, March 1999
It's an old saying in many philosophical movements that you need to be more careful of your friends than of your enemies, for the simple reason that outsiders are more likely to judge your whole movement -- unfairly, of course, but that's the way it is -- more by what your friends do and say than by what your enemies do and say.
Now, for every person who carefully reads and absorbs the well-reasoned arguments at www.fsf.org/philosophy (I disagree with many of their conclusions, but they are rational and well-thought-out), several dozen will see this sort of adolescent foolishness. This is one reason why I'm somewhat disappointed that more adult GPL advocates don't try more actively to discourage this kind of mindless post. (On the other hand, they may realize that it's a hopeless undertaking.)
No doubt that kfm has vastly improved html support in 1.1 (as do kmail and the rest, since they apparently all use a vastly improved library), but it still has a ways to go before it works as well as Netscape4, especially in the areas of forms and printing.
It will be fascinating to see to what extent the NGLayout engine can be adapted to kfm -- that could make for a dynamite combination.
It's a great year to be a hacker. I'm looking forward to it.
The biggest hassle in what I do is the cut-n-paste mess. Even between, say, Netscape 4 and NEdit -- both Motif apps -- I have to remember that it's Alt-c in Netscape but Ctrl-c in Motif. So I usually wind up just using the middle button. (XEmacs understands the Motif clipboard, too, but of course its default key bindings were originally designed for the plates on the back of a stegosaurus.)
Fortunately KDE and GNOME will be interoperable in this fundamental way in the next releases, Qt 2 will support wheel mice, key accelerator conventions seem to be getting more uniform, and so on. KWrite is very, very nice and Gnumeric seems to be almost mature enough to replace Wingz -- and all flame wars aside, either GTK+ or Qt is an enormous improvement -- both in code quality and freedom -- over Motif.
(My personal favorite desktop at the moment is either IceWM or XFCE with wmppp, NEdit, and of course a dozen xiterms. Ain't choice great? Check out www.x11.org when you get bored....)
> We live in a time when such things can and should be handled automatically by machine.
Yep, the automount program and filemanager features are very convenient. But you have to bear in mind why they're necessary, and why they're separated from the OS core: Unix is a multiuser system, so anything that would change the operating environment for everyone at once requires root privileges, whether it's changing the CD or editing XF86Config.
If automount were built into the OS it would provide an endless source of security headaches for Linux as a server -- and just picture what a nice little office system could be set up with a central Alpha or high-end Pentium running apps for a dozen or so old 486s being used as X terminals; a cost-effective, flexible all-Linux installation. But automount under those circumstances would be a pretty awful idea....
This is probably a troll; it's hard to believe that anyone this idiotic could actually learn to operate a toaster, let alone a computer.
But whether it is or not, it's a useful example of the mindset that makes many of us dislike the GPL and gives us the uneasy feeling that it may have outlived its usefulness -- particularly in an age where trial lawyers bicker about what the meaning of "is" is and legislatures believe that no area of human interaction is safe against their interference.
The mere fact that some clown would be clueless enough to prattle about "all true Linux users" shows that the grownups in this movement -- who really do constitute the majority -- have a lot of educating to do.
Craig
My personal opinion is that licenses should first be read as moral obligations, and after that they should be gone over by lawyers.-- Linus Torvalds, March 1999
Since Unix is inherently multiuser, a more traditional approach would be to install all of them and then have the administrative adduser program allow the choice. I believe some commercial Unixes do that with e.g. OpenLook and CDE.
Besides, 10G disks are breaking the $200 barrier now....
Well, I can tell you why mine doesn't. Looking at my logs, about a third of my hits are from v3 browsers, which don't support it. I like the idea of PNG, I'm sure it's technically superior (I'm not a graphics guru, but I'll take everybody's word for it), and eventually I'll start using it. But since graphics are a very minor part of my site -- mostly decorations to prevent the text from becoming boring -- I see no need to risk about a third of my (small) audience for the sake of technical advantages that are in my particular case irrelevant.
Still, though, I support the idea of PNG and wish every success to Greg and his book and his format. The sooner my.gifs are obsolete the better.
> "In the free [software] world, we've been able to do things the right way, because we've been able to take the time," de Icaza says. "We haven't had to worry about deadlines or release dates, and that's given us a chance to create better things...."
I have great respect for Miguel, and wish GNOME the best, but I have to say that the Linux World announcement of GNOME 1.0 was clearly a marketing-driven release date; that's the only possible explanation of its official release with so many instabilities. It's sad to see this happen with free software, but that's life in the big city.
(Linus' release of 2.2.0 with the brown-bag bug -- ldd core -- was, OTOH, not motivated by any marketing concern but simply because Linus was getting a little burned out after two years of 2.1....)
> The compiler in particular would have been torn apart long ago by proprietary interests if it had been covered by anything other than GPL.
One point that I don't understand about the whole license debate -- GPL vs the freer BSD/X/Artistic etc. -- is that GPL people keep repeating this sort of thing as though they have lost something they were entitled to if somebody takes the available source, makes some secret improvements, and makes money selling it -- which is prohibited by the GPL but allowed (one way or another) by most of the others.
If you have some freely-available source, and so does somebody else, and that somebody else makes changes to it without giving them to you, what precisely have you lost? Can you no longer make the same use of the source you always could? What exactly have they deprived you of? How have they "torn apart" the program?
And if this could happen so easily and inevitably, why is all the FreeBSD stuff still doing so well?
Linux is a good enough name, so I think I'll stick with it....
RMS himself has claimed in a recent interview that about 30% of the code in a basic Linux distribution is from the FSF (although he may have meant that it's under the GPL; one problem in this discussion is that the distinction is not always clear). 30% may be a plurality, sure, but it would have nothing to run on if it weren't for the kernel -- and the kernel couldn't be built without gcc.
So? Linux is obviously a complex product and the distro people deserve whatever money and egoboo they make. FSF software is a central part of any distro. That doesn't mean we're all morally obligated to do whatever RMS says -- or indeed to pay any attention to him at all -- but on the other hand RMS has earned the right to try to make his case for the moral necessity of the GPL -- which he is doing, and taking advantage of the sudden industry interest in Linux to evangelize as much as possible.
Our movement -- and I don't care what you call it, we all know what it is -- includes revivalist RMS, PR specialist ESR, politician BP, executives at Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, and VA, and thousands of hackers and hundreds of thousands of testers, advocates, and kibitzers. That's just the way it is; millions of people doing their own thing on Planet Linux for their own reasons, and none of us has the authority to exile anybody else from the movement.
I personally think this effort -- to replace FSF software purely out of spite, or out of disgust with the press attention paid to RMS, or out of fear that clueless business executives may shy away from Linux because of RMS' mystical advocacy of his particular brand of freedom (or the misunderstanding of the GPL apparent in the rantings of some of its more immature supporters, whose mouths are substantially bigger than their brains) -- this effort is fundamentally misguided.
We're not about "reading anybody out" of the movement. (Some people, like Bruce Perens, periodically read themselves out, then back in again. That's their privilege.) We're about producing high-quality software with a completely open and cooperative development model. If we don't do that, we might as well spend our time and resources collecting baseball cards or playing golf.
So instead of reinventing the FSF's wheel, let's go on to making GNOME reliable, getting KDE 2 out the door, expanding The Gimp's capabilities, bulletproofing our NFS routines, writing USB drivers, perfecting LessTif and WINE, or other things that need doing. Wasting development time just because we're ticked off at what someone says is silly, bordering on the childish. We're supposed to be grownups.
We're both probably getting tired and/or bored by this, so if you respond, I promise you'll have the last word....
> The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business.
I would say -- and this is ESR's whole point -- that your analysis is getting it exactly backwards. "The strongest evolutionary pressure" at this point is against the institution of proprietary software, and in particular against Microsoft's dominance of that institution. Linus (and RedHat) didn't go hat in hand to Intel, IBM, Netscape, and the rest begging to be saved and legitimized by commercial investment; they came to us. They want something from us, and as in any free-market transaction, they're trying to figure out (a) exactly what it is they want, and (b) what they can give us for it (whatever it is) in trade.
Free software advocates (and I'm one of them) tend to grossly underestimate the power of their own movement, however disorganized and anarchic it may be (that's something else the suits don't understand, although their institution, the free market, is at least as disorganized and anarchic as ours, and resists all government efforts to "solve" that "problem". What, by the way, makes you think they're any more "coherent" than we are?) -- and to grossly overestimate the power of finance in this movement. We'll be OK no matter what the suits try to do.
As to motivations, RMS is one of the very few the examples I know of who decided to write free software just so it would be FREE. (LessTif is probably another such case.) Much more typical is Spencer Kimball, who started to write The Gimp as an intellectual exercise. He was using Motif, discovered that it sucked eggs big time, and the result was GTK+. Likewise with WindowMaker, Blackbox, Lyx, and probably most of the kernel. Software freedom, for the most part, is a by-product rather than a goal -- note that Netscape freed their source not because of altruism but to hold on to market share.
>...a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy.... new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.
OK, let me get this straight: somebody writes a fantastic new application for Linux that's just wonderful and superior. It's proprietary and costs money. You have a Linux system. You run free software. Somehow this guy selling his wonderful app has... curtailed your freedom?
How? Will your Linux suddenly do less than it could before? Will tar and emacs immediately stop working? Or will you simply have more options than before for using your machine (this particular option not being of interest to you because of your a) poverty, b) dedication to RMSFreedom, c) all of the above)?
And what kind of freedom do you value when you would prefer to suppress this proprietary software, when other people may want it, be willing to pay for it, and not give a damn whether they even get the source, much less whether they can hack it however they like? Doesn't their freedom of choice matter?
RMS' views on software freedom are purely religious -- i.e. you need to either accept on faith his moral system, in which case the GPL follows, or not accept it, in which case there is no rational way to defend it.
The "pragmatist" school points out the engineering value of the open-source development process, which is discussible in empirical and rational terms. Guess which approach to open software advocacy is likely to pick up more adherents.
For years now us Linux advocates have been petitioning major software companies to port their apps -- office suites, games, CAD, whatnot -- to Linux. Now they're poised to do so, and the response of the more insecure and easily frightened in our community is "EEk! Not commercialism! No, no, anything but that!"
Slashdot Mirror
Craig
Hmmm. I was under the impression that the anarchist faction in Spain was mostly of the syndical anarchist faction (as was, I believe, Bakunin), but I'll take your word for it, though early Marxists tended to classify themselves as anarchists on the basis of the "withering away of the state."
Craig
communist anarchism (Marxism);
syndical anarchism;
individualist anarchism;
Christian anarchism (Tolstoy; more accurately called pacifist anarchism).
All shared the labor theory of value, whose sole remaining proponents nowadays are the socialists. This may be the source of your confusion; Tucker was usually classified as an individualist anarchist. The communist anarchists -- the ones involved in the Haymarket Riots -- sneered at the individualist anarchists and called them "Boston anarchists" -- since Tucker's magazine Liberty was published in Boston.
Contemporary political classifications don't always fit historical situations too well. (In fact, some political classifications don't fit the contemporary situation too well.)
Craig
While that's certainly a noble reason, it doesn't apply today.
I dunno. The estates of AA Milne, CS Lewis, RA Heinlein and others might not agree with you so readily.
In any case, the classic view of copyright is that it does not protect an idea per se -- e.g. the peaceful tranquillity of a wooded valley in the summer etc. -- but rather its particular expression in specific poetry, prose, music, painting, or whatnot.
What about artistic integrity? Are the activist film directors completely out of line when they sue distributors for cutting their movie in a way which -- in their opinion -- destroys its artistic integrity? What rights does an artist have over his creation? What rights does a programmer have over his code?
Personally I have no exhaustive answer to those questions, but I definitely can't accept the view that the creator of a poem or a sonata or a program has no more fundamental property rights with regard to it than does the first passerby who notices it.
Craig
Craig
I assume that most moderators will typically operate with their threshhold turned down, anyway, if they take their responsibility seriously....
Craig
Just a minute. I thought the whole open software community -- hey, really the whole internet -- is "an anonymous group" of individuals "with random agendas." Rob let us loose on his site the minute he decided to allow comments.
This seems like a pretty good first cut at a system, anyway; and if you want to filter 'em yourself, go over to the preferences page and set your threshhold to, say, -32768.
By the way, the "user prefs" page is pretty nifty; this is the first time I've visited it. If you don't like stories about Apple or hamsters or the CDA, you can filter 'em out. Neat!
Craig
This is all very well, and completely in accordance with both common sense and common courtesy -- otherwise one might edit one of RMS' essays to imply that he supported, say, racism or military dictatorship, which would constitute libel and fraud by any imaginable standard. But I'm not sure that this can be stated in any sort of ironclad legal way. (Indeed, events of the Year of Monica suggest that it may be impossible to state anything in a really ironclad legal way.)
And of course, if you can make whatever random changes to the license document you wish when redistributing it, then any license terms become immediately unenforcible.
Perhaps it would be for the best if we just tried to give each other the benefit of the doubt, and remembered Linus' recent comment on the subject:
Craig
I'm not sure they are, or if they are, the question deserves a much longer discussion than is appropriate here.
But the point is that whatever the practical or metaphysical reality may be, the corporations that we would like to see open their source code believe that their source code is valuable intellectual property, as is evident in the various "commercial open software" licenses, and a standard license of some sort that accomodated that belief would be preferable to the current cascade of differing semi-hemi-demi-open-source licenses we're getting now.
These corporations are unlikely to be persuaded to reveal what they currently regard as their Trade Secret Above All Trade Secrets by any sort of moral or philosophical argument about the nature of ideas, so let's just accept that and move on.
Craig
Presumably the printed version will include the actual license text; oddly, it's not as easy to find current, definitive versions of the various licenses on the 'net as one would think (or at least I've not found it as easy as I thought). Are you planning to add them to the page?
[slightly off-topic] The summary of the Great Qt License Struggle was interesting but I found its presentation a little one-sided (quite legitimately; it's your book, after all). In the great 'net tradition of presenting all eighteen sides of a two-sided question, do you know if Troll Tech has posted anywhere a (non-PR sanitized) account of the process from their point of view?
Craig
What we really can't tell in advance, though, is which of these putative issues will prove to be a real problem and which will remain purely theoretical. And until we have several years of experience with different "commercial open software" licenses, any conclusions about how the hacker community (or the lawyer community, or indeed the user community) will behave under conditions X, Y, and Z will be purely speculative.
Netscape, after a year, seems to offer a couple of tentative observations:
All we can really do is enjoy the new flood of source washing in and try not to spend too much time quibbling about exact license terms. (By and large, corporations will listen more closely to the lawyer they're paying hundreds an hour to than to J. Random Hacker anyway, and there's not much we can do about that.) It'll be fascinating, though, to watch the commercial license situation shake itself out. But it'll take patience.
Craig
I have a serious problem with the assumption that "free" software automatically refers to "free according to the FSF", because it seems to me that the GPL sacrifices important freedoms in some areas in an attempt to preserve it in others.
But the term "copyleft" was specifically invented by RMS, at least as far as I know, and it's discussed extensively at the FSF web site, so I regard RMS and the FSF as having a legitimate claim on the word.
As near as I can see, this license would not be regarded by the FSF as a "copyleft", but they're the ones to be the judge of that.
There is, however, a crying need for a standardized open software license that simultaneously makes source available for hacking, allows contributing hackers credit for their work, does not require the original source (person or company) to sacrifice all of their intellectual property rights, and protects the originating source against litigation in this crazy lawyer-ridden society. Netscape, IBM, Apple, and Sun are all struggling with this, and doubtless more is to come. If O'Reilly wants to host another Grand Summit, this would be a good topic. The sooner we have a uniform "Commercial Open Software" license that we all understand, the sooner we can stop quibbling about this nonsense and get back to hacking.
Craig
My personal opinion is that licenses should first be read as moral obligations, and after that they should be gone over by lawyers. -- Linus Torvalds, March 1999
It's an old saying in many philosophical movements that you need to be more careful of your friends than of your enemies, for the simple reason that outsiders are more likely to judge your whole movement -- unfairly, of course, but that's the way it is -- more by what your friends do and say than by what your enemies do and say.
Now, for every person who carefully reads and absorbs the well-reasoned arguments at www.fsf.org/philosophy (I disagree with many of their conclusions, but they are rational and well-thought-out), several dozen will see this sort of adolescent foolishness. This is one reason why I'm somewhat disappointed that more adult GPL advocates don't try more actively to discourage this kind of mindless post. (On the other hand, they may realize that it's a hopeless undertaking.)
Craig
No, because it is the only license that perpetuates the FSF concept of freedom at the expense of a concept of freedom held by many other people.
"Freedom" is too important a word to allow it to be exclusively defined by one person or organization.
Craig
It will be fascinating to see to what extent the NGLayout engine can be adapted to kfm -- that could make for a dynamite combination.
It's a great year to be a hacker. I'm looking forward to it.
Craig
Fortunately KDE and GNOME will be interoperable in this fundamental way in the next releases, Qt 2 will support wheel mice, key accelerator conventions seem to be getting more uniform, and so on. KWrite is very, very nice and Gnumeric seems to be almost mature enough to replace Wingz -- and all flame wars aside, either GTK+ or Qt is an enormous improvement -- both in code quality and freedom -- over Motif.
(My personal favorite desktop at the moment is either IceWM or XFCE with wmppp, NEdit, and of course a dozen xiterms. Ain't choice great? Check out www.x11.org when you get bored ....)
Craig
Yep, the automount program and filemanager features are very convenient. But you have to bear in mind why they're necessary, and why they're separated from the OS core: Unix is a multiuser system, so anything that would change the operating environment for everyone at once requires root privileges, whether it's changing the CD or editing XF86Config.
If automount were built into the OS it would provide an endless source of security headaches for Linux as a server -- and just picture what a nice little office system could be set up with a central Alpha or high-end Pentium running apps for a dozen or so old 486s being used as X terminals; a cost-effective, flexible all-Linux installation. But automount under those circumstances would be a pretty awful idea....
Craig
But whether it is or not, it's a useful example of the mindset that makes many of us dislike the GPL and gives us the uneasy feeling that it may have outlived its usefulness -- particularly in an age where trial lawyers bicker about what the meaning of "is" is and legislatures believe that no area of human interaction is safe against their interference.
The mere fact that some clown would be clueless enough to prattle about "all true Linux users" shows that the grownups in this movement -- who really do constitute the majority -- have a lot of educating to do.
Craig
Besides, 10G disks are breaking the $200 barrier now....
Craig
Well, I can tell you why mine doesn't. Looking at my logs, about a third of my hits are from v3 browsers, which don't support it. I like the idea of PNG, I'm sure it's technically superior (I'm not a graphics guru, but I'll take everybody's word for it), and eventually I'll start using it. But since graphics are a very minor part of my site -- mostly decorations to prevent the text from becoming boring -- I see no need to risk about a third of my (small) audience for the sake of technical advantages that are in my particular case irrelevant.
Still, though, I support the idea of PNG and wish every success to Greg and his book and his format. The sooner my .gifs are obsolete the better.
Craig
I have great respect for Miguel, and wish GNOME the best, but I have to say that the Linux World announcement of GNOME 1.0 was clearly a marketing-driven release date; that's the only possible explanation of its official release with so many instabilities. It's sad to see this happen with free software, but that's life in the big city.
(Linus' release of 2.2.0 with the brown-bag bug -- ldd core -- was, OTOH, not motivated by any marketing concern but simply because Linus was getting a little burned out after two years of 2.1....)
Craig
One point that I don't understand about the whole license debate -- GPL vs the freer BSD/X/Artistic etc. -- is that GPL people keep repeating this sort of thing as though they have lost something they were entitled to if somebody takes the available source, makes some secret improvements, and makes money selling it -- which is prohibited by the GPL but allowed (one way or another) by most of the others.
If you have some freely-available source, and so does somebody else, and that somebody else makes changes to it without giving them to you, what precisely have you lost? Can you no longer make the same use of the source you always could? What exactly have they deprived you of? How have they "torn apart" the program?
And if this could happen so easily and inevitably, why is all the FreeBSD stuff still doing so well?
Craig
RMS himself has claimed in a recent interview that about 30% of the code in a basic Linux distribution is from the FSF (although he may have meant that it's under the GPL; one problem in this discussion is that the distinction is not always clear). 30% may be a plurality, sure, but it would have nothing to run on if it weren't for the kernel -- and the kernel couldn't be built without gcc.
So? Linux is obviously a complex product and the distro people deserve whatever money and egoboo they make. FSF software is a central part of any distro. That doesn't mean we're all morally obligated to do whatever RMS says -- or indeed to pay any attention to him at all -- but on the other hand RMS has earned the right to try to make his case for the moral necessity of the GPL -- which he is doing, and taking advantage of the sudden industry interest in Linux to evangelize as much as possible.
Our movement -- and I don't care what you call it, we all know what it is -- includes revivalist RMS, PR specialist ESR, politician BP, executives at Red Hat, SuSE, Caldera, and VA, and thousands of hackers and hundreds of thousands of testers, advocates, and kibitzers. That's just the way it is; millions of people doing their own thing on Planet Linux for their own reasons, and none of us has the authority to exile anybody else from the movement.
I personally think this effort -- to replace FSF software purely out of spite, or out of disgust with the press attention paid to RMS, or out of fear that clueless business executives may shy away from Linux because of RMS' mystical advocacy of his particular brand of freedom (or the misunderstanding of the GPL apparent in the rantings of some of its more immature supporters, whose mouths are substantially bigger than their brains) -- this effort is fundamentally misguided.
We're not about "reading anybody out" of the movement. (Some people, like Bruce Perens, periodically read themselves out, then back in again. That's their privilege.) We're about producing high-quality software with a completely open and cooperative development model. If we don't do that, we might as well spend our time and resources collecting baseball cards or playing golf.
So instead of reinventing the FSF's wheel, let's go on to making GNOME reliable, getting KDE 2 out the door, expanding The Gimp's capabilities, bulletproofing our NFS routines, writing USB drivers, perfecting LessTif and WINE, or other things that need doing. Wasting development time just because we're ticked off at what someone says is silly, bordering on the childish. We're supposed to be grownups.
Craig
Craig
> The strongest evolutionary pressure is now coming from a well-funded and highly coherent group: big business.
I would say -- and this is ESR's whole point -- that your analysis is getting it exactly backwards. "The strongest evolutionary pressure" at this point is against the institution of proprietary software, and in particular against Microsoft's dominance of that institution. Linus (and RedHat) didn't go hat in hand to Intel, IBM, Netscape, and the rest begging to be saved and legitimized by commercial investment; they came to us. They want something from us, and as in any free-market transaction, they're trying to figure out (a) exactly what it is they want, and (b) what they can give us for it (whatever it is) in trade.
Free software advocates (and I'm one of them) tend to grossly underestimate the power of their own movement, however disorganized and anarchic it may be (that's something else the suits don't understand, although their institution, the free market, is at least as disorganized and anarchic as ours, and resists all government efforts to "solve" that "problem". What, by the way, makes you think they're any more "coherent" than we are?) -- and to grossly overestimate the power of finance in this movement. We'll be OK no matter what the suits try to do.
As to motivations, RMS is one of the very few the examples I know of who decided to write free software just so it would be FREE. (LessTif is probably another such case.) Much more typical is Spencer Kimball, who started to write The Gimp as an intellectual exercise. He was using Motif, discovered that it sucked eggs big time, and the result was GTK+. Likewise with WindowMaker, Blackbox, Lyx, and probably most of the kernel. Software freedom, for the most part, is a by-product rather than a goal -- note that Netscape freed their source not because of altruism but to hold on to market share.
> ...a curtailment of the freedoms we all currently enjoy. ... new, wonderful utilities and applications that are less open, less free.
OK, let me get this straight: somebody writes a fantastic new application for Linux that's just wonderful and superior. It's proprietary and costs money. You have a Linux system. You run free software. Somehow this guy selling his wonderful app has ... curtailed your freedom?
How? Will your Linux suddenly do less than it could before? Will tar and emacs immediately stop working? Or will you simply have more options than before for using your machine (this particular option not being of interest to you because of your a) poverty, b) dedication to RMSFreedom, c) all of the above)?
And what kind of freedom do you value when you would prefer to suppress this proprietary software, when other people may want it, be willing to pay for it, and not give a damn whether they even get the source, much less whether they can hack it however they like? Doesn't their freedom of choice matter?
RMS' views on software freedom are purely religious -- i.e. you need to either accept on faith his moral system, in which case the GPL follows, or not accept it, in which case there is no rational way to defend it.
The "pragmatist" school points out the engineering value of the open-source development process, which is discussible in empirical and rational terms. Guess which approach to open software advocacy is likely to pick up more adherents.
For years now us Linux advocates have been petitioning major software companies to port their apps -- office suites, games, CAD, whatnot -- to Linux. Now they're poised to do so, and the response of the more insecure and easily frightened in our community is "EEk! Not commercialism! No, no, anything but that!"
In the immortal words of Nero Wolfe, pfui.
Craig