there's a steady droll of anti-free software going on.
I take it to mean that commercial interests are stronger that potential gains enabled by new technological forms of collaboration. We (as a society) are 'choosing' to keep all gains enabled by digital technology private rather than revising the capitalist apparatus which is strained by these new digital possibilities.
Strangly fixated on how "free software" is not a metonym. I wonder what the author would make of free speech, let alone the fact that grammer is completely irrelevant to the point at hand.
It then marshalls enough other bad arguments in a short enough period to be a gish gallop, and I gave up halfway through.
Honestly I felt the presise had some promise, software has changed and the FSF not so much, but this article does not convince or educate me of it.
Source-available software that has inoffensive terms and enforcement has allowed people to take Free Software for granted; much in the same manner that the lack on onerous stifling of speech has allowed many to take Free Speech for granted. Many young north americans think speech should face more limits, for instance.
Alright. Let me save you an hour or so, and below I'll point out spots where I take issue.
TL:DR
Through militant refusal to read up on linguistic context, and grammar nazi'ing, the author sets the stage for a complete teardown of Free Software.
Starts of with intentionally not getting the point, keeps going to explaining the historical suck that prompted the Free Software movement and villainizing the movement for forcing source code on people, and for depriving all those software providers of uncontested captive audiences.
Stipulates that whatever RedHat does must be the superior approach to burdening people with source.
Complains about free as in beer, and how they shouldn't use that anyway, because they should brew their own beer if they actually followed their values that spawn out of an alleged origin myth of Free Software being the to protect people from Bad Actors. (Only partially, but never the only goal)
Asserts GPL wouldn't have saved anyone from THERAC-25 (not that the proprietary binary only way did either)...
Honestly couldn't go any further.
Excerpts below. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to weep for the time I'll never get back.
Number one:
>Those of us who are interested in issues of freedom and ethics and social justice related to software must explore alternative stratagems to achieve those objectives. The tactics of the Free Software Foundation (the insistence on copylefting software and fighting software patents)
Free Software was only about one thing: creating software that protects the rights of users. If you came to the movement to do anything else... I got nothing.
>The first sign that free software is intellectually bankrupt is that the Free Software Foundation seems unable to develop new generations of leadership.
Hasn't needed to. Stallman and the Board have done just fine, despite what a bunch of folks would like people to believe.
>It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
The Free Software Foundation is famously fixated on insisting that it be given credit for Linux.
Noted; but follow up question: Author seems rather concerned about who shouldn't be take credit, so... Why bring that up exactly? Also, last I checked, GNU never took credit for Linux. Linux is an OS kernel. GNU is the user space traditionally coupled with the Linux kernel. Together they are GNU/Linux, GNU on Linux, or as I endearingly refer to it, "the damn computer".
>Thirdly, the rhetoric of Free Software devotees is awkward and unconvincing. The inflexibility (or inarticulateness) that has failed to evolve the talking points to make them more effective is a failure of politics. To take my own pet peeve, it is unarguable that inanimate objects cannot have freedoms. People have freedoms. Frying pans, as an example, cannot have freedoms. If one were to talk about Free Frying Pans, the only way to interpret that statement is that one is referring to frying pans that one needn’t pay for. When one uses the phrase “free press”, one is not suggesting that the pile of metal and wood that constitutes a printing press machine is entitled to freedoms. The word “press” in that phrase is a figure of speech known as metonymy. It refers to journalists It refers to journalists. “Freedom of the press” is talking about the freedom bestowed on journalists. Most people understand that “the press” refers to the journalist collective. So when one says “free software” or “software freedom” we know that the freedom is not given to an executable file. The expression (unless we are referring to software that we needn’t pay for) is referring to freedom for some group of people that we know as “the software” (y’know, like “the press”). And who are those people who are members of “the software”? That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t try to explain it to me. I was pointing out how nonsensical this framing is.
That entire gem, right there is a crime against any ...
I admit I did not read the whole essay, but I think the idea of free software is more relevant today than ever, and is only getting more so. In fact, I think we're approaching the "runaway" part of an exponential curve.
We're in a place where non-programmers and non-hackers are waking up to the importance of transparency and data ownership, and there's no way to achieve that without free software.
I like the idea of public software mentioned in the article, which I understand to be software which is fully transparent and verifiable by everyone, which also sounds a lot like free software.
I think the term "public" is more understandable by a non-technical person, and I may adopt using it after some consideration.
The FSF has never said that free software must be copylefted. The article itself says that De Icaza and Stallman agreed that open source and free software are the same set of software and the only difference is the intent of the person who is going to use that software.
Jordi, by attacking RMS at this very moment you are joining people such as the author of this article, Microsoft and Google who want to destroy Free Software and Open Source alike. You are right on your views about leadership, but in practice you are acting as an enemy agent destroying free software from within. This is very saddening and embarrassing.
"Cult of personality" doesn't literally mean someone's personality. It means making a cult out of a person. The way people are saying that attack rms is attacking free software itself is very much a cult of personality.
rms is not free software. The 2000 signatories of the letter are free software. We are a community much larger than a single man.
Seeing the signatories of that letter is like seeing all of my old friends. I know that guy from debconf and that one from pycon and oh yeah we used to hang out in that irc channel man remember when we worked together on that bug.
People are attacking the FSF BECAUSE of stallman. YOU and your lot are the people that are making him a cult of personality. Again, he is a quirky old man who is in that position, because of his contributions and his views. I sat next to him and I never particularly liked him. But this is the same shit that you people did when you destroyed Mozilla to make an example out of Brendan Eich only to get him replaced with the Chief of Marketing and then wondering why Mozilla's direction is weird.
You don't get to turn this into a cult of personality yourself, then attack it and then blame the other side for it. Your logic here is nothing short of insane.
I don't see you calling for the tearing down of founding fathers statues and the US constitutions. All but 3 of them were slave owners, so probably have a bunch of cruelties they did while they were alive.
> But this is the same shit that you people did when you destroyed Mozilla to make an example out of Brendan Eich
"You people"? Come now, stay classy.
> I don't see you calling for the tearing down of founding fathers statues and the US constitutions. All but 3 of them were slave owners, so probably have a bunch of cruelties they did while they were alive.
I don't see anyone here trying to erase RMS from history, so I don't see how this applies. But I imagine if your founding fathers would magically come alive, it would be a dumb idea to elect one of them president.
> I don't see anyone here trying to erase RMS from history
Define "here". Is it this thread, or the current attack on RMS and the FSF at large? If the latter, Sarah Mei and the author of this article, to name some examples, are definitely trying to erase RMS and his achievements. This particular article is mostly garbage (I think you'll agree) but the people trying to reframe RMS' entire life history in terms of alleged harassment and various moral infractions are definitely trying to get him erased.
Keep in mind that Sarah Mei also looks through everything in terms of diversity through the american lense of literal black and white skin color[1], completely disregarding the fact that some of these people in Europe - myself included - have had their fair share of racism across Europe even though we are considered "white" in the US. Ask turks how they are treated in Germany or people from the Maghreb region in southern france or Romas even though they're "white caucasian dudes" in these peoples eyes. Besides myself getting pepper sprayed from old Germans myself on the top of my head there is a study in Germany that gives you a 50% less chance of getting hired if you have a non central European name. The self righteousness and ignorance of these people knows no bounds.
100% agree. But he's not attacked because he farts in elevators or because of his awkward social antics. He's attacked by Microsoft and Google because he represents free software, or at least an important part of it. This attack is joined by an army of well-intentioned people who attack him by legitimate reasons like you do. The fact that these two attacks are parallel is really harmful.
Churchill was a horrible person, far more horrible than RMS can ever be. Would you have supported a coup to defenestrate Churchill during the Battle of Britain? On whose side would you be in the light of history if you did that?
> He's attacked by Microsoft and Google because he represents free software
Almost none of the 2000 signatories are Microsoft and Google. There's no conspiracy here. You don't need to find a hidden villain in this story to explain why we don't want Stallman anymore. This is all out in the open. We really all know him over the decades and we know he needs to step down.
No. The world is crumbling around us because we are more and more encroached by the dystopian nightmare that big tech is building. The FSF is one of the last beacons of sanity (regardless of who leads it), for they are amongst the few to have an uncompromising stance for the right to read [0] and for general-purpose computing [1]. Now the FSF is being attacked by a Microsoft-led mob (via Sarah Mei, from Salesforce in partnership with Microsoft), and they write damning "open letters" that are hosted by Microsoft. They are opportunistically joined by people from the Open Source Initiative, and also by well-intentioned people like jordigh who are legitimately concerned by the FSF leadership, but in my opinion have chosen the worst moment to act. I'm really sad and embarrassed by all this. I just want to keep hacking but I'm full of gloom and doom instead.
Although, yeah my comment was a passing snark and perhaps didn't contribute much, from your response it is evident that you have a more pessimistic and blinkered view of the world than I do.
> The FSF is one of the last beacons of sanity (regardless of who leads it)
No. Emphatically No. This is what was always unappealing to me about FSF.
They pretend that they are the only ones who care. Furthermore only things that they care about (software freedom) are the only things that should matter. Even your comment regarding pronouns reflects this. In an alternate world, the Freedom to choose my pronoun foundation is the last bastion fighting against the evil FSF.
Why is it hard to see that we won the one battle in making the world a better place. FLOSS is what it is today thanks to FSF (and the BSDs, and Apache, and PSF, and...). It is time now to continue this war by speaking about intersectional freedoms.
Even if you don't believe the battle is won, why sacrifice the war for the sake of one outdated commander?
vrms is free software though. In the unlikely event you're not already using it, you should. It looks through your installed packages to find non-freely licensed software, and if none if found then you win.
The difference is the intent of the person who RELEASES the software.
Free software under the GPL is deliberately restrictive. Put briefly, it’s designed to prevent someone from taking your software and releasing it under a license more restrictive than the GPL itself.
It enforces the right to run the software, study it, distribute changed versions, and benefit from other people’s changes.
With “open source”, meaning something like the MIT license, anyone can take the software you wrote, change it to add features, wrap it up in a fancy package, and sell it without source code access. You wouldn’t be able to even run the new version without buying a copy.
Stallman has been explaining this for nearly forty years. He even wrote a book about it.
> In fact, I think we're approaching the "runaway" part of an exponential curve.
Tangential nitpick: There's no "runaway" part of an exponential curve. At every point along the x-axis (typically time), the curve looks exactly the same. This property is often abused by writers who want to make you believe that now is the time when everything changes – although in fairness, they often deceive themselves.
If you don't believe me, look at plots [1] and [2]. In both cases it looks like the past was flat and the "knee" of the curve is right in front of you, promising an exciting future!
Any yet this "absolute" viewpoint is never really absolute, but always relative to the authors current position in time – as if by coincidence.
EDIT: To clarify, when an author uses an exponential curve to make the "runaway" argument, they almost never justify why the current absolute value of the curve should have special significance over the absolute values at other points in time. For example, in forgotmypw17's original post, there's no explanation why the current status of free software is at a special threshold – or what "exponential curve" they're even talking about.
The “relativeness” comes from time, not from us. Judging the curve today, the past looks flat and the future looks steep. In 5 years the same will be true: today will seem flat and the future will seem steep — that’s the point of OP showing both of those ranges. It is this relative perspective that precisely creates the illusion of a runaway point, an “absolute” perspective gives you the fractal understanding that the graph is the same at every dimension.
Most exponential curves are only exponential until they hit a limit and become an S-curve. These sort of have a runaway point. But in this article full of hyperbole and falsehoods, steelmanning its bad arguments might not be appropriate.
That's because you scale the y axis along with it. If you were to define the y axis as added value from 0(no added value) to 10(very high added value), then this is only going to start getting interesting around x=0. Before that the change is still exponential but the value not significant according to our (arbitrarily) defined value scale.
You're fighting the good fight. I've recently seen the term "exponential" used in the press to mean all sort of things, but mostly as equivalent to "really fast". This kind of thing may be inevitable, but it's a pity that such sharp and descriptive terminology is decaying into just another term for "growing quickly".
I've seen this abuse of the term "exponential" a lot in the press as well (i.e. meaning "really fast"). This is unfortunate in these pandemic times; a new infection does indeed spread through a susceptible population exponentiaally (at least while the susceptible population is much larger than the infectious population).
By degrading the language, journalists deprive themselves of the ability to talk clearly about the spread of the pandemic. I think this abuse of "exponential" is supposed to make the writer look erudite, even though they haven't a clue what the word means.
Many things aren't actually exponential. Adoption of something new may look exponential at the start, but then becomes an S curve. The middle of the S is the point of maximum slope and does represent a transition.
Definitely agree if we're just talking about the curve itself, but the "runaway" part comes from the context of what it's measuring. If we're talking exponential deaths - I don't care if the "curve" looks the same on day 5 as day 20. It's certainly starting to runaway if now instead of 32 deaths a day there are 1 million a day (2^x)
Sorry, I am not a statistician, nor a mathematician, and I appreciate your clarification.
What I meant was that the part of the adoption curve which has been nearly horizontal for a long time is curving upwards and is about to hit a near-vertical. May or may not be actually "exponential".
If you know of a good way to express this which will not annoy field experts, please let me know.
L not for "libre" but for "liberal as in education"? (Which "open source" should already cover, and was the reason for free/libre as something distinct.) At least he acknowledges the root word at the end... And then another new term presented as if it should be as familiar as "shareware" is "public software". This is very confusing to read.
Before I give my thoughts, I want to say that I really enjoyed this article. I didn't agree with much of it, but I had a good time reading it and I had a few chuckles along the way.
> Free-softwarites like to use beer metaphors (free as in beer). Let me suggest that if one were concerned with bad actors, one wouldn’t drink purchased beer (or free beer). One would brew one’s own beer, because bad actors might have poisoned the beer. And one would have to grow one’s own hops, (as bad actors might have poisoned purchased hops). And what might one use for water to brew the beer? Bad actors might have poisoned the water supply. One would need to dig one’s own well (unless, of course, the bad actors had polluted the water table). This way lies temperance.
This is not cut and dry. It is a spectrum. A spectrum of abstraction layers. There are layers where you trust others more than you trust yourself, and that is where it's OK for small teams with small budgets (technical or financial) to abstract away more and more complexity with another layer. If you're a fairly technical organization with huge budgets, and your market demands extra stability; you run your own infra. Organizations can only implement plans when their capabilities align with their intent. If you lack capability you must reduce your intent or obtain more capability. Capability can be purchased. There is an opportunity cost analysis associated with those decisions. The author of the article seems to assert that every org should just abstract away all complexity all the time just because they can. They don't stop to consider the cost or difficulty associated with that approach.
> ...but having a government agency whose job it is to keep the beer supply safe might be more effective than having each household test the beer they purchase to determine if it is safe...
The author ignores the fact that most of this demographic owns guns to protect their family from that $2 trillion dollar military. But I digress, you're still conflating "Effective" with "Cost effective" which are not the same thing. Most organization would at least perform some rudimentary risk-benefit analysis. If buying beer is 99.999% safe and making beer is 100% safe, is the cost associated with producing beer worth the risk?
tldr (from 5,277 words): Users are far more concerned with protection against
harms closed-source software may inflict, but access to that source code is a
terrible way of preventing those harms. Thus free software advocates are
barking up the wrong tree when they condemn closed-source as acts of political tyranny.
editorial 1: What do you care what reasons the free software dorks employ?
I sure as hell won't install a browser extension if its source code isn't publicly available; I don't see how the government should or even could protect us from every update made to all of the software packages I import (even if the punishment for malware is severe); and large corporations may be able to get their hands on source code, but I don't trust them either. The FSF may be stuck in the '80s in some ways, but their fundamental principles are solid. I much prefer their vision to one that has users "freed" from source code, trusting large and opaque companies and government agencies, whose interests may not align with mine, to shield me from malicious actors, of which there are many. Honestly, if anyone is stuck in the past and not relevant anymore, it's not the FSF; it's people who downplay malicious actors, fail to recognize that software is often tiny, or updated frequently, or written by someone anonymous or outside of US jurisdiction whose behavior we can't punish with US law. A lot of software is made up of forks too, and not many software forks end up useless like in his anecdote about his company forking Windows... Yeah, this dude obviously hasn't been keeping up to speed since his retirement.
How much time on average do you spend on reviewing the source code of a given browser extension before you install it? Also, how do you make sure that the published source code is 1:1 with what you are actually installing?
You don't need to do a thorough code review to benefit from the source code: the Chrome/Chromium web browser allows the user to load unpacked extensions directly from any folder.
So simply git clone the extension, have a quick look at the recently opened (and closed) issues/PRs for any red flags, git checkout the most recent tag, and load it as unpacked.
Then you are guaranteed to have the source code of exactly the extension you're running, and have done a reasonable amount due diligence for malware.
And if you're interested at any point in the future you can do a code review.
If the author does not like GPL, FSF, etc., why don’t they just not participate in GPL and FSF matters. Why not let people choose what they like?
What do I like? I like diversity, all kinds of wonderfully different people, many types of software licenses, different cultures, etc. I would not tell anyone what kind of software license to use in the same way I would not tell someone who to vote for. The world is a better place when we embrace things and people different from our own tastes and selves.
I would have enjoyed the article more if the author had been brief in their criticisms, spending more time on their ideas about how they would license software and organize large public and proprietary projects.
EDIT: I should have also said that I enjoyed the article.
This is such an enormously bad take I don't even really know where to begin.
My #1 problem, I guess, is that all of his complaints seem to be false dichotomies - how is the existence of the FSF preventing you from setting up software libraries or passing legislation? The author states that it is but doesn't really explain...
I thought it interesting that the "public software" terminology was floated again. There was some debate in 2016 when Nadia Eghbal brought it up as an alternative to "open source".
I'm a bit disheartened not to see the word "commons" appear once in the discussion (although admittedly, it can be used interchangeably with "public" most of the time).
I'm not familiar enough with the history of the free software movement to participate in the debate as framed by the article (edit: OP's), but I thought the author had a narrow focus on individual freedoms. I always thought of the GPL and related licenses as a useful means of building and safeguarding a type of commons.
It's arguable that GPL software is not free (as in freedom). It imposes a cost on some people, but not others.
The people who pay are those who modify the source code and want to distribute the result without contributing their modifications. It doesn't affect users of the software, only people with the skills and motivation to update and improve the software. These people are forced to provide their labor for free if they want to use the software for their purpose.
This of course is by design. But to me the irony is that it disproportionately ends up affecting mostly small programmers and developers who rely on OSS to make an income, while users, notably large corporations who provide cloud services and manufacture hardware, etc, profit handsomely without being forced to contribute any of their money or labor.
Of course AGPL attempts to fix this, but it's only really targeted at some corporate users and the small developer is still at a severe disadvantage.
> The people who pay are those who modify the source code and want to distribute the result without contributing their modifications.
This seems to be a very narrow view of "pay". The effort is in the modification, which is already "paid" by the time they are required to distribute sources.
> These people are forced to provide their labor for free if they want to use the software for their purpose.
I don't think this is an accurate description of the state of affairs. Nobody's forced, and the labor doesn't have to be free, either. Many people are paid to develop free software.
I'm a small developer who is quite grateful for the millions of hours of work I didn't have to do or pay for, upon which I build my own software. I've worked on dozens of projects that would have been impossible without GPL'd software readily available to use.
Yes, bro. Everyone sermonizing about software that's "free as in speech, not
as in beer," misses the larger point that 99% of us only really care about the
beer part.
Well I happen to agree with you, but it's a tough argument to get into on the Internet, so I avoid it when possible.
To me, a license like MIT is "obviously" more free than GPL, which is more restrictive. The FSF has a somewhat circuitous argument for how GPL results in more net freedom, somehow, but I don't buy it.
Both are free enough, I suppose. There's something about the FSF project of using the master's tools (copyright restrictions) to dismantle the master's house (copyright itself) that's never sat entirely right with me.
The solution is easy though: use a permissive license to release my software. So I do.
Yes, the GPL is deliberately more restrictive. Put briefly, it’s designed to prevent someone from taking your software and releasing it under a license more restrictive than the GPL itself.
It enforces the right to run the software, study it, distribute changed versions, and benefit from other people’s changes.
With the MIT license, anyone can take the software you wrote, change it to add features, wrap it up in a fancy package, and sell it without source code access. You wouldn’t be able to even run the new version without buying a copy.
Stallman has been explaining this for nearly forty years. He even wrote a book about it.
Oh, he wants poor students who write free software in their free time and give it away to emulate DJB and also offer $500 for bugs others found in their software.
> The Free Software clique is rooted in the deep past, and committed to endlessly rehashing the software controversies of the 1980’s — when mainframes were battling with minicomputers for supremacy.
That sounds a lot like the 2020s, s/mainframes/AWS/
Yep. The original paper on Borg (the predecessor to Kubernetes) didn't even go out of it's way to hide the fact that they looked at the problem at least a little bit as "what does a million core mainframe look like". Calling the resource config language 'BCL' as a play on IBM's JCL is a huge clue.
Micros were still viewed as toys by mainframe and mini manufacturers in the 80s. It wouldn't be until the 90s that micros started punching above their tiny weight.
> My interest in free or open source software has never been either political or industrial. My interest has always been educational. That is, access to the source code provided the opportunity to learn from it. So, in the same spirit as the Open Source / Free Software distinction, I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.
As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.
They are explaining to you that in the post you replied to, the part prefixed “>” was a quote from the article and your original post reads as if you thought that part was an expression of the comment authors opinion. The only part of the post you replied to that was not from the article was:
> As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.
Indeed. And the article is playing dirty politics, imho. The L in "FLOSS" means Libre to me too. The only way I have ever seen it used. Redefining its common meaning is disingenious. Call the alternative FLIBERO or something.. free, liberal, open. And build your story around that. If people like it, it may gain traction. And otherwise.. too bad. But don't hijack existing acronyms like this.
(OT: Hijacking terminology happens more often by big tech. The other day I came upon a great example, but forgot. But terms like "serverless" are example, meaning 'servers abstracted away by The Cloud')
It's to disambiguate the english uses of the word "free." It's free as in freedom, not free as in beer. Libre (in French, as it is used in the acronym) only means the former.
Then why not call it LOSS? The F has to mean something, and if it doesn't mean libre it either means gratis or it's redundant and confusing. GLOSS could be a different thing, to differentiate it from PLOSS (paid libre open source software).
Free Software was coined by (probably) RMS to highlight how users of such software are getting a number of _freedoms_: namely those to use, modify and share that software onwards (with or without their modifications).
It is in opposition to "restricted" software where you are restricted in all of those. (Copyleft software restrict others from adding more restrictions, which is defensible but some BSD proponents disagree)
Libre is, as many have said, just the Latin word for Free. You'd still have to explain what it means in this context.
"Open Source" has similar problems: many think that it's enough for source code to be available for inspection for software to be called "Open Source", but it is just a another attempt to market a philosophy under a particular name.
These constructs are created to have a special meaning to promote an ideology, and are thus usually capitalized in English. This is nothing uncommon, and attempting to use these—now accepted—phrases to mean something else is bound to cause confusion. So, just like you learn what a "programming language" or "HyperText Transport Protocol" is (yes, one transfers a lot more than just "HyperText" over it), if you are in IT, one should learn what "Free Software" and "Open Source" mean.
Indeed, in Dutch we have "Vrij" (Libre, free as in freedom) and "Gratis" (a term I sometimes see used on international fora as well, meaning free, as in beer). Since English does not have this distinction Libre was used. I never ever associated it with Liberal.
With beer it's a bit special, because beers you didn't pay for have some freedom: they can decide to leave your stomach even against your will back the way they came :D
But if you paid for it, they ain't allowed to, of course.
The issue is that the word "free" in English has two meanings, while other languages have two separate words for each meaning (gratis = free of charge, libre = free as in freedom). The reason why L means Libre is to emphasise that the "free" in "free software" refers to the libre meaning of the word "free", not necessarily the gratis meaning.
This is also what the phrase "free as in speech, not as in beer" attempts to disambiguate.
It refers to the civil liberties kind of Free. You have the term "free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. The Libre makes it clear that the first kind of Free is referred to here.
Update: The distinction is important. It also entails that people should be able to earn a living by providing FLOSS software. Many people that don't know much about FLOSS think of it as the "Free beer" variant (something promoted by much of big tech, which is seemingly free). There can be good business models attached to FLOSS (though devs have a very hard time to monetize in practice).
I heartily applaud anyone trying to monetize FLOSS based on decent principles and values, rather than just bottom-line, willingly taking the hard road of founding a bootstrapped, sustainable business.
To add to the other answers, the acronym used to be FOSS. People changed it to FLOSS exactly because unethical corporations kept exploiting the confusion between "libre" and gratis on the English language to misinform people.
(Notably Microsoft had the gals to do it in its English PR and translate all over the world, including literal translations to Latin languages where both words are completely different.)
Liberal actually comes from "Libre" that means "free", as in Freedom.
Liberal as in education, comes from "liberal arts", that were those arts that were not necessary for surviving but were typical of Free men's education(Aristocracy first, bourgeoisie later).
Liberal is actually an overloaded adjective that could mean: liberal as in non orthodoxy(not subjected to dogma) like in sex politics or religion. Or economic freedom.
But in the US, "liberals" in politics are actually another dogmatic cult(that probably see themselves as non dogmatic)
In the Netherlands, we have both a conservative-liberal and a progressive-liberal party, which are currently the largest and second-largest parties. The first is clearly part of the right, the second portrays itself as centrist but is considered by many to lean to the left (I'm simplifying).
I think the issue is that there are "economically liberal" politics (= free market above everything else) and "socially liberal" politics (e.g. pro gay marriage etc.). In the US, these are split between the Republicans (more economically liberal) and Democrats (more socially liberal). The party which is radically liberal in both senses is the (very small) Libertarian Party.
indeed, I'm not native speaking, but is - 'Thirdly, the rhetoric of Free Software devotees is awkward and unconvincing.' - 'devotee' respectful rhetoric? Isn't that, well, awkward and unconvincing?
The author is quite clearly an ignoramus on the topic of FLOSS, and can be safely ignored. I'm not sure how this got to the front page of HN. It's embarrassing, frankly.
Well he does claim advocacy for social justice and other authoritarian left political ideologies, it is common practice in those circles to refine terms to meet their political objectives so it is not shocking he would attempt to redefine FLOSS to meet his political needs
> Caring about who gets the credit more than successfully creating change is not a good look.
So yeah, the author is disingenuous at best.
Another point where they pretend not to see the benefits: Free Software and specifically copyleft has succeeded in getting so many manufacturers to publish their kernel source code, opening the door for bringing more freedom to a bunch of people using their technological devices today (eg. all the ROMs for phones and IoT devices).
And the attempt to highlight the "metonymy" (you know they are bullshitting as soon as they start using terms unfamiliar to the masses) in "free press" but argue against "free software" standing for "software that can be freely used" is very hypocritical too. Righto, who is this "the speech" in "free speech" (alluding to their use of "the software" group).
I've given up reading at that point because it's a post by someone bitter focusing on an unproven premise (how a political ideology has failed if there is no change in leadership for more than 10 years — maybe it's because centralised leadership is not necessary to achieve it ;-)).
Anyway, language is free for people to adapt to their needs, and no amount of elitist grammatical nitpicking will ever change that.
The FSF is the last bastion of free/libre software, and it’s very close to being overrun by the corporate interests.
The activist strategy, of which you are very well aware, is for one or two “well-meaning” people, without any technical chops, to manage to insert a code of conduct into a project. At that point, any “offense” that is perceived to violate the CoC becomes more important than any technical merit the project might have. This is enforced by mob justice, as we’ve seen in the last couple of days.
The leaders of these projects often have strong personalities and have a decades-long paper trail that can be mined for purported infractions.
Next, the founder is attacked and forced out and the activists own the project.
The power of the project is diminished and the corporate interests benefit, whether or not they are behind the activist take over.
The key is the GPL. It’s the most important thing Stallman has done.
If he is eliminated, the pressure will be to move away from the GPL. The corporate takeover of the web will be complete.
Please continue to support the GPL. The FSF needs rejuvenation, not elimination. It needs to return to its roots.
Hopefully, Stallman has learned to be more respectful and accommodating to his own (genuine) supporters. Otherwise, the war could be lost.
The article I wrote is about the GPL, not about the FSF. In my comment, I specifically said that free software (GPL being one of many licensing tools for free software) is as important as ever.
The FSF has accomplished very little in the past 10+ years, other than being the subject of controversey. It's not doing much good for the free software cause anymore, and in fact might be causing it harm. Admitting to this is not the same thing as agreeing to subscribe to the pattern you described, of well-meaning activists lacking technical chops inserting themselves into projects to establish a CoC and kick out undesirables.
Little of that has to do with RMS, for the record. I am not speaking out for or against RMS or his role at the FSF.
I agree that the FSF has accomplished little in the last ten years. Like many other organizations, it has been driven by its CoC, rather than by its original technical objectives.
It needs rejuvenation.
I don’t know what will happen - maybe the forces arrayed against it will neuter it completely.
Maybe someone read Stallman the riot act. Maybe a year in the wilderness has caused some change and he will show his true supporters more respect and tolerance. He did seem happy and relaxed in the video, more so than I can remember over the last couple of decades.
The GPL is a hard fight. It really takes Stallman’s implacability and persistence. I think he deserves another go.
There are many interests absolutely determined to deny him that, which shows how important this battle is.
Mostly, I think FSF's original ideas have been achieved. It is possible today to buy a machine running entirely free software. Major problem now is that such machine is either expensive or old.
It looks like the focus now should turn to hardware. The world needs a free hardware foundation today just like it needed FSF in the 80's.
I would refer you to my previous comment but - for once! - I don't want to be an asshole. (Plus, dang would probably ban me.)
This is possible in the same way as it's possible to build a nuclear weapon in a garage. There is no theoretical barrier, but out of 7-8 billion people, I'm betting the number of those who actually did it is a close approximation of zero.
Where, exactly, are you going to buy a regular personal computer that comes with free - LIBRE - software in BIOS, microcode, TPM, video card, network card, and finally OS? Asking for a friend.
Some of the original ideas might have been achieved, but they are constantly under attack one way or the other -- some more brutal, some more indirect.
There is a war going on against General Purpose Computing, and walled gardens have become the norm. We need the FSF -- or something like it -- more than ever.
> I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.
I can find no evidence of this term being used anywhere outside of this piece; FLOSS is consistently expanded by people discussing the term as “Free/Libre and Open Source", where “Libre” disambiguates the sense of “free”.
The author may have coined a term that happens to spelled identically to a popular term, but the clear insinuation that the popular term refers to the authors hobby horse is grossly misleading and obviously deliberately so.
If that's the case, why is the author trying to redefine the term FLOSS for their own ideology?
I understand the argument that FLOSS (Libre) was always a movement that was not just about software, but just because it is not only about software does not imply that shoving any random ideology into it (as the author is doing) is welcome.
I reiterate: if credit doesn't matter to the author, why is he trying to steal credit for FLOSS?
Hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, and borderline fraudulent to make the claims he is making.
Richard Stallmann has an interesting piece on FLOSS and FOSS definition, containing this:
> A researcher studying practices and methods used by developers in the free software community decided that these questions were independent of the developers' political views, so he used the term “FLOSS,”
Unfortunately he doesn't name that researcher, whom he is attributing FLOSS to. Anyone knows?
According to Stallmann "FLOSS" is the most inclusive term including open source with a non-free license though:
> Thus, if you want to be neutral between free software and open source, and clear about them, the way to achieve that is to say “FLOSS,” not “FOSS.”
So and I'm suprised by that, while L stands for libre according to Stallman, the acronym FLOSS is a actually a more liberal term because it is neutral to whether the software in question free or only open source.
"Open source with a non-free license" essentially doesn't exist.
The opensource definition [0] and free software definition [1] are similar enough in outcome (if not intent) that such a thing is basically impossible.
Last time I looked the only difference between the OSI's and FSF's lists of acceptable licenses was the OpenWatcom license, which requires you to release the source even when you just deploy it privately. This was a mistake on part of the OSI and should not have been accepted. At least Debian, Fedora and the FSF consider it to be unacceptable.
Isn’t something like the MIT License open source but not “free software” in the rms sense because it does not encumber people who build on it to in turn produce free software themselves?
The open source page also says “ The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.” which would seem to disqualify the GPL.
It is quite easy for every side in a debate to convince themselves they’re on the side of “freedom” by giving different weights to various positive and negative freedoms, so I don’t consider this is a very useful line of inquiry.
> Isn’t something like the MIT License open source but not “free software” in the rms sense because it does not encumber people who build on it to in turn produce free software themselves?
No. The FSF considers the MIT license to be a Free software license compatible with the GPL. [1]
> The open source page also says “ The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.” which would seem to disqualify the GPL.
Section 5 of GPLv3 ("Conveying Modified Source Versions.") contains the following text:
'A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.'
IANAL, but to me, that means the license doesn't insist on all other software on the same medium being licensed under the GPL.
It's logical to assume the free/open source software disagreement would be over copyleft licenses, then the separation of the two would seem meaningful. But the spirit is mostly a disagreement over the use of the word "free," in 99% of cases both terms mean the same thing.
My understanding of it was that the "free software" movement is making moral claims about how software should be distributed while the "open source" movement is just saying "hey, this stuff is cool and useful" and doesn't have the same kind of uncompromising stance. Which would fit well with the license thing.
> Isn’t something like the MIT License open source but not “free software” in the rms sense because it does not encumber people who build on it to in turn produce free software themselves?
No, the FSF specifically IDENTIFIES MIT as meeting the Free Software Definition, which does not require any such requirement.
Now, Stallman and the FSF have identified reasons that they prefer copyleft licenses like the (A)GPL for many uses, but that isn't the same as considering them the only Free licenses.
> The open source page also says “ The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.” which would seem to disqualify the GPL.
The GPL explicitly does not put any restrictions on other software merely because if is distributed along with the licensed software.
The article tripped my "is this shilled" senses too. Either the author got paid or they've had some really pent up frustrations with the FSF for a remarkably long time that they needed to blow off.
The article seemed more concerned with making sure the FSF was blown up, rather than with creating something to move forward the concerns brought up.
This is especially confusing since the existence of the FSF doesn't really impact one way or another the existence of other groups pushing forward other agendas. The only risk is one group losing mindshare to the other.
I can certainly see supporting free software to ensure user's rights as well as supporting other sorts of 'public software infrastructure' to ensure security or availability of services at the same time.
My guess is some pent up frustration with the political infighting in the FSF.
> If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell — whereas the bad actor would not be able get away with such nefariousness if you had access to the source code.
But it's true. People act more socially if they think they are watched or they think they could be watched. They don't actually have to be watched. If people think their source code will be examined, they will do less antisocial things. It is very rare to have deliberately malicious features in free software, whereas we have a whole class of dark patterns in dark software.
The exceptions are things like Chrome or Firefox that are such giant and unwieldy codebases that they might as well be opaque boxes. In the case of Chrome, the Chrome builds you use contain secret sauce from Google in order to make it easier for Google to show you ads, different from Chromium.
Firefox occasionally also tries to embed anti-user features, but then distributors such as Debian may notice them and remove them when repackaging the software.
Does anybody who had time to read the whole thing have a concise summary? From the parts I skimmed it sounds like the author is annoyed by the politics of the FSF. I've heard this argument many times before and in my experience it usually comes from people who only have a superficial understanding of how the GPL actually works. Often this happens as a result of learning what the little they do know from their corporate legal team not from actual software engineers writing free software. "The GPL is politics and inherently incompatible with venture _capitalism_." The GPL puts users first. Good capitalism does that too.
On top of that, the only time I hear people actually complain about free software is if they're trying to incorporate it into their product and don't have the authority to make the business/product call to not worry about the secrecy of their source code (or don't want to). Essentially, they don't respect the license/ethos and just want to use other software for free not with user freedom in mind.
Here's why you use free software:
1. You are building a product where user freedom is important.
2. You don't want a large company to take your software and use their vast resources to pump out improvements and usurp your position in the market (AGPL).
3. You want to mutually benefit from others using your software in a more tangible way than "can I have money look I have github stars".
4. You want to assert your patent position and ensure that nobody can ever lock you out of your product by patenting a derivative work.
Here's when free software is annoying:
1. If you're trying to make money off commodity software (or talent).
2. If your lawyers aren't familiar with how the world writes software and insist that everything your engineers output is a trade secret and will bolster your software portfolio in the event of acquisition (don't work for these companies).
I've also commonly heard the myth that using the GPL slashes your company's value. In the instances where that's happened, the people who let it happen got taken, or they didn't do their diligence and let the GPL slip into their product when their whole strategy was keeping their source secret and then look like fools and direct their anger at the GPL.
Another thing people don't often realize is that as the original copyright holder, you have permission to dual license your work as you see fit. If you're say an enterprise company and trying to woo a big client and they just can't stomach the GPL, then you can choose to license it to them under terms they're willing to work with, if that makes sense for your business. Honestly I think this puts the company that owns the software in a pretty powerful position "oh you like our product but want special treatment, well that's going to cost some $$$".
If Free Software is dead you'd think the linux kernel would be dead, Signal would be dead, etc.
If I could boil down the author's thesis into something reasonably edited, it's...
1. The FSF has an overly narrow view of user freedoms that doesn't actually protect users freedoms [because they assume all users are developers]. Users want warranties, not source code that they aren't able to inspect. Even if they were, fixing that source is effectively forking the program into an unsupportable version, hence why proprietary licensing started [to save users from themselves]. Ergo, source availability is not a reasonable way to protect users. (Insert hamfisted metaphor about assault weapons and QAnon.)
2. The FSF has no legislative adjenda to mitigate or eliminate the harms of proprietary software. Their sole strategy is based in litigation: locking software into copyleft licenses that mandate source code publication as a condition of redistribution. The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today.
> The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today.
I think this is the one thing I do agree with. If there's something I think the FSF got wrong it's their staunch aversion to software patents. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to patent trolls, and I do agree that from a liberal intellectual property stance it's hard to rationalize patenting something that's not a physical invention and that software patents are in some regards akin to patenting the fastest route from your house to the grocery store. I concede we have had some pretty bogus software patents like "an object oriented operating system", but I think that as society matures in its understanding of software it will only get better, not worse, and sniffing out bogus software patents and there will only become more and more prior art. I also think that any serious company needs to patent their inventions. Once you do that the invention becomes public domain and you have the rights to license it in any style you see fit, just as you do with copyright, or, copyright still applies and you have the power to lay claim to all forms of your invention, not just your reference implementation. I think the FSF's focus on copyright is a result of Stallman stumbling into the discovery that he could hack the copyright system and he just ran with that. And of course it is much harder to patent something because it has to be novel and copyleft has that nice.. viral effect. The reality is that most people aren't doing novel things with software, they're just doing things with software. The FSF gets more exposure if it can apply in the later case.
I don't understand why we need to tear down the FSF to incorporate approaches that include freedom-focused patenting into the software licensing discussion. It's also not a new talking point. The GPL covers mutual patent assignment and I believe the FSF has advocated for people to donate patents to different software projects etc. There is a very real issue with patents and free software and there has been litigation in the past between patent holders and open source software projects that have implemented software off of a patented specification. The FSF doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I find it way more understandable than the massive rant we're all talking about and it makes a way more coherent argument to boot.
My personal opinion is that the best solution (if I specifically had the power to alter history such that CONTU's 1978 final recommendation was different) would have been to establish a sui generis right for software distribution monopolies that lasted 10 years and required source-code escrow. This is cribbed from the existing sui generis right for IC designs. Copyright would be explicitly barred from covering software, but it would still cover embedded creative works within the software.
Under this regime, a videogame would have it's engine code covered by software-rights, but it's art assets covered by ordinary copyright. This would mean that, for example, old videogames would be freed from the constraints of having to relicense middleware and engines. We wouldn't have massive preservation hazards like, say, Adobe Flash Player that wind up rendering entire art scenes inaccessible until manually remade by their copyright holders. By the time the software is abandoned, anything a decade older would be free to preserve and adapt.
(If you're wondering: this is the licensing model id took with their old game engines: once the engine was no longer being licensed, they just dropped GPL'd source code. You still needed to buy DooM if you wanted to play DooM, as the source drop didn't come with any levels or models, but if you just wanted to play with the game engine or build your own game with it, you were free to do so.)
Video codecs are one of the few areas of software where patents are preferred over copyright protection; or at least they were until H.265's three patent pools broke the licensing model and everyone fled to AOM AV1. MPEG is also trying their hand at another royalty-free codec (even though ISO's patent disclosure policies make it difficult to do so). So I wouldn't be surprised if the standard shifts to Free software implementations of unpatented codecs with widespread hardware implementations.
Part of the apprehensiveness people have over patents is that they're much broader. This is also why creative works are born copyrighted (you only need to register to sue) but inventions aren't born patented. You have to apply for patents and prove to multiple countries' patent offices that your invention is novel. But patent offices do a terrible job at this; their incentive is to approve everything so they can collect filing fees and let the victims of patent trolls bear the burden of proving obviousness to a court. That's why I would really prefer some kind of "copyright-lite" to a patents-based approach.
> In the GPLv3 (and it was there in GPLv2 and v1) clauses 15 and 16 are the Disclaimer of Warranty and the Limitation of Liability. To be fair, proprietary software licenses have the same clauses, but the free-softers cannot claim the moral high ground here. These licenses assert that if the software causes any harm, the people who wrote it aren’t liable (limitation of liability).
This is an inane argument. Limiting your liability isn't some kind of moral evil. The potential for harm due to defects always exists, and if you provide a good or service to someone, you have to negotiate with that person who will accept the liability for it.
Generic software licenses limit liability because it's usually much cheaper for the end user to assume the liability as they have far greater knowledge of their practical risks.
A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.
yes. and to add to this, the fitness for use in some safety critical system, and we talk about functional safety here, is strictly regulated. functional safety requires process discipline at the system level, evidence based engineering and evidences for soundness of scrutiny, at the system level and then down to the components.
in that light it is a moral obligation to remind consumers of the technology about their obligations. The legalese may sound just evasive, and motivated by the us environment of litigations by stupid people, but seriously: fitness for use is am obligation of the systems engineer, not the provider of FOSS.
elisa.tech is a community to enable Linux in safety applications. even there, the responsibility is with the consumer of their work, they also just seek methods and inputs for system safety engineering, which, when used by a system safety engineer may lead to a certifiable, and then liability covered device. like an adas system powered by Linux.
> the responsibility is with the consumer of their work
This would also apply to the problem of web search and social network monopolies. The way I see it: let Google and FB develop or host a plurality of ranking, filtering and UI variants, and let the users decide their preferred flavor. Then they can't complain about bias. There would be a Republican Google and a Democrat Google and a EFF Google and a BLM Google to pick from. They are now like single TV channels with unified editorial stance, they should be more like cable networks. Give people the remote for content ranking, filtering and UI.
> A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.
Hmm... I hadn't though about the implications of this before. Is this a solution to the mythical funding balance the industry is failing to achieve? Enterprise software already operates like this. What if e.g. github reframed its project sponsorship model as something that involved getting maintainers setup with liability insurance and the ability to offer sponsors warranty and liability for their software.
My concern with the rust ecosystem right now is that it goes the way of node and projects just get littered with endless libraries that were fresh and hot at one point in time. Often times you open issues and it takes days or weeks to get a response if at all because the maintainers have moved on.
I'd be super interested in only using dependencies where I could subscribe to liability and warranty service after I've tried them out and they're want I'm going to roll with. And you would even potentially see interesting things like "pure" chains where all software used is covered by somebody.
This model would also have the interesting effect of promoting software design and language selection that results in "easier to warrant" not just "does the job" and maintainers that do a better job at writing good software would bubble to the top since their liability insurance premiums would stay cheap. If you write too much crappy software, at some point it becomes unaffordable and you go work for Facebook (it's a joke! you get the point).
> What if e.g. github reframed its project sponsorship model as something that involved getting maintainers setup with liability insurance and the ability to offer sponsors warranty and liability for their software.
I think it would be much more expensive. The developers of some library are having a hard time judging how much money somebody stakes on that library working perfectly. It might be that they'd lose an hour of work if they hit a bug, it might also be that a huge project fails with gigantic losses - it's hard to insure against that if you still want people to be able to afford it.
It's much easier to buy insurance on the user side where you know the potential impact (i.e. "my wordpress site will be offline for a day" vs "the oil rig I've run calculations for could sink if there was a bug").
Scaling the payment with the importance of the software is already how enterprise software largely works. Often times customers actively want to pay more for software so they can secure more attention from the vendor, if the software is critical to their business.
It's not only about a legit project failing with gigantic losses.
A blanket liability insurance would also raise hordes of liability insurance trolls. I.e. organized efforts to collect insurance payments by claiming damage caused by the use of the software.
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[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadI take it to mean that commercial interests are stronger that potential gains enabled by new technological forms of collaboration. We (as a society) are 'choosing' to keep all gains enabled by digital technology private rather than revising the capitalist apparatus which is strained by these new digital possibilities.
It then marshalls enough other bad arguments in a short enough period to be a gish gallop, and I gave up halfway through.
Honestly I felt the presise had some promise, software has changed and the FSF not so much, but this article does not convince or educate me of it.
TL:DR
Through militant refusal to read up on linguistic context, and grammar nazi'ing, the author sets the stage for a complete teardown of Free Software.
Starts of with intentionally not getting the point, keeps going to explaining the historical suck that prompted the Free Software movement and villainizing the movement for forcing source code on people, and for depriving all those software providers of uncontested captive audiences.
Stipulates that whatever RedHat does must be the superior approach to burdening people with source.
Complains about free as in beer, and how they shouldn't use that anyway, because they should brew their own beer if they actually followed their values that spawn out of an alleged origin myth of Free Software being the to protect people from Bad Actors. (Only partially, but never the only goal)
Asserts GPL wouldn't have saved anyone from THERAC-25 (not that the proprietary binary only way did either)...
Honestly couldn't go any further.
Excerpts below. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to weep for the time I'll never get back.
Number one: >Those of us who are interested in issues of freedom and ethics and social justice related to software must explore alternative stratagems to achieve those objectives. The tactics of the Free Software Foundation (the insistence on copylefting software and fighting software patents)
Free Software was only about one thing: creating software that protects the rights of users. If you came to the movement to do anything else... I got nothing.
>The first sign that free software is intellectually bankrupt is that the Free Software Foundation seems unable to develop new generations of leadership.
Hasn't needed to. Stallman and the Board have done just fine, despite what a bunch of folks would like people to believe.
>It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. The Free Software Foundation is famously fixated on insisting that it be given credit for Linux.
Noted; but follow up question: Author seems rather concerned about who shouldn't be take credit, so... Why bring that up exactly? Also, last I checked, GNU never took credit for Linux. Linux is an OS kernel. GNU is the user space traditionally coupled with the Linux kernel. Together they are GNU/Linux, GNU on Linux, or as I endearingly refer to it, "the damn computer".
>Thirdly, the rhetoric of Free Software devotees is awkward and unconvincing. The inflexibility (or inarticulateness) that has failed to evolve the talking points to make them more effective is a failure of politics. To take my own pet peeve, it is unarguable that inanimate objects cannot have freedoms. People have freedoms. Frying pans, as an example, cannot have freedoms. If one were to talk about Free Frying Pans, the only way to interpret that statement is that one is referring to frying pans that one needn’t pay for. When one uses the phrase “free press”, one is not suggesting that the pile of metal and wood that constitutes a printing press machine is entitled to freedoms. The word “press” in that phrase is a figure of speech known as metonymy. It refers to journalists It refers to journalists. “Freedom of the press” is talking about the freedom bestowed on journalists. Most people understand that “the press” refers to the journalist collective. So when one says “free software” or “software freedom” we know that the freedom is not given to an executable file. The expression (unless we are referring to software that we needn’t pay for) is referring to freedom for some group of people that we know as “the software” (y’know, like “the press”). And who are those people who are members of “the software”? That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t try to explain it to me. I was pointing out how nonsensical this framing is.
That entire gem, right there is a crime against any ...
I do appreciate the attempt at a summary, though.
The guy "r0ml" is a troll but with an insidious agenda.
We're in a place where non-programmers and non-hackers are waking up to the importance of transparency and data ownership, and there's no way to achieve that without free software.
I like the idea of public software mentioned in the article, which I understand to be software which is fully transparent and verifiable by everyone, which also sounds a lot like free software.
I think the term "public" is more understandable by a non-technical person, and I may adopt using it after some consideration.
Open/Free/Public software is obviously very useful.
But it's the 'copyleft' stuff that I think the author is taking umbrage with.
It's arguably we don't really need copyleft to do any of the things you indicate as being important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality
rms is not free software. The 2000 signatories of the letter are free software. We are a community much larger than a single man.
Seeing the signatories of that letter is like seeing all of my old friends. I know that guy from debconf and that one from pycon and oh yeah we used to hang out in that irc channel man remember when we worked together on that bug.
You don't get to turn this into a cult of personality yourself, then attack it and then blame the other side for it. Your logic here is nothing short of insane.
I don't see you calling for the tearing down of founding fathers statues and the US constitutions. All but 3 of them were slave owners, so probably have a bunch of cruelties they did while they were alive.
"You people"? Come now, stay classy.
> I don't see you calling for the tearing down of founding fathers statues and the US constitutions. All but 3 of them were slave owners, so probably have a bunch of cruelties they did while they were alive.
I don't see anyone here trying to erase RMS from history, so I don't see how this applies. But I imagine if your founding fathers would magically come alive, it would be a dumb idea to elect one of them president.
Define "here". Is it this thread, or the current attack on RMS and the FSF at large? If the latter, Sarah Mei and the author of this article, to name some examples, are definitely trying to erase RMS and his achievements. This particular article is mostly garbage (I think you'll agree) but the people trying to reframe RMS' entire life history in terms of alleged harassment and various moral infractions are definitely trying to get him erased.
[1] http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2015/02/01/the-fosdem-conundrum...
Churchill was a horrible person, far more horrible than RMS can ever be. Would you have supported a coup to defenestrate Churchill during the Battle of Britain? On whose side would you be in the light of history if you did that?
Almost none of the 2000 signatories are Microsoft and Google. There's no conspiracy here. You don't need to find a hidden villain in this story to explain why we don't want Stallman anymore. This is all out in the open. We really all know him over the decades and we know he needs to step down.
Are you saying Microsoft and Google have cleverly infiltrated FSF and reinstated rms knowing fully well that the FLOSS ecosystem would implode?
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
> The FSF is one of the last beacons of sanity (regardless of who leads it)
No. Emphatically No. This is what was always unappealing to me about FSF.
They pretend that they are the only ones who care. Furthermore only things that they care about (software freedom) are the only things that should matter. Even your comment regarding pronouns reflects this. In an alternate world, the Freedom to choose my pronoun foundation is the last bastion fighting against the evil FSF.
Why is it hard to see that we won the one battle in making the world a better place. FLOSS is what it is today thanks to FSF (and the BSDs, and Apache, and PSF, and...). It is time now to continue this war by speaking about intersectional freedoms.
Even if you don't believe the battle is won, why sacrifice the war for the sake of one outdated commander?
Free software under the GPL is deliberately restrictive. Put briefly, it’s designed to prevent someone from taking your software and releasing it under a license more restrictive than the GPL itself. It enforces the right to run the software, study it, distribute changed versions, and benefit from other people’s changes.
With “open source”, meaning something like the MIT license, anyone can take the software you wrote, change it to add features, wrap it up in a fancy package, and sell it without source code access. You wouldn’t be able to even run the new version without buying a copy.
Stallman has been explaining this for nearly forty years. He even wrote a book about it.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
https://shop.fsf.org/books-docs/free-software-free-society-s...
Tangential nitpick: There's no "runaway" part of an exponential curve. At every point along the x-axis (typically time), the curve looks exactly the same. This property is often abused by writers who want to make you believe that now is the time when everything changes – although in fairness, they often deceive themselves.
If you don't believe me, look at plots [1] and [2]. In both cases it looks like the past was flat and the "knee" of the curve is right in front of you, promising an exciting future!
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+exp%28x%29+x+%3D+...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+exp%28x%29+x+%3D+...
Update: I guess this is a tangent on a tangent, pun intended.
Any yet this "absolute" viewpoint is never really absolute, but always relative to the authors current position in time – as if by coincidence.
EDIT: To clarify, when an author uses an exponential curve to make the "runaway" argument, they almost never justify why the current absolute value of the curve should have special significance over the absolute values at other points in time. For example, in forgotmypw17's original post, there's no explanation why the current status of free software is at a special threshold – or what "exponential curve" they're even talking about.
In a limited world, exponential changes are sometimes catastrophic.
By degrading the language, journalists deprive themselves of the ability to talk clearly about the spread of the pandemic. I think this abuse of "exponential" is supposed to make the writer look erudite, even though they haven't a clue what the word means.
What I meant was that the part of the adoption curve which has been nearly horizontal for a long time is curving upwards and is about to hit a near-vertical. May or may not be actually "exponential".
If you know of a good way to express this which will not annoy field experts, please let me know.
https://publiccode.eu
> Free-softwarites like to use beer metaphors (free as in beer). Let me suggest that if one were concerned with bad actors, one wouldn’t drink purchased beer (or free beer). One would brew one’s own beer, because bad actors might have poisoned the beer. And one would have to grow one’s own hops, (as bad actors might have poisoned purchased hops). And what might one use for water to brew the beer? Bad actors might have poisoned the water supply. One would need to dig one’s own well (unless, of course, the bad actors had polluted the water table). This way lies temperance.
This is not cut and dry. It is a spectrum. A spectrum of abstraction layers. There are layers where you trust others more than you trust yourself, and that is where it's OK for small teams with small budgets (technical or financial) to abstract away more and more complexity with another layer. If you're a fairly technical organization with huge budgets, and your market demands extra stability; you run your own infra. Organizations can only implement plans when their capabilities align with their intent. If you lack capability you must reduce your intent or obtain more capability. Capability can be purchased. There is an opportunity cost analysis associated with those decisions. The author of the article seems to assert that every org should just abstract away all complexity all the time just because they can. They don't stop to consider the cost or difficulty associated with that approach.
> ...but having a government agency whose job it is to keep the beer supply safe might be more effective than having each household test the beer they purchase to determine if it is safe...
The author ignores the fact that most of this demographic owns guns to protect their family from that $2 trillion dollar military. But I digress, you're still conflating "Effective" with "Cost effective" which are not the same thing. Most organization would at least perform some rudimentary risk-benefit analysis. If buying beer is 99.999% safe and making beer is 100% safe, is the cost associated with producing beer worth the risk?
editorial 1: What do you care what reasons the free software dorks employ?
editorial 2: Verbosity is an existential threat.
So simply git clone the extension, have a quick look at the recently opened (and closed) issues/PRs for any red flags, git checkout the most recent tag, and load it as unpacked.
Then you are guaranteed to have the source code of exactly the extension you're running, and have done a reasonable amount due diligence for malware.
And if you're interested at any point in the future you can do a code review.
It's a simple strategy. Here's an example: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
If the author does not like GPL, FSF, etc., why don’t they just not participate in GPL and FSF matters. Why not let people choose what they like?
What do I like? I like diversity, all kinds of wonderfully different people, many types of software licenses, different cultures, etc. I would not tell anyone what kind of software license to use in the same way I would not tell someone who to vote for. The world is a better place when we embrace things and people different from our own tastes and selves.
I would have enjoyed the article more if the author had been brief in their criticisms, spending more time on their ideas about how they would license software and organize large public and proprietary projects.
EDIT: I should have also said that I enjoyed the article.
My #1 problem, I guess, is that all of his complaints seem to be false dichotomies - how is the existence of the FSF preventing you from setting up software libraries or passing legislation? The author states that it is but doesn't really explain...
https://medium.com/@nayafia/i-hate-the-term-open-source-a65f...
I'm not familiar enough with the history of the free software movement to participate in the debate as framed by the article (edit: OP's), but I thought the author had a narrow focus on individual freedoms. I always thought of the GPL and related licenses as a useful means of building and safeguarding a type of commons.
The people who pay are those who modify the source code and want to distribute the result without contributing their modifications. It doesn't affect users of the software, only people with the skills and motivation to update and improve the software. These people are forced to provide their labor for free if they want to use the software for their purpose.
This of course is by design. But to me the irony is that it disproportionately ends up affecting mostly small programmers and developers who rely on OSS to make an income, while users, notably large corporations who provide cloud services and manufacture hardware, etc, profit handsomely without being forced to contribute any of their money or labor.
Of course AGPL attempts to fix this, but it's only really targeted at some corporate users and the small developer is still at a severe disadvantage.
This seems to be a very narrow view of "pay". The effort is in the modification, which is already "paid" by the time they are required to distribute sources.
> These people are forced to provide their labor for free if they want to use the software for their purpose.
I don't think this is an accurate description of the state of affairs. Nobody's forced, and the labor doesn't have to be free, either. Many people are paid to develop free software.
To me, a license like MIT is "obviously" more free than GPL, which is more restrictive. The FSF has a somewhat circuitous argument for how GPL results in more net freedom, somehow, but I don't buy it.
Both are free enough, I suppose. There's something about the FSF project of using the master's tools (copyright restrictions) to dismantle the master's house (copyright itself) that's never sat entirely right with me.
The solution is easy though: use a permissive license to release my software. So I do.
It enforces the right to run the software, study it, distribute changed versions, and benefit from other people’s changes.
With the MIT license, anyone can take the software you wrote, change it to add features, wrap it up in a fancy package, and sell it without source code access. You wouldn’t be able to even run the new version without buying a copy.
Stallman has been explaining this for nearly forty years. He even wrote a book about it.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
https://shop.fsf.org/books-docs/free-software-free-society-s...
That sounds a lot like the 2020s, s/mainframes/AWS/
The mainframe/mini battle was the 70s. More importantly it was IBM and the BUNCH vs DEC/DG/etc.
As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.
> As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.
Indeed. And the article is playing dirty politics, imho. The L in "FLOSS" means Libre to me too. The only way I have ever seen it used. Redefining its common meaning is disingenious. Call the alternative FLIBERO or something.. free, liberal, open. And build your story around that. If people like it, it may gain traction. And otherwise.. too bad. But don't hijack existing acronyms like this.
(OT: Hijacking terminology happens more often by big tech. The other day I came upon a great example, but forgot. But terms like "serverless" are example, meaning 'servers abstracted away by The Cloud')
So in floss, that would be free free open source software.
Which doesn't seem right? Unless there is another meaning to libre I'm missing?
Interesting!
edit: could mean Gratis and/or Libre Open Source Software
I do like the idea of distinction between GLOSS and PLOSS, but we've got enough acronym soup at this point that I'd say just stick with FLOSS.
Also, many people who only speak English don't know the word Libre.
Because then people would think they are losing something by using it? /s
It is in opposition to "restricted" software where you are restricted in all of those. (Copyleft software restrict others from adding more restrictions, which is defensible but some BSD proponents disagree)
Libre is, as many have said, just the Latin word for Free. You'd still have to explain what it means in this context.
"Open Source" has similar problems: many think that it's enough for source code to be available for inspection for software to be called "Open Source", but it is just a another attempt to market a philosophy under a particular name.
These constructs are created to have a special meaning to promote an ideology, and are thus usually capitalized in English. This is nothing uncommon, and attempting to use these—now accepted—phrases to mean something else is bound to cause confusion. So, just like you learn what a "programming language" or "HyperText Transport Protocol" is (yes, one transfers a lot more than just "HyperText" over it), if you are in IT, one should learn what "Free Software" and "Open Source" mean.
But if you paid for it, they ain't allowed to, of course.
This is also what the phrase "free as in speech, not as in beer" attempts to disambiguate.
http://freebeer.org/blog/recipe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
Update: The distinction is important. It also entails that people should be able to earn a living by providing FLOSS software. Many people that don't know much about FLOSS think of it as the "Free beer" variant (something promoted by much of big tech, which is seemingly free). There can be good business models attached to FLOSS (though devs have a very hard time to monetize in practice).
I heartily applaud anyone trying to monetize FLOSS based on decent principles and values, rather than just bottom-line, willingly taking the hard road of founding a bootstrapped, sustainable business.
(Notably Microsoft had the gals to do it in its English PR and translate all over the world, including literal translations to Latin languages where both words are completely different.)
Liberal as in education, comes from "liberal arts", that were those arts that were not necessary for surviving but were typical of Free men's education(Aristocracy first, bourgeoisie later).
Liberal is actually an overloaded adjective that could mean: liberal as in non orthodoxy(not subjected to dogma) like in sex politics or religion. Or economic freedom.
But in the US, "liberals" in politics are actually another dogmatic cult(that probably see themselves as non dogmatic)
So it is quite confusing term to use.
I don't understand. What definition of "liberal" has a meaning in education?
> Caring about who gets the credit more than successfully creating change is not a good look.
So yeah, the author is disingenuous at best.
Another point where they pretend not to see the benefits: Free Software and specifically copyleft has succeeded in getting so many manufacturers to publish their kernel source code, opening the door for bringing more freedom to a bunch of people using their technological devices today (eg. all the ROMs for phones and IoT devices).
And the attempt to highlight the "metonymy" (you know they are bullshitting as soon as they start using terms unfamiliar to the masses) in "free press" but argue against "free software" standing for "software that can be freely used" is very hypocritical too. Righto, who is this "the speech" in "free speech" (alluding to their use of "the software" group).
I've given up reading at that point because it's a post by someone bitter focusing on an unproven premise (how a political ideology has failed if there is no change in leadership for more than 10 years — maybe it's because centralised leadership is not necessary to achieve it ;-)).
Anyway, language is free for people to adapt to their needs, and no amount of elitist grammatical nitpicking will ever change that.
https://drewdevault.com/2019/06/13/My-journey-from-MIT-to-GP...
The FSF is the last bastion of free/libre software, and it’s very close to being overrun by the corporate interests.
The activist strategy, of which you are very well aware, is for one or two “well-meaning” people, without any technical chops, to manage to insert a code of conduct into a project. At that point, any “offense” that is perceived to violate the CoC becomes more important than any technical merit the project might have. This is enforced by mob justice, as we’ve seen in the last couple of days.
The leaders of these projects often have strong personalities and have a decades-long paper trail that can be mined for purported infractions.
Next, the founder is attacked and forced out and the activists own the project.
The power of the project is diminished and the corporate interests benefit, whether or not they are behind the activist take over.
The key is the GPL. It’s the most important thing Stallman has done.
If he is eliminated, the pressure will be to move away from the GPL. The corporate takeover of the web will be complete.
Please continue to support the GPL. The FSF needs rejuvenation, not elimination. It needs to return to its roots.
Hopefully, Stallman has learned to be more respectful and accommodating to his own (genuine) supporters. Otherwise, the war could be lost.
The FSF has accomplished very little in the past 10+ years, other than being the subject of controversey. It's not doing much good for the free software cause anymore, and in fact might be causing it harm. Admitting to this is not the same thing as agreeing to subscribe to the pattern you described, of well-meaning activists lacking technical chops inserting themselves into projects to establish a CoC and kick out undesirables.
Little of that has to do with RMS, for the record. I am not speaking out for or against RMS or his role at the FSF.
It needs rejuvenation.
I don’t know what will happen - maybe the forces arrayed against it will neuter it completely.
Maybe someone read Stallman the riot act. Maybe a year in the wilderness has caused some change and he will show his true supporters more respect and tolerance. He did seem happy and relaxed in the video, more so than I can remember over the last couple of decades.
The GPL is a hard fight. It really takes Stallman’s implacability and persistence. I think he deserves another go.
There are many interests absolutely determined to deny him that, which shows how important this battle is.
It looks like the focus now should turn to hardware. The world needs a free hardware foundation today just like it needed FSF in the 80's.
This is possible in the same way as it's possible to build a nuclear weapon in a garage. There is no theoretical barrier, but out of 7-8 billion people, I'm betting the number of those who actually did it is a close approximation of zero.
Where, exactly, are you going to buy a regular personal computer that comes with free - LIBRE - software in BIOS, microcode, TPM, video card, network card, and finally OS? Asking for a friend.
There is a war going on against General Purpose Computing, and walled gardens have become the norm. We need the FSF -- or something like it -- more than ever.
I can find no evidence of this term being used anywhere outside of this piece; FLOSS is consistently expanded by people discussing the term as “Free/Libre and Open Source", where “Libre” disambiguates the sense of “free”.
The author may have coined a term that happens to spelled identically to a popular term, but the clear insinuation that the popular term refers to the authors hobby horse is grossly misleading and obviously deliberately so.
I understand the argument that FLOSS (Libre) was always a movement that was not just about software, but just because it is not only about software does not imply that shoving any random ideology into it (as the author is doing) is welcome.
I reiterate: if credit doesn't matter to the author, why is he trying to steal credit for FLOSS?
Hypocritical, intellectually dishonest, and borderline fraudulent to make the claims he is making.
> A researcher studying practices and methods used by developers in the free software community decided that these questions were independent of the developers' political views, so he used the term “FLOSS,”
Unfortunately he doesn't name that researcher, whom he is attributing FLOSS to. Anyone knows?
According to Stallmann "FLOSS" is the most inclusive term including open source with a non-free license though:
> Thus, if you want to be neutral between free software and open source, and clear about them, the way to achieve that is to say “FLOSS,” not “FOSS.”
So and I'm suprised by that, while L stands for libre according to Stallman, the acronym FLOSS is a actually a more liberal term because it is neutral to whether the software in question free or only open source.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html
The opensource definition [0] and free software definition [1] are similar enough in outcome (if not intent) that such a thing is basically impossible.
Last time I looked the only difference between the OSI's and FSF's lists of acceptable licenses was the OpenWatcom license, which requires you to release the source even when you just deploy it privately. This was a mistake on part of the OSI and should not have been accepted. At least Debian, Fedora and the FSF consider it to be unacceptable.
[0] https://opensource.org/osd [1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
The open source page also says “ The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.” which would seem to disqualify the GPL.
I really think copyleft being free is a stretch people make because of what an uphill battle free software has. I mean peep the name 'copyleft'
No. The FSF considers the MIT license to be a Free software license compatible with the GPL. [1]
> The open source page also says “ The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.” which would seem to disqualify the GPL.
Section 5 of GPLv3 ("Conveying Modified Source Versions.") contains the following text:
'A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an “aggregate” if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.'
IANAL, but to me, that means the license doesn't insist on all other software on the same medium being licensed under the GPL.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#X11License
No, the FSF specifically IDENTIFIES MIT as meeting the Free Software Definition, which does not require any such requirement.
Now, Stallman and the FSF have identified reasons that they prefer copyleft licenses like the (A)GPL for many uses, but that isn't the same as considering them the only Free licenses.
> The open source page also says “ The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.” which would seem to disqualify the GPL.
The GPL explicitly does not put any restrictions on other software merely because if is distributed along with the licensed software.
It's not a brand new construction (the link has the author of the piece using the term several years ago). I think you are right about the L though.
This is especially confusing since the existence of the FSF doesn't really impact one way or another the existence of other groups pushing forward other agendas. The only risk is one group losing mindshare to the other.
I can certainly see supporting free software to ensure user's rights as well as supporting other sorts of 'public software infrastructure' to ensure security or availability of services at the same time.
My guess is some pent up frustration with the political infighting in the FSF.
You don't need logic if you're a believer working tirelessly against the unbelievers.
But it's true. People act more socially if they think they are watched or they think they could be watched. They don't actually have to be watched. If people think their source code will be examined, they will do less antisocial things. It is very rare to have deliberately malicious features in free software, whereas we have a whole class of dark patterns in dark software.
The exceptions are things like Chrome or Firefox that are such giant and unwieldy codebases that they might as well be opaque boxes. In the case of Chrome, the Chrome builds you use contain secret sauce from Google in order to make it easier for Google to show you ads, different from Chromium.
Firefox occasionally also tries to embed anti-user features, but then distributors such as Debian may notice them and remove them when repackaging the software.
Again, these two are rare cases.
On top of that, the only time I hear people actually complain about free software is if they're trying to incorporate it into their product and don't have the authority to make the business/product call to not worry about the secrecy of their source code (or don't want to). Essentially, they don't respect the license/ethos and just want to use other software for free not with user freedom in mind.
Here's why you use free software:
1. You are building a product where user freedom is important. 2. You don't want a large company to take your software and use their vast resources to pump out improvements and usurp your position in the market (AGPL). 3. You want to mutually benefit from others using your software in a more tangible way than "can I have money look I have github stars". 4. You want to assert your patent position and ensure that nobody can ever lock you out of your product by patenting a derivative work.
Here's when free software is annoying:
1. If you're trying to make money off commodity software (or talent). 2. If your lawyers aren't familiar with how the world writes software and insist that everything your engineers output is a trade secret and will bolster your software portfolio in the event of acquisition (don't work for these companies).
I've also commonly heard the myth that using the GPL slashes your company's value. In the instances where that's happened, the people who let it happen got taken, or they didn't do their diligence and let the GPL slip into their product when their whole strategy was keeping their source secret and then look like fools and direct their anger at the GPL.
Another thing people don't often realize is that as the original copyright holder, you have permission to dual license your work as you see fit. If you're say an enterprise company and trying to woo a big client and they just can't stomach the GPL, then you can choose to license it to them under terms they're willing to work with, if that makes sense for your business. Honestly I think this puts the company that owns the software in a pretty powerful position "oh you like our product but want special treatment, well that's going to cost some $$$".
If Free Software is dead you'd think the linux kernel would be dead, Signal would be dead, etc.
1. The FSF has an overly narrow view of user freedoms that doesn't actually protect users freedoms [because they assume all users are developers]. Users want warranties, not source code that they aren't able to inspect. Even if they were, fixing that source is effectively forking the program into an unsupportable version, hence why proprietary licensing started [to save users from themselves]. Ergo, source availability is not a reasonable way to protect users. (Insert hamfisted metaphor about assault weapons and QAnon.)
2. The FSF has no legislative adjenda to mitigate or eliminate the harms of proprietary software. Their sole strategy is based in litigation: locking software into copyleft licenses that mandate source code publication as a condition of redistribution. The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today.
I think this is the one thing I do agree with. If there's something I think the FSF got wrong it's their staunch aversion to software patents. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to patent trolls, and I do agree that from a liberal intellectual property stance it's hard to rationalize patenting something that's not a physical invention and that software patents are in some regards akin to patenting the fastest route from your house to the grocery store. I concede we have had some pretty bogus software patents like "an object oriented operating system", but I think that as society matures in its understanding of software it will only get better, not worse, and sniffing out bogus software patents and there will only become more and more prior art. I also think that any serious company needs to patent their inventions. Once you do that the invention becomes public domain and you have the rights to license it in any style you see fit, just as you do with copyright, or, copyright still applies and you have the power to lay claim to all forms of your invention, not just your reference implementation. I think the FSF's focus on copyright is a result of Stallman stumbling into the discovery that he could hack the copyright system and he just ran with that. And of course it is much harder to patent something because it has to be novel and copyleft has that nice.. viral effect. The reality is that most people aren't doing novel things with software, they're just doing things with software. The FSF gets more exposure if it can apply in the later case.
I don't understand why we need to tear down the FSF to incorporate approaches that include freedom-focused patenting into the software licensing discussion. It's also not a new talking point. The GPL covers mutual patent assignment and I believe the FSF has advocated for people to donate patents to different software projects etc. There is a very real issue with patents and free software and there has been litigation in the past between patent holders and open source software projects that have implemented software off of a patented specification. The FSF doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I find it way more understandable than the massive rant we're all talking about and it makes a way more coherent argument to boot.
My personal opinion is that the best solution (if I specifically had the power to alter history such that CONTU's 1978 final recommendation was different) would have been to establish a sui generis right for software distribution monopolies that lasted 10 years and required source-code escrow. This is cribbed from the existing sui generis right for IC designs. Copyright would be explicitly barred from covering software, but it would still cover embedded creative works within the software.
Under this regime, a videogame would have it's engine code covered by software-rights, but it's art assets covered by ordinary copyright. This would mean that, for example, old videogames would be freed from the constraints of having to relicense middleware and engines. We wouldn't have massive preservation hazards like, say, Adobe Flash Player that wind up rendering entire art scenes inaccessible until manually remade by their copyright holders. By the time the software is abandoned, anything a decade older would be free to preserve and adapt.
(If you're wondering: this is the licensing model id took with their old game engines: once the engine was no longer being licensed, they just dropped GPL'd source code. You still needed to buy DooM if you wanted to play DooM, as the source drop didn't come with any levels or models, but if you just wanted to play with the game engine or build your own game with it, you were free to do so.)
Video codecs are one of the few areas of software where patents are preferred over copyright protection; or at least they were until H.265's three patent pools broke the licensing model and everyone fled to AOM AV1. MPEG is also trying their hand at another royalty-free codec (even though ISO's patent disclosure policies make it difficult to do so). So I wouldn't be surprised if the standard shifts to Free software implementations of unpatented codecs with widespread hardware implementations.
Part of the apprehensiveness people have over patents is that they're much broader. This is also why creative works are born copyrighted (you only need to register to sue) but inventions aren't born patented. You have to apply for patents and prove to multiple countries' patent offices that your invention is novel. But patent offices do a terrible job at this; their incentive is to approve everything so they can collect filing fees and let the victims of patent trolls bear the burden of proving obviousness to a court. That's why I would really prefer some kind of "copyright-lite" to a patents-based approach.
This is an inane argument. Limiting your liability isn't some kind of moral evil. The potential for harm due to defects always exists, and if you provide a good or service to someone, you have to negotiate with that person who will accept the liability for it.
Generic software licenses limit liability because it's usually much cheaper for the end user to assume the liability as they have far greater knowledge of their practical risks.
A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.
in that light it is a moral obligation to remind consumers of the technology about their obligations. The legalese may sound just evasive, and motivated by the us environment of litigations by stupid people, but seriously: fitness for use is am obligation of the systems engineer, not the provider of FOSS.
elisa.tech is a community to enable Linux in safety applications. even there, the responsibility is with the consumer of their work, they also just seek methods and inputs for system safety engineering, which, when used by a system safety engineer may lead to a certifiable, and then liability covered device. like an adas system powered by Linux.
This would also apply to the problem of web search and social network monopolies. The way I see it: let Google and FB develop or host a plurality of ranking, filtering and UI variants, and let the users decide their preferred flavor. Then they can't complain about bias. There would be a Republican Google and a Democrat Google and a EFF Google and a BLM Google to pick from. They are now like single TV channels with unified editorial stance, they should be more like cable networks. Give people the remote for content ranking, filtering and UI.
and you choose your profile not via drop down but with your engagement with and liking and disliking of content?
Hmm... I hadn't though about the implications of this before. Is this a solution to the mythical funding balance the industry is failing to achieve? Enterprise software already operates like this. What if e.g. github reframed its project sponsorship model as something that involved getting maintainers setup with liability insurance and the ability to offer sponsors warranty and liability for their software.
My concern with the rust ecosystem right now is that it goes the way of node and projects just get littered with endless libraries that were fresh and hot at one point in time. Often times you open issues and it takes days or weeks to get a response if at all because the maintainers have moved on.
I'd be super interested in only using dependencies where I could subscribe to liability and warranty service after I've tried them out and they're want I'm going to roll with. And you would even potentially see interesting things like "pure" chains where all software used is covered by somebody.
This model would also have the interesting effect of promoting software design and language selection that results in "easier to warrant" not just "does the job" and maintainers that do a better job at writing good software would bubble to the top since their liability insurance premiums would stay cheap. If you write too much crappy software, at some point it becomes unaffordable and you go work for Facebook (it's a joke! you get the point).
For single projects this is definitely possible, at least theoretically. But I can't imagine it working for large ecosystems.
I think it would be much more expensive. The developers of some library are having a hard time judging how much money somebody stakes on that library working perfectly. It might be that they'd lose an hour of work if they hit a bug, it might also be that a huge project fails with gigantic losses - it's hard to insure against that if you still want people to be able to afford it.
It's much easier to buy insurance on the user side where you know the potential impact (i.e. "my wordpress site will be offline for a day" vs "the oil rig I've run calculations for could sink if there was a bug").
The ones who want this already have it through SLAs and the remainder can't afford it.
Package registries would shut down overnight.