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The Free Software Movement is Barking Up the Wrong Tree

posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:44PM   
from the interesting-viewpoints dept.

canopic jug writes:

Joseph Graham has written a very short blog post about software freedom and the direction we might take to achieve it.

The free software movement, founded in the 80s by Richard Stallman and supported by the Free Software Foundations 1, 2, 3, 4, preaches that we need software that gives us access to the code and the copyright permissions to study, modify and redistribute. While I feel this is entirely true, I think it's not the best way to explain Free Software to people.

I think the problem we have is better explained more like this:

"Computer technology is complicated and new. Education about computers is extremely poor among all age groups. Technology companies have taken advantage of this lack of education to brainwash people into accepting absurd abuses of their rights."

Source : The Free Software movement is Barking up the wrong tree

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Original Submission

• Every publicly traded company has a price Every publicly traded company has a price (Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday December 26 2017, @10:33PM (3 children)

  by Pino P (4721) on Tuesday December 26 2017, @10:33PM (#614470) Journal

  Instead of saying it's flat out illegal, say everything has a price. If the client is willing to pay billions of dollars to acquire a controlling stake in the publisher of the relevant piece of proprietary software, it's not illegal. So quote the client the publisher's market capitalization as part of your expenses for such a project.

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  Starting Score:	1		point
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  Interesting=1, Informative=1, Total=2
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• Re:Every publicly traded company has a price Re:Every publicly traded company has a price (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:33PM (2 children)

  by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:33PM (#614774) Journal

  Even that's not the whole story. A lot of proprietary software projects include libraries that are licensed under specific terms and so you'd also need to acquire your suppliers' suppliers (for example, when Sun open sourced Solaris, they had to strip out the locale code from libc, because they had licensed a proprietary implementation from IBM and did not have the rights to release the source code, at all, let alone under an open source license). In some cases, the supplier provided a binary-only blob and has subsequently gone out of business and the receivers lost the code. Yahoo ended up in this situation with respect to a few things and so has some insane patches to FreeBSD to allow them to run a 32-bit library inside a 64-bit process.

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  sudo mod me up

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  • Re:Every publicly traded company has a price Re:Every publicly traded company has a price (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:43PM (1 child)

    by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:43PM (#614829) Journal

    In some cases, the supplier provided a binary-only blob and has subsequently gone out of business and the receivers lost the code.

    The procedure for this:

    1. Buy rights to what the receivers do have
    2. Disassemble
    3. Publish assembly code under free software license
    4. Add unit tests
    5. Refactor

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    • Re:Every publicly traded company has a price (Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:09AM

      by Wootery (2341) on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:09AM (#618954)

      I suspect they thought of that.

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