from the the-solution-has-always-been-copyleft dept.
Educator Lionel Dricot explores the historical prescience of Richard Stallman's (RMS) warnings and prophecies which have been spot on since the beginning, including his proposed solutions. Dricot points out that the problem with acceptance of the solutions is not with RMS or the Free Software Foundation (FSF), instead the problem is us and that we didn't listen. In addition to the Four Freedoms, he points out one obligation which has been taken for granted and left unspoken until now: the obligation to prevent privatization of the Commons.
There was one weakness in RMS theory: copyleft was not part of the four freedoms he theorised. Business-compatible licenses like BSD/MIT or even public domain are "Free Software" because they respect the four freedoms.
But they can be privatised.
And that's the whole point. For the last 30 years, businesses and proponents of Open Source, including Linus Torvalds, have been decrying the GPL because of the essential right of "doing business" aka "privatising the common".
They succeeded so much that the essential mission of the FSF to guarantee the common was seen as "useless" or, worse, "reactionary". What was the work of the FSF? The most important thing is that they proof-bombed the GPL against weaknesses found later. They literally patched vulnerabilities. First the GPLv3, to fight "Tivoisation" and then AGPL, to counteract proprietary online services running on free software but taking away freedom of users.
But all this work was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.
Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein's creature and handed them to the evil professor.
Previously:
(2018) Happy 35th Birthday GNU!
Related Stories
Christine Hall of FOSS Force has interviewed Richard Stallman with a series of seven questions. The interview wraps up with a question about LLMs and a question about service as a software substitute which leads to a discussion about digital surveillance.
Let’s contrast this with traditional systems of age verification to see how much worse this is. When you buy alcoholic beverages, a store clerk will ask to see your ID, but won’t record your identity, only take note of your age. That practice respects your privacy; its surveillance impact is null. But digital age verification systems record who you are, and precisely everything you do.
At 73 years old, I am sure all the sites that do age verification would rule I am old enough. But doing the age verification would give them my name or an ID number, and I refuse to give them that.
Because of my age, I am entitled to a discount card for the Boston trains and buses. But the card would record my identity every time I board a subway train or bus. I would rather pay full fare than submit to that.
I don’t own a car, or want to, but we need to stop cars from reporting where people go. I hope to find a mechanic who will work out how to convert connected cars into “disconnected cars.” I think it could be done by wrapping some sort of metal sheets around the antennas that transmit privacy-violating data, or receive GPS. Or perhaps just unscrewing them. To do navigation, use a stand-alone GPS receiver that isn’t connected to the car’s surveillance system.
One of the dangers of tech companies storing your personal data — and personal data about you — in their servers is that agents of repression can get that data from the company without even informing you.
For more about digital surveillance, see
https://gnu.org/philosophy/surveillance-vs-democracy.html.
One long-running theme which RMS emphasizes is that software freedom remains a moral issue.
Previously:
(2023) The Four Freedoms and The One Obligation of Free Software
(2018) Happy 35th Birthday GNU!
(2018) RMS on a Radical Proposal to Keep Your Personal Data Safe
(2017) The Free Software Movement is Barking Up the Wrong Tree
(2017) US Court Upholds Enforceability of GNU GPL as Both a License and a Contract
(2015) GNU Prophet Richard Stallman Calls Windows and MacOS Malware
At the beginning of last year, Manuel Hoffmann, Frank Nagle, and Yanuo Zhou published a working paper on the Value of Open Source Software [PDF] for comment and discussion only.
The value of a non-pecuniary (free) product is inherently difficult to assess. A pervasive example is open source software (OSS), a global public good that plays a vital role in the economy and is foundational for most technology we use today. However, it is difficult to measure the value of OSS due to its non-pecuniary nature and lack of centralized usage tracking. Therefore, OSS remains largely unaccounted for in economic measures. Although prior studies have estimated the supply-side costs to recreate this software, a lack of data has hampered estimating the much larger demand-side (usage) value created by OSS. Therefore, to understand the complete economic and social value of widely-used OSS, we leverage unique global data from two complementary sources capturing OSS usage by millions of global firms. We first estimate the supply-side value by calculating the cost to recreate the most widely used OSS once. We then calculate the demand-side value based on a replacement value for each firm that uses the software and would need to build it internally if OSS did not exist. We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. The top six programming languages in our sample comprise 84% of the demand-side value of OSS. Further, 96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers.
The working paper is especially interesting when considered in the context of similar, earlier works such as Ghosh et al in Study on the effect on the development of the information society of European public bodies making their own software available as open source [PDF] published by the European Commission back in 2007. One would think that both sides of the pond would be very interested in this valuable commons and work to not just protect it but cultivate it further, rather than work to saw the legs from under it by advancing software patents instead.
Previously:
(2025) Open Internet Stack: The EU Commission's Vague Plans for Open Source
(2023) The Four Freedoms and The One Obligation of Free Software
(2023) Opinion: FOSS Could be an Unintended Victim of EU Security Crusade
(2021) European Commission's Study on Open Source Software
The Free Software Foundation has a well-written overview of how the superset to Free Software, referred to collectively as Open Source, cannot save us from loss of liberty in the context of computing. A lead-in using conventional rhetoric is followed by a concise conclusion using logic.
The FSF and the OSI both spend their days talking about licenses, which makes them easy to mix up. Follow the money instead. The OSI runs on corporate sponsorship, and its sponsors are some of the largest companies on earth. The FSF runs on membership dues from individuals.
FSF est. 1983
• Campaigns for the freedom of computer users. That's the whole mission statement.
• Wrote the GPL, "designed specifically to protect freedom for all users of a program," and defends it.
• No corporate members. Funded by individual dues and limited donations that buy no vote and no seat.
• Says "freedom" in meetings, unprompted, since 1983.OSI est. 1998
• Approves licenses. (§05 covers the quality control.)
• Maintains a definition that never grants you the right to run the program. (§04.)
• Founded to make free software palatable to business, with the ethics filed off.
• Corporate sponsors include: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Cisco, Salesforce, Bloomberg, Intel. The famous grassroots.Microsoft and Google do not sponsor things out of sentiment. Money at that scale steers, whatever the org chart says. The FSF is structurally incapable of being bought the same way: there is no corporate membership to buy. A company can donate, within limits, and what the donation purchases is nothing. One of these organizations exists to defend you from corporations. The other one sends corporations a welcome basket.
And when a license is actually violated, only one of them shows up. The FSF runs a licensing and compliance lab, answers license questions for free, and holds the copyrights that make enforcement possible. When Cisco shipped GPL code in Linksys routers without offering source, the FSF took them to federal court in 2008 and settled on its terms: source code published, a free-software compliance officer appointed, money paid. GPL violators can expect a courtroom. The OSI offers nothing comparable. It holds no copyrights, runs no compliance program, and has never enforced a license in its life; it stamps them and walks away. If anything, the institution leans the other way: its co-founder spent years arguing that open source "doesn't need the GPL anymore." Certifying dozens of alternatives to copyleft while defending none of them is not neutrality. It is a way of hobbling the one license built to fight back.
[...] Since F⊆OF⊆O is true and O⊆FO⊆F is false, by definition FF is a proper subset of OO:
F⊆O ∧ F≠O
Even from the big launch of the term Open Source in 1998, the idea was only ever meant as a stepping stone to lead developers fully over to Free Software. Unfortunately some have gotten stuck along the way. And in the direction of software freedom, it is important to remember that software freedom is not the end goal in and of itself, it is merely the start of and prerequisite to greater things which only become possible from that foundation.
Previously:
(2025) Forty Years of Commitment to Software Freedom
(2024) Achieving Software Freedom in the Age of Platform Decay
(2023) The Four Freedoms and The One Obligation of Free Software
(2022) Conflicts of Interest in OSI Election
(2019) Has FOSS Traded its Shared Values for Success in the Marketplace?
... and many more.
The GNU project was officially announced on 27 September 1983 by Richard Stallman. Thirty-five years of a project that has now become the fundamental building block of everything we use and see in technology in 2018. I would not be wrong to say that there isn't a single proprietary piece of software that anyone is still using from 35 years ago – please post comments if there is something still being used.
There is only one reason for this longevity: the GNU project was built upon the premise that the code is available to anyone, anywhere with the only restriction that whatever is done to the code, it shall always be available to anyone, forever. Richard Stallman's genius in crafting the copyleft license that is the GNU General Public License is probably the best hack of the 20th century software industry.
Extra: Happy Birthday, GNU: Why I still love GNU 35 years later
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2023, @10:55PM (1 child)
I'll never forget being invited to Stallman's pad outside MIT, for wine and discussion (database is my bag), and watch him pick fleas out of his beard and crack them between his long fingernails.
(Score: 1, Flamebait) by epitaxial on Wednesday June 21 2023, @03:08AM
Even his pictures have those visible stink lines.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2023, @11:13PM (7 children)
"Copying isn't stealing" because you still have the source. "I lose nothing if somebody lights their candle from my flame", or something like that allegedly quoted by Thomas Jefferson. TFS is hypocrisy. Most people in the FS movement would agree with the previous, but if you refuse to play within their Public Software feifdom, suddenly copying has magically become theft!
Note, I'm not calling it Free Software. I'm calling it Public Software, because that's what it is--just like a public park or a public school. You can't take those private, but they get trashed and poorly maintained all the time and then when people take their kids to private or charter schools, the same people who are likely to whine about BSD are probably whining about that.
Truly free licenses like BSD, MIT, etc. are IMHO superior because when the Public Software model doesn't produce, that proprietary option they're lamenting gives people the incentive to pick it up and improve it in ways that the volunteers either can't or don't want.
MacOS didn't take anything from you. Darwin is still there. Have at it.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 20 2023, @11:35PM (6 children)
I do like that metaphor.
It's worth noting that doing a poor job of maintaining the commons doesn't just happen, it's a deliberate decision on the part of those charged with cleaning and maintaining the public good to not give a damn if it's trashed. Usually, that's because the decision to maintain or not maintain it is being made by people who aren't using it. Which creates a reason this won't happen to major bits of what you're terming Public Software, because major players who are in a position to maintain it also use it and thus have reason to maintain it.
But even without that, there's another factor at play: Public parks and schools often get help from volunteers, people helping out of the goodness of their hearts and for no other reason. Even informally: If I'm in a park and I see litter, there's a greater-than-zero chance I'm going to grab it and put it in a trash can, because it's a decent use of a couple of minutes and helps me enjoy the place too.
Which means odds are pretty good the users don't want the "improvement" either, but instead it's being driven by a marketdroid or a project manager who needs to meet their quota of completed changes.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2023, @12:30AM (4 children)
Which means odds are pretty good the users don't want the "improvement" either, but instead it's being driven by a marketdroid or a project manager who needs to meet their quota of completed changes.
And once again, if they use OSS to build junk you don't have to use the junk. OTOH, they used the BSD stack and the JPEG handling in Windows for years and how on Earth did that hurt anybody? If anything it was a bunch less security holes in Windows if they rolled their own. I have a hard time empathizing with anybody who would complain about that, especially since the developers knew all along it could go proprietary, and *they* also had the freedom to make a proprietary product with it, or an Open Source project so everybody wins whereas GPL/CopyLeft locks you in to business models that work that way. Show me a business model where "support" or "clicks" is the revenue generator, and I'll show you software that needs those things. If anything is a slave to marketroids and especially data-miners, it's Public Software. Good ol' proprietary Windows didn't pull that shit until 8.x to 10 transition when they installed the infamous GWX update because they knew that the only way to make money in a market dominated by Public Software was to mine the hell out of your data.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by GloomMower on Wednesday June 21 2023, @01:25AM
> Good ol' proprietary Windows didn't pull that shit until 8.x to 10 transition when they installed the infamous GWX update because they knew that the only way to make money in a market dominated by Public Software was to mine the hell out of your data.
Seems dominated by proprietary software:
"As of February 2023, Windows holds 57.37% of the desktop OS market in the US, macOS holds 29.62% and Chrome OS holds 7.47%. Linux holds 2.55%, whereas other miscellaneous desktop operating systems hold 2.97%"
Office 365 with 54% market share, google docs the rest.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 21 2023, @02:38AM (2 children)
Ah, I see your mistake: You think of everything in terms of business models and profitability. But that doesn't explain long-running successful non-profit projects like, say, the Postgres database.
There are lots of reasons why people write software. Selling it, selling support for it, or using it to spy on people is only some of the reasons someone might create code. For example, a large percentage of code is for large corporations to use internally.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2023, @03:29AM (1 child)
> a large percentage of code is for large corporations to use internally.
That's what we do, specialty/niche math models for large companies. Years ago our tiny company licensed our own code and held onto our source as trade secret. The niche is small enough that we never really took off as a "software company". Eventually our customers realized that they would do better long term with their own source for code that was integral to their internal process.
It became obvious that they had the resources to hire their own engineers and roll their own...eventually (there's a steep learning curve in our specialty). Thus we concluded that we should change our business model over to "engineers for hire" where the customer gets the source code. Now we contract to write specific code for the customers. It's so customized to work with their business (and their legacy code) that it's unlikely anyone else could use it anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GloomMower on Wednesday June 21 2023, @08:23AM
I don't think this is because of open source software, or what parent calls "public software".
All software even proprietary software can be copied at no cost. It just has to be written once and can be copied infinite amount of times. You have to have real good leverage in order to get people to pay, otherwise a competitor (either open source, proprietary, or internal) can drive the cost to zero. It is similar to goods with mass production, cost often creeps down to close to materials cost. It is why in the US it is mostly a service economy. You buy/sell peoples time to do something if it is important to you/a company.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 21 2023, @03:18PM
I would much rather they went with Public Domain Software. It ties in nicely with how Public Domain books work. Once a book is in the Public Domain, it's freely available for anyone to use how they see fit. You want to print toilet paper with the constitution of the united states printed on it, go for it. That might irk some people, but so long as they aren't in your home using your toilet paper. You shouldn't need to worry too much about that.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bloodnok on Wednesday June 21 2023, @12:58AM (5 children)
It became obvious to me very early on, when, if my memory is not entirely failing, a BSD-licensed TCP/IP stack was taken and placed into a proprietary operating system, that the GPL was necessary and would always be my preferred licence.
I consider the lack of obligations in BSD and similar licences to grant only the extra freedom to enslave the licensed work: that is to take it from the commons and make it proprietary. And although for some projects that might be desirable (the good PostgreSQL folks think so), for most it should probably not be.
The GPL does not grant the right to enslave, and so is sometimes described as less free than the BSD license but such arguments either miss the point or try to obfuscate it. I have no problem with commercial software existing, and I have no problem with someone using my code for commercial purposes: I will happily sell them a commercial licence to my GPL'd software if that's what they want. If they want to make money from my software and are not prepared to give their modifications back to the community, they can damn well pay for the privilege. And if they therefore choose not to use my GPL'd software, the commons is hardly impoverished by their choice.
__
The Major
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Wednesday June 21 2023, @03:15AM (1 child)
I'd find it pretty damn amusing that the IP stack I wrote made it into major commercial software.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday June 21 2023, @08:05AM
I'd find it pretty damn amusing that the IP stack I wrote made it into major commercial software.
There's two ways to look at that.
One is that from a certain perspective, it is worlds better that m$ ripped off the BSD stack instead of trying to pretend that they could have written their own IP stack. Writing their own would have gone even worse than what has happened with their BSD stack, and look at what a mess that turned out to be.
Another way to look at it is that getting the IP stack from BSD allowed m$ to enter the Internet era instead of dying of irrelevance. That brings us spam farms, worms, ransomware, DDoS-for-hire, and many other problems that would be moot had Windoze gone away with the passing of the 1990s.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 21 2023, @06:48AM (2 children)
Ok, what does "enslaving" software mean and why is it supposed to be a bad thing?
(Score: 3, Informative) by bloodnok on Wednesday June 21 2023, @05:05PM (1 child)
It means taking the software, modifying and using it for your own purposes, without allowing it to be used by others. It means denying that software the right to be free.
As for why that's bad: if its not obvious I don't think I can explain it to you.
__
The Major
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday June 23 2023, @12:13AM
Eh, there's not much there and yet it's quite broken. First, if that software is sentient, then I agree that it should have rights and we should be diligent in protecting those rights. But the option to be a servant to many masters rather than just one never will be such a right nor make one more free.
It's really a conflict of interest on your part. You want to exploit software and thus, fabricate a "right" that enhances your exploitation of that software. It boils down to the right to be exploited in any way that you can conceive. And well, the right for software to be proprietary and hidden is just as legitimate as the right not to be "enslaved". My take: don't bother to give rights to inanimate objects and come up with a better paradigm instead.
It's not obvious. I agree on your inability to explain this, but it's not my fault.
Here, the real problem is the freedom of users. The more proprietary the system, the less control users have over their actions in and out of the system.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Uncle_Al on Wednesday June 21 2023, @12:58AM
"the only way to make money in a market dominated by Public Software was to mine the hell out of your data."
or.. add value. Something people are willing to pay for. But that's too hard.
UX is exceeding bad in free software. Fix it, sell it for a resonable price and offer support.
Take suggestions. Don't put up with the petty battles going on between virtue signaling coders.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Late on Wednesday June 21 2023, @04:39AM (6 children)
You can certainly take the pessimistic view if you start from a premise that GNU and the FSF were going to take over how software is licensed and distributed. But people do that?
If you start from a pessimistic view then how things have unfolded has been excellent in my opinion. When I first read the GNU manifesto I supposed that was an interesting perspective. I'd read the recently passed Unabomber's manifesto not long after and the Communist Manifesto not long before. I never supposed any of these ideals were relevant to how my life would proceed. But the GNU manifesto turned out to be quite relevant. Free software hasn't taken over how the author would wish, but it's there for those who want it. I was pretty impressed with how DJ Delorie's gcc port to DOS could use a flat 32 bit memory model when what I'd considered the best, Borland's C++ compiler, did only segmented memory models. And then there was emacs. Figured that would be about it along with this cute manifesto to wonder about. But now there are any number of systems and some effort to push into firmware. Phones aren't in a great place but maybe someday.
Recently I thought of the four freedoms as an elaboration of some left wing ideals I'd recently read in a book on participatory economics (No Bosses by Michael Albert). One of his values is that decision making capacity should fall proportionally to who's affected by the decisions. Another is that jobs be what he called balanced, meaning that everyone would get to actualize into the more interesting roles in any effort rather than be relegated to only the worst ones. He gave other examples of the latter principle, but I imagined the split between pure developers, pure testers, and pure sysadmins being torn down. If you find a bug and wish to fix it you could. That doesn't happen easily in (most?) companies, but it's allowed with free software projects. So I think of the free software principles as a special instance of principles that people should have influence on what affects them (decision making by those affected) and be able to actualize out of set roles (balanced jobs).
Now, I'm no great student of the radical left. I just picked up this book cause of the title and the fact that the powers that be laid off some of my friends again, i.e. I was ticked off in unfocused directions. But as far as I can tell participatory economics has so far only gotten to be words on pages. Maybe there are some co-ops that fit the bill to some extent, but I don't know myself how I would ever experience anything like that. I know a co-op, but I don't think they're looking for anyone or that I do what they need. But with free software it's easy enough to use and participate in, subject to free time, mental limits and back soreness.
As some say, licenses can only do so much. I'd say further that carving out principles within a certain field of endeavor without successfully (or desirably) realizing similar principles in the wider context can only do so much.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Wednesday June 21 2023, @02:14PM (1 child)
It will be interesting to see what happens, license-wise, with AI trading off of GPL software. Imagine if all AI generated code to be licensed under the GPL.
Of course, there are lots of incompatible licenses out there, so thus outcomebus unlikely. More, it is likely that Copilot included private, proprietary software in its training corpus. That's likely to be a costly mistake...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Freeman on Wednesday June 21 2023, @03:20PM
True, but if you can make a few billion before anyone notices. What's a few million dollars in fines?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 21 2023, @04:12PM (3 children)
I get the impression the radical left is too idealistic and dismissive of painful facts about immediate motives and plain old greed. The biggest lack in the free software movement is finance. In one report of an interview with RMS, when he was asked how developers were to make money, basically, how to make money outside Capitalism, he ignored the question. Maybe that reporting is biased, and he did answer. Wouldn't surprise me. But supposing it is accurate, then maybe he thought the answers too obvious. But it gives the impression he doesn't have any ideas either. Further evidence that RMS didn't have a good answer was all the verbiage about being allowed to charge money for the distribution, on floppies(!), of source code. It was to recover the costs of the media and delivery, but I saw also hints that one ought to ask a bit more, in order to profit. Sooo ... it was the old levying of fee per copy! It really is asking a lot of developers to invest time and effort into open software without any guarantees they will ever receive compensation. It hurts even more that there are endless opportunists out there seeking to exploit generous spirits to get something for almost nothing. In most cases, a project has to gain some success, recognition and popularity before it is in position to solicit donations. Thus most projects have been about developers scratching their own itches.
Yet there is a pretty good answer to the problem of finance: patronage, particularly of the crowdsourcing variety. It's not a new idea either. For instance, for centuries, much classical music was funded via patronage. What I believe is needed and good is significant enhancements of such systems. Crowdfunding is one such enhancement, made possible by modern networking. Centuries ago, of course, only the wealthy could afford to patronize the arts. I would like to see more organized and comprehensive patronage. It strikes me as odd that an organization that manages crowdfunding might not fund itself in the same manner, but instead is a for-profit private entity that profits off the old model of keeping everything hush hush so the customers don't see how very much the organizers pocket, how big that what amounts to Salami Embezzlement is.
It's funny that you mention the Borland C++ compiler, and segmentation. I regard that compiler as a failure, because of a bad bug in their implementation of segmented memory handling. Through at least version 4.5, and I think into the 5.0 versions, if you tried to compile software that used more than 64K of RAM for data, the compiler would build code that uses the same 64K segment when it should have been multiple different segments. As you can imagine, having completely unrelated variables assigned the same memory locations leads to all kinds of crazy bugs. It's incorrect and illegal memory usage on steroids, and the OS can't see any of it. Why was such a badly broken compiler ever brought to market? Is that a failure of the capitalistic model? It certainly is a failure of the proprietary ownership model. Every outsider who might have been able to fix the bugs was implicitly denied all opportunity to try. I remember also Borland's "like a book" license model they extolled in their EULA. The way they wrote it, made the concept sound real reasonable and generously permissive. Or at least, that they thought so. But it wasn't.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Late on Wednesday June 21 2023, @05:26PM (1 child)
I didn't know Borland C++ had bugs in its memory models. I just remember you had to choose from names like tiny, large, huge, or something like that, each corresponding to the values segment registers would be allowed to take. Like I think tiny meant you were going to stick to one 64K segment for both code and data. IIRC huge was quite disappointing when compared to the actual flat 32 bit memory model gcc gave you.
I was a complete novice programmer, so my worshiping of Borland wasn't based on expert knowledge. On BBSes and among my sister's programmer friends first Turbo Pascal was the thing and then bcc picked up on that popularity. In college one guy preferred Microsoft's C++ compiler. We were all like, ew, how can he be so clueless.
I dunno if I'd conclude much about proprietary software vs. free software from this example. My guess would be that the free software people were coming from bigger machines and the culture of the PC crowd was to work smaller and more directly against the PC's architecture.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday June 21 2023, @11:39PM
Borland was a toy. We real programmers used to use WATCOM C++ for good, on DOS3, Windows 2, Windows 286 and WfW. It was worth the money.
The kinder you are, the easier it is for wicked people to morally coerce you.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Zinho on Wednesday June 21 2023, @06:46PM
The best analogy I've heard about for this is that the computer age is a gold rush, and the people developing proprietary software are the ones selling shovels. In a fully open source world you would not be paid for writing a word processor, you would be paid for being a novelist. You would not be paid for writing a database engine, you would be paid for populating and maintaining an accounting database for a company. Open source does not prevent people from using software to make money, the jobs that create actual value are still there. We're just cutting out the metaphorical shovel-selling middlemen.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is another model that works well for "how to make money using open source". Microsoft's Azure service is obviously proprietary, but Amazon Web Services (AWS) is built on Open Source, [amazon.com] and is proud to support the community. They seem to have figured out how to be capitalists in a fully realized open source environment, and are doing well at it.
I honestly hope the likes of Microsoft and Apple stick around to give the Free Software community healthy competition, but I won't shed any tears if their profit margins and business model get seriously eroded by the availability of Free/free (Freedom/beer) alternatives.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 5, Interesting) by choose another one on Wednesday June 21 2023, @06:53PM
Linus can defend himself, but in my opinion (and I recall reading his thoughts on this right back early .99 days) that is verging on slanderous.
Linus _always_ took the tack (I think even before he selected GPL) that there was a social contract inherent to Linux (and expressed in GPLv2) that you can use the source for whatever. modify it however, BUT you MUST give your changes/improvements/modifications back (that means back to the commons). That is, he inherently opposed privatisation of the commons, from day 1 to this day.
Linus has never decried the GPL, he chose it, promoted it, supported it. He didn't like GPLv3, he didn't think it refelected the goals and social contract of v2. He wasn't alone in that, I don't like it either (not that I matter) and nor did (at least several of) the other kernel developers. I'm not sure if he liked the FSF before, but he certainly didn't after the GPLv3 process started. Nor did I. I would (and have) use GPLv2, by choice, but I won't use GPLv3 unless it's forced.
If you want just one example of where the FSF lost the plot with v3 take a look at all the stuff (about 500 words, equivalent to a quarter of the entire v2 licence) about "user product". Ask yourself why is that there? Oh, yes, Tivoisation, BUT why is there all the stuff about "user product", ask yourself what happens to NOT "user products"?
The answer is that there a fields of endeavour (large, commercial, big money, fields) in which "Tivoisation" is not a "bug in the licence", it's a feature, in fact often a legally required feature. So, the FSF decided that if you were in one of those big money big business fields, you can Tivoize the heck out any GPLv3 code. Tivo itself just wasn't big enough business to get the FSF to listen to it. Now ask yourself who is protecting the essential right of "doing business" aka "privatising the common". I can no longer find the reference but I recall it was alleged at the time that a whole bunch of large commercial interests looked at one of the early v3 drafts and threatened to fork essentially everything under GPLv2 to keep it under GPLv2, so the FSF changed stuff (that essential right of "doing business" again...). Apple still left the party over v3, which gives you an idea of the size of the interests we are talking about.
Linus talks about GPLv3 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/9m4n2g/linus_torvalds_says_gpl_v3_violates_everything/ [reddit.com]
Kernel devs here: https://lwn.net/Articles/200422/ [lwn.net]