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.
« Five Tech Giants are Hiding $1.65tn in AI Debt, Using the Trick that Toppled Enron | Zilog Z80 Turns 50 as an Open-Source Replacement Heads to Drop-in DIP40 Silicon »
Related Stories
https://fossforce.com/2019/03/foss-on-the-road-to-nowhere/
The FSF and Linux Foundation are not the only organizations that could assume the moral leadership of FOSS. practices the same ideals that existed in FOSS twenty years ago. Similarly, after years of inactivity, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) has been struggling recently to again be relevant. However, both have a long way to ago before they can speak for the majority of FOSS, assuming they would care to.
Maybe the loss of a single direction is a sign of the success of FOSS. Maybe shared ideals can only exist at a certain point in a movement's development, and to wish otherwise is only meaningless nostalgia. Yet, despite the success of FOSS, today it has only partly transformed technology and business, and much remains to do. Unless we decide to content ourselves with what has already been done, I think that a sense of meaning — of making a difference — is more useful than seeing FOSS as nothing more than a shorter time to market.
Technology journalist Nathan Willis has taken a look at the election at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The election appears to have brought with it several severe conflicts of interest. Several sponsors are running candidates and several corporations are running multiple candidates for multiple seats. Little information was available about some candidates and their stances on Open Source Software and its community.
Ostensibly, these elections are serious affairs. The OSI is high-profile organization, with a robust list of Big Tech sponsor companies funding it. And "open source" as a term is the OSI's property: the OSI is in charge of the trademark and defends it when it is misused; the OSI also maintains the formal "open source" definition and the list of licenses that you are permitted to call "open source". [...]
Nevertheless, these elections kinda just plod through without a lot of interest or engagement. [...] That's in pretty stark contrast to the public back-and-forth that happens for Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections and the brouhaha over recent leadership "maneuvering" (scare quotes intentional) in the FSF.
The OSI board candidates can each write a candidacy-page text that gets put on the wiki, but it can say whatever they want. In short, to you the voter, there's no genuine back-and-forth provided. No debates, no time allotted, no required position papers, etc. For the past few years, however, Luis Villa has made an effort to pose questions to the candidates. I think that's great. Although not everyone answers, some do. [...]
Follow the story link for a detailed breakdown of the ballot candidates and the issues he is concerned about.
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.
Here are two related essays on software freedom in light of the current environment where platform decay has become the norm.
Lead developer of Linux-Libre, FSFLA board member, and previous FSF board member, Alexandre Oliva wrote a piece back in June about platform decay (also known colloquially as enshittification) and how to fight it through software freedom. It's from his May 5th, 2024 LibrePlanet presentation with the same title ( video and slides ). This weekend, developer Daniel Cantarín wrote a follow up addressing the nature of software freedom and the increasing communication, philosophical, and political barriers to actually achieving software freedom.
The two essays are essentially in agreement but raise different points and priorities.
Alexandre Oliva's essay includes the following:
[...] Software (static) enshittification
Back in the time when most users could choose which version of a program they wanted to run, upgrading software was not something that happened automagically. Installing a program involved getting a copy of its installable media, and if you wanted to install a newer version, you had to get a copy of the installable media for the newer version.
You could install them side by side, and if you found that the newer version was lacking some feature important to you, or it didn't serve you well, you could roll back to the older version.
This created a scenario in which the old and the new versions competed for users, so in order for the newer version to gain adoption, it had to be more attractive to users than the older one. It had to offer more interesting features, and if it dropped features or engaged in enshittification, it would need even more interesting features to make up.
This limits how much enshittification can be imposed on users in newer versions. It was much harder to pull feature from under users in that static arrangement.
Software (dynamic) enshittification
But now most users are mistreated with imposed updates, and since they are required to be online all the time, they are vulnerable all the time, and they can't go back to an earlier version that served them well. The following are the most enshittifiable arrangements to offer computing facilities to users. Most enshittifiable so far, Homer Simpson would presumably point out.
Apps that run on remotely-controlled telephones (TRApps) and that are typically automatically updated from exclusive app stores, and their counterparts that run on increasingly enshittified computers (CRApps) are cases in which the programs are installed on your own computer, but are controlled by someone else. They've come to be called apps, so that you'll think of them as appliances rather than as something you can and should be able to tinker with.
Web sites that, every time you visit them, install and demand to run Javascrapped programs on your computer, are a case in which, even if the program is technically Free Software, in this setting, someone else controls which version you get to run, and what that version does.
And then, there are the situations in which, instead of getting a copy of a program, you're offered a service that will do your computing for you, under somebody else's control, substituting software that could have been respectful of your freedom. [...]
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) turns forty on October 4, 2025. The Free Software Foundation will have then been defending the rights of all software users for the past 40 years. The long term goal is for all users have the freedom to run, edit, contribute to, and share software.
There will be an online event, with an in-person option for those that can get to Boston. In November there will also be a hackathon.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23, @02:40AM (9 children)
The thing is.. some of us just want our (software) creations to be useful. We don't care to market it, or commercialize it, and if someone else does - great, I was useful!
it's another of these societal things. Society is just going to have to evolve, and it's going to take its own time in doing so. I'm not going to be able to force it to do so. I'm not going to especially worry about it, either - I have much more immediate concerns in my life. However, I'll express my support of _free_ software at conferences, and to my coworkers, and bosses, et al.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday July 23, @03:07AM
The thing is also that if you're writing the sort of simple software that follows the Unix philosophy, it doesn't necessarily require having a large number of people using it, or contributing to it, to be worth it. So many pieces of software I encounter these days do far more than is really necessary and have far too many moving parts for their own good.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 23, @04:07PM (7 children)
>it's another of these societal things.
Yeah, my "societal thing" for the last 35+ years has been: I've gotta pay for groceries and shelter somehow, and it's not coming from my parents anymore.
As such, LGPL is my "sweet spot" license. MIT (common free use version) is also a good one. GPL pisses off the people who give my paychecks, so... I've gotta pay for groceries and shelter somehow, and that shareware I wrote back in 1997? Net profits to-date: three boxes of hot pockets and a night in a youth hostel.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Friday July 24, @07:07AM (6 children)
You're not being honest - there are plenty of jobs that will provide food and shelter that don't have anything to do with software.
But it is true that for a limited number of companies, proprietary software is sometimes a way to get immense profit out of comparatively little work, just like how beating people up in the street and stealing their wallets, can net high profits (but the latter has much lower profits and you'll soon enough be arrested and appropriately punished for doing so, unlike the former, where the government comes along and does their best to make the citizens they're meant to be serving, empty their wallets at the company).
As far as I can tell, that software you wrote back in 1997 was proprietary software, due to being published under proprietary terms (distributing exact copies allowed, but no modifications allowed, practically and legally I expect), but it's okay that such specific proprietary program didn't make you a fortune?
I think you need to actually read the LGPLv2.1 and LGPLv3 - the requirements are mostly the same as the GPLv2 and GPLv3, it's just that there's an added exception to allow using the library in a proprietary program, as long as the library itself remains free.
I am quite glad that such freedom "pisses off" the enemies of humanity - I'll license AGPLv3-or-later harder and enforce GNU licenses harder too.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24, @12:21PM (5 children)
>You're not being honest - there are plenty of jobs that will provide food and shelter that don't have anything to do with software.
So, then, after spending 3 months out of work looking for my initial job out of University, I was supposed to pass over the one that involved software, because it was "the wrong kind of software"? In 1991?
Then, after "the right kind of software" became available, I was supposed to forsake all employment that used "the wrong kind of software" - and take significant pay cuts and loss of benefits like health insurance, as well as spend longer searching for work to feed now not only myself but my family?
As I just noted elsewhere, from 2006 through about 2019 I made significant strides steering my employers to use FOSS - to their financial benefit. However, only about 40% of my colleagues followed my lead and our most recent "product refresh" is taking a huge turn back to the M$ camp. I, and my FOSS acolytes, still get our paychecks - but if we're going to continue to be "team players" we're going to be doing a lot more under the M$ umbrella for the coming years.
>I'll license AGPLv3-or-later harder and enforce GNU licenses harder too.
I hope it brings you great joy and satisfaction in your life. I, personally, find none in fighting legal battles.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Friday July 24, @02:38PM (4 children)
It an incredibly ludicrous claim, that in spending 3 months looking for a job in 1991, you could only find a job writing proprietary software (considering that very few of such jobs has ever been available) - you were clearly seeking out such specific job for 3 months (clearly anyone who cares about making a lot of money, with moderate work, would be seeking out a spot in that sweet wallet theft ring) and after 3 months you found one.
Considering that 99% of available jobs, do not consist of writing proprietary software and many employers that are not proprietary software companies, do offer health insurance (the USA is totally braindead in that health insurance from the employer is a thing, considering that that the US government puts enough money into the medical system to cover treatment costs of all current patients, but of course businesses instead steal the money, instead of delivering the treatments they were paid to deliver), it is clearly ludicrous to claim that your choice was between writing proprietary software and "significant pay cuts", "loss of benefits like health insurance" and "not being able to feed yourself and your family".
This whole song and dance always frames it as being a matter of not being able to afford to eat, when it's a matter of otherwise not being able to easily afford a McMansion.
I'm not surprised that it took 13 years of advice, for the company to make (some) competent business and financial decisions, but m$ is of course handcuffing themselves back on, via their unpaid agents and will send the business bankrupt in a decade or so (now if only m$ goes bankrupt too).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24, @03:52PM (3 children)
>It an incredibly ludicrous claim, that in spending 3 months looking for a job in 1991, you could only find a job writing proprietary software
I categoically reject your assessment of the situation. Job searches were conducted in person, through snail mail letters (100 of which were sent, 95 of which were ignored - 2 offers to work in Nuclear power, no thank you, and an offer to spend another 3 years in Academia at 50% of market rate compensation, again no thank you.) First company I drove to had been shut down by the FDA two weeks prior to my visit, this wasn't in the news, this wasn't common knowledge, I learned of the situation by arriving in an empty parking lot and seeing chains and padlocks on the glass doors with no lights on inside. Three interviews a week was my average during those three months, most were cold calls. I did, actually, get an offer to work as a SCUBA diver counting brittle stars in the Florida Keys, but there the compensation was even more meager than the University - neither of which would have enabled me to pay for things like my own car insurance without cutting down on food expenses below my already frugal budget.
So, sure, I had options: glow in the dark, slowly starve and be unable to afford to maintain my car, skin cancer from 8 hours a day of direct sun exposure, or continue searching for another 3 months on the chance that something better might come along - my savings was running out, I could have moved back in with Mom's new husband in the cats' bedroom, but she lived in a city with even fewer job prospects than the one I was in. And, can you even put your head in 1991? FOSS was barely a blip on the awareness of software engineers at the time.
> the USA is totally braindead in that health insurance from the employer is a thing
Oh, now the proposition is that I, a 22 year old with zero working experience, apply for an international work visa?
> and will send the business bankrupt in a decade or so (now if only m$ goes bankrupt too).
Highly unlikely, as the business has a USD 100 billion market cap and my little corner of it is only responsible for maybe 100 million of annual revenue tied to roughly 1000 Windows licenses sold per year. While Microsoft may stumble I do believe their political influence puts them in "too big to fail in my lifetime" territory.
>when it's a matter of otherwise not being able to easily afford a McMansion.
My McMansion after graduation with my Master's degree was an efficiency apartment, a luxurious 20 square meters rented from what I later found out was a family whose father was convicted of fencing stolen cars through his pawn shop. It was close to the University and 20% less expensive than anything else avaialble when our previous landlord kicked us out with 30 days' notice in the middle of the fall term (the neighbor's construction project wrapped up and apparently she was only renting the house to us while the noise next door was truly obnoxious.) I did pursue "the American Dream" which is not as easily attainable in most of the rest of the free healthcare world, and I purchased my McMansion after just under 2 years of having a "real job" in "evil proprietary software creation." That McMansion was 60 years old, 2 bed 1 bath 110 square meters. Ten years later, married with one child, we did "upgrade" to a bigger 3 bed 2 bath 150 square meter McMansion, which was quite a financial strain - so much so that when that first evil proprietary software employer had to lay off the entire staff, I spent the next 4 months looking for work and eventually had to move 1900km to support our lavish lifestyle with a 2nd baby on the way in our late 30s.
Take your idealism and smoke it, I'm sure it will bring you great pleasure.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Saturday July 25, @04:28AM (2 children)
So, prior to finding the convenient job, you did in fact have not one, but two prior reasonable offers to work in an extremely safe job, with acceptable terms, but you didn't accept either as you were worried about that scary nuclear radiation?
As far as I can tell, you could have worked in that job for a few years, delivering clean and green power (likely lowering your chances of death from cancer) and then proceeded to find a better job, before the low, but higher than background, radiation exposure, marginally increased your cancer risk (it's hard to get a job if you're unemployed, but if you already have a job, then it's easy to get a job?).
While that job was clearly a bad offer, it isn't too difficult to ensure that you don't get skin cancer with only 8 hours a day sun exposure.
I didn't write anything about that - but considering 1991, the concept of "FOSS" didn't exist (some might have buzzworded that word, saying many words to mean nothing - but it seems that didn't happen until at least 1995) - while the GNU and the concept of free software did exist and custom software was certainly most software - but that is not relevant to the topic.
Please do not assume things that I did not write - I only mean what I write and nothing more.
Pointing out how something is broken in the USA, does not imply that I propositioned leaving the country.
You underestimate the ability of CEO's and m$ to send businesses bankrupt, no matter how big, even with government interference - it's the core goal of proprietary software companies to send each other bankrupt - there's a reason there are https://companiesmarketcap.com/software/largest-software-companies-by-market-cap/
So you did indeed get enough money to purchase a (old but likely fine) house in under 2 years? You don't get paid that much for doing good.
Your first employer was so incompetent at such a high margin business, that they effectively went bankrupt and had to lay off the entire staff and you needed to look for 4 months and move 1900km to find another proprietary software employer that hadn't gone bankrupt yet? Damn.
The moral of this story is, even if all you care about is money, employment writing proprietary software, that nets the employer huge profits, is unlikely to get you much of that money, or even land you a secure job.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bentonite on Saturday July 25, @04:31AM
*there's a reason there are under 1000 proprietary software companies in the whole world and that number is set to shrink; https://companiesmarketcap.com/software/largest-software-companies-by-market-cap/ [companiesmarketcap.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Saturday July 25, @12:04PM
> but two prior reasonable offers to work in an extremely safe job
Actually, I had 3 offers in Nuclear power:
1) 2 years on a military submarine (with the military tendency to "oops" we're not going ashore for another several months, you'll just have to serve longer)
2) Tech support on a reactor farm - a facility of shockingly open lies and/or incompetence. On the night after the interview I met a local whose "daddy did hot laundry out at the facility, they took real good care of momma after he passed." They preferred not to talk about what they made there, but when pressed they would say "submarine fuel' - they almost certainly also make weapons grade plutonium there. While on site, one of the interviewers bragged to me about how the "local college boys are always sampling the water in the streams leaving the plant, they never find anything." Well, 3 weeks after my interview and offer which I turned down, the facility did make the news with radioactive contamination leaving the 300+ square mile facility in a stream. You may have ideals about software licenses and legal structures, my ideals formed in the 1980s were more focused around nuclear non-proliferation and self preservation from said activities. And, besides, who wants a career in IT tech support?
3) Safety inspector for the NRC (electrical generation facilities) - this one would have been safer, but the terms of the deal included: never living in the same location for more than 2 years (to avoid becoming too familiar with the plant). This also had the idiot/liar management problem... question to interviewer (in 1989): Given the political climate around nuclear power generation, what's the future advancement path for a safety inspector? Answer: (completely avoids the question of where a safety inspector can advance to) Oh, we've got all kinds of new much safer designs, they'll be building all kinds of new plants real soon now, there will be all kinds of new plants for safety inspectors to rotate around inspecting. Here we are, 37 years later, and exactly one site in the US has constructed a new facility since that interview. By now, I would have served tours at well over half of the generation facilities, and never had the kind of close contact with management that typically gets one noticed for advancement out of one's current role. Consider the fact that our current plant inspectors either: A) believed that line of bull, or B) never asked the question in the first place.
The money was, in fact, good in nuclear - high end of the competitive range, but the prices were high.
>then proceeded to find a better job
See, that's some of the advice offered by the son of the dead "hot laundry worker"... he got a job out of school in foods: General Mills. His experience in the post-graduate working world was that he could easily switch companies to Tyson, or Kraft, or Mars, but after just 4 years in the food industry, he was basically locked for life in food, nobody else would consider him, not even as entry level. My experience in medical device development was identical - locked to the industry, others won't hire you even at lower pay because they assume you'll just find something better "in your field" and leave them. There are rare cases where people with connections successfully jump industries mid career, but that's nothing to count on when you're starting out. It's not like University where you can spend half your career figuring out what you actually want your degree to be in.
> it isn't too difficult to ensure that you don't get skin cancer with only 8 hours a day sun exposure.
Full face mask, gloves and booties with UV goggles? They actually make such garb today, in 1991 it was very uncommon and what was available was not too compatible with flipping over rocks at the bottom of Florida bay, or the boat ride to and from. Even the boat rides at the start and end of the day are excessive exposure by even the 1991 guidelines. Now... that would have been a job I probably could have done for 6 months then "switched carreers" but I got the software offer just a couple of days later.
Yes, I was truly evil, 22 years old, walking into a medical device development lab to write software to run on IBM compatible PCs - I should have sought out the alternatives, I should have independently crusaded on welfare and food stamps until I made something good happen in the world of software, I should have started the movement. I was five years into that job before I ever heard of Linus or Slackware - my first exposure. And I really tried to like Slackware, but it was obviously far from anything we could get our customers to use in 1996. Hell, Windows 95 was barely useable by 1996 - our customers used DOS, and in reality DOS' big favor to us was to do as little as possible.
Why didn't you change the world? Or, did you try with all your soul and still flop so miserably that we are in the state we are today?
>Pointing out how something is broken in the USA, does not imply that I propositioned leaving the country.
Wuss. Why wouldn't you leave a broken country? The ultimate form of protest.
> You don't get paid that much for doing good.
What an absolutely self-flagellating attitude. Now we must suffer in order to do good in the world? Those who choose not to suffer financially accrue to themselves the power to do good, as I have within my roles helping advance the adoption and use of FOSS within our products. Not 100% successfully, but far more than 0, which would have been my level of influence from an IT tech support hotline jockey.
Separately, the point of the first home was that it was attainable in this "broken country" at a price of 2.7x my starting annual salary, 2.0x after my 1st promotion. Those were market rates, market prices. Small and old, we evil closed software employees don't all take the job so we can live in McMansions.
>Your first employer was so incompetent at such a high margin business
You assume too much.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 23, @05:39AM (14 children)
There is a word for the "freedom" the GPL seeks. It's not correct to call it "free" software. It's more correct to call it "public" software and this is why people are migrating away from it.
Public software gets you free software, a tote bag and some good feelings if you're left leaning. Permissive OS licenses get you free software and the possibility of getting rich if you can find a way to monetize it.
The only way to monetize public software is with some other service the software facilitates. Trapping software in the commons devalues it as a product in and of itself. Developers who didn't drink the kool-aid have always known this.
Kind of a moot point maybe. AI is looking like it will be drinking all our milk shakes.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jb on Thursday July 23, @07:16AM (2 children)
Sounds like the kind of FUD that Gates/Ballmer used to spread back in the day (can't remember which, but one of them famously described free software as "a communist plot").
No, free software really is about freedom. Most modern "left leaning" movements are decidedly anti-freedom. If you want to find a "left leaning" cause that actually put freedom front & centre, you'd have to look quite a long way back into the past (the French/Belgian/Dutch resistance during the second world war is the most recent widely-known example I can think of). Free software is neither "left" nor "right": it just makes sense.
Perhaps, but that's nothing to do with the free versus open source terminology debate. The licenses most of us automatically think of when we hear the phrase "permissive licenses" (ISC, MIT, 2BSD) satisfy both the FSD and the OSD. There are some licenses that satisfy one but not the other, as TFA points out. But the biggest difference between the two camps is not the "what" but the "why": philosophical motivations (freedom) versus business benefits (OSS, through OSDM). The second biggest difference (and TFA managed to get this bit right) is that because of those different motivations and because of the different structures, FSF is orders of magnitude harder to subvert than OSI.
Note that most of what is referred to as "AI" today is not AI at all. More to the point though, the discussion is about freedom. People who give a damn about the freedom to control their own computing (FSF's core message) are highly unlikely to outsource any of their thinking to a jumped up random number generator: such an idea simply isn't compatible with freedom (nor even with sanity, but I digress...). On the other hand, those merely in search of "business benefits" are far more likely to be taken in by the charlatan hype-mongers of the LLM scene (as with any good con job, its effectiveness is entirely dependent on the extent of the mark's greed).
(Score: 3, Touché) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 23, @08:43AM (1 child)
> a jumped up random number generator
cut n paste engine
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bentonite on Friday July 24, @07:11AM
Maybe copying code normally wouldn't be that bad - but LLM's go along and slopify the code, jumbling up copies from different places and adding noise - meaning the end result is always bad code.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday July 23, @07:41AM
PermissiveNon-reciprocal OS licenses get you free software and the possibility of getting rich if you can find a way to monetize it.The only way to monetize public software is with some other service the software facilitates. Trapping software in the commons devalues it as a product in and of itself. Developers who didn't drink the kool-aid have always known this.
There. FTFY.
That's not the only way to monetize reciprocally licensed software. There are at least two other ways. One is dual licensing. For those that have an aversion to the reciprocal license, they have to pay. You can't do that with non-reciprocal licensed software, companies just steal it. Letting them steal it is fine for a few things, such as TCP/IP stacks and the like, but for complex, user-space applications and services, it is not and life is better when the companies contribute back to the pool either with code or with money. Another way monetize reciprocally licensed software is to sell development services, adding features etc.
Anyway, for most use-cases, non-reciprocal licenses are harmful and something you only want your competitors to use, and maybe not even them.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Thursday July 23, @08:36AM (7 children)
> Trapping software in the commons devalues it as a product in and of itself.
Value is way more than $.
Some products have value exactly because they are in the commons: in the software domain, so many things like transport protocols, communications algorithms, programming languages are valuable because they are in the commons (which relies on a host of clients compilers and so on).
(Score: 5, Insightful) by pTamok on Thursday July 23, @09:34AM (6 children)
There is an English saying: "Knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing."
People who cannot tell the difference between price and value do not understand the saying, and regard it as senseless, and the attempted distinction as meaningless.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 23, @04:29PM (5 children)
There is wonderful value of software "trapped in the commons" value that I benefit from every day.
Unfortunately, it's not value that I can easily turn into food and shelter, so while I get what value I can from GPL/FOSS - I also need to get paid, and that happens under other licensing structures for me.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday July 23, @05:44PM (2 children)
I appreciate the problem.
In principle, if you didn't need to get paid, the problem disappears: which is the theory behind socialism, that is to say "To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities." Or an adequate UBI that removed the baseline driver for food and shelter.
We live on a planet that has sufficient resources to provide an adequate quality of life for the human population, but those resources are distributed in highly unequal modes. The trouble is, no-one has come up with a better distribution system in practice than the 'free market', with all its inequalities. Planned economies simply don't work.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 23, @06:45PM (1 child)
>Planned economies simply don't work.
The problem with planned economies is: lack of benevolent selfless egalitarianism, not to mention diverse values, among the planners.
The free market distributes decision making, but gives a per-dollar weight, and too many people are too free with their surplus dollars pursuing goals that are ultimitately detrimental for most people, not to mention meta-problems like people who mostly use their dollars to manipulate financial systems to get themselves more dollars.... The economy may be abundant, but our resource pool is finite and as our numbers continue to climb that finite resource pool is going to become more and more constraining.
Modern communication and data processing technologies have radically altered what is possible in terms of transparency, democracy, decision making, distribution of resources and labor... but the old ways are slow to relinquish their hold on the power structures, quick to seize the new technologies in support of their own selfish aims, etc...
With a global population of 8 billion, but a Dunbar number of 200 or less, people need to organize better so that they have more insight into what affects them and more of a voice in the decisions that affect themselves.
Ideally, a "local group" might consist of 100 people, at most, who elect representatives into the next layer of decision making - maybe four representatives from the group (for continuity and responsibility sharing / division) who represent into the "first level of decision making" - that group of 100 people then represents 2500 people, and again, from within that group, 4 more people are elected to the next level up - 100 more people who then collectively represent 25 groups of 2500 people - 62500 people represented in the group of 100 people who discuss matters pertaining to the group of groups. And again, 4 from them up to the next layer, bringing 25 groups of 625000 together -> 1,562,500 @ 3, like a large city -> 39,062,500 @ 4, like a large state -> 976,562,500 @ 5, like the largest of countries, and 9 of those level 5 groups would cover the entire human population today, sending 36 representatives in total to the level 6 "top" decision making tier for global issues.
Looking from the "top down" these level 6 representatives would be focused mostly on global level issues, while the 9 level 5 groups of 100 representatives will "lose" 4 of their members to the higher level issues, leaving 96 to actively decide the "level 5" issues, and so on down the layers, but each representative at their own level, could not only maintain some semblence of a "within their Dunbar number" social understanding and relationship with each and every member of their peers, they can also do the same with the group that elected them to represent at the next level. It would be more challenging, but not impossible, for even the highest level representatives to maintain meaningful dialogue and understanding with everyone from their small local neighborhood of 100 who first elected them to the small HOA level of representation, all the way up through their highest level of representation.
Based on my limited experience with "small group" elections, I would think a 6 month term would be appropriate at the "grassroots" level, with eligibility for re-election up to 5 years unless promoted to higher levels. When elected to the "next level up" the term might double to a year, with a reprieve from the lower level election(s) while advanced - again with a maximum term of 5 years' total service time at that level unless promoted. Level 3 might run 2 years, level 4 might run 4 years, level 5 for 6 years, and level 6 for 8 years, with elections staggered such that 1/8th of the highest level office holders are up for (a maximum of 2) re-elections every year.
Through modern communication technology, people could (though probably still won't) actively evaluate their choices for each election... of the 100 candidates, maybe only 25 (one from each lower level) are eligible to run for the current cycle - that's a big field, but not overwhelming, and it gives opprotunity for nuance that's missed in a 2 party 1 platform system.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday July 23, @08:46PM
Thank you for sharing your thinking.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday July 24, @03:54AM (1 child)
So the Free Software types do have an answer to the "how do you get paid" problem: They point out that most professional developers make their living customizing stuff to match the needs of a particular business. So, for example, I don't need to build a database engine, I need to make sure that a particular company maintains its financial transaction records correctly, and a database engine would sure be useful for that, so I'm not really losing anything I would have been paid to build by grabbing a copy of Postgres or Mongo rather than paying somebody for a proprietary engine. Or maybe I'm building a website, and while an existing free software framework provides a good start, the money is in hooking the web front end into the 3 other tools they want to integrate with, and updating the look-and-feel to match with the company branding, and adding that weird feature that Marsha from marketing can't shut up about.
How does the Free Software package get improved, then? Let's assume you have a package with a bug that's causing a problem for you, or is lacking the feature that would make it really useful. You have 3 options:
1. Make your in-house developers do the work to fix or build it.
2. Pay for somebody else to fix or build it.
3. Switch back to the proprietary version and pay licensing fees forever.
There's a decent chance that 1 or 2 are cheaper than 3 over the course of a long-enough time period.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 24, @12:14PM
>There's a decent chance that 1 or 2 are cheaper than 3 over the course of a long-enough time period.
And, from 2006 to 2026, I won that argument - professionally.
We have a new project, and it's drifting back significantly further under the M$ cloud. My takehome pay, however, is higher than ever.
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday July 23, @11:35AM
I think you're confusing price with value: Just because you don't pay to use something doesn't make it worthless, and just because you pay a bunch of money to get something doesn't make it automatically valuable. That's "pay Tom Sawyer to whitewash his fence" logic.
In the case of software: I've been spending most of the last year professionally wrangling with a terrible platform that utterly fails to do its job properly (documentation is poor-to-nonexistent, a number of features just break, it can't even manage to sort a list properly, it's never been tested at scale, etc) which I am contractually obligated to use, but because it's a proprietary system I can't fix it or even look at it to know how it tries and fails to do its job. By contrast, with its GPL'd competitor, I can see exactly how it works, add, remove, or modify features the way I want to in order to solve my problem, and as an added bonus take advantage of the work everyone else has contributed to solve their problems (which are likely to be similar to my problems).
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 24, @03:16AM
"software freedom"
Don't forget its not just the ... social contract of download code, look at code, run code, not get sued for running code.
There's the entire donation ecosystem and rest of the social transactions in the group that matter.
People who want you to focus on the price and solely the price are probably scamming you in some other area, like freedom or quality or culture or something. Not just in software but IRL if someone in marketing says look there and only there and definitely not at anything else, you'd be well advised not to obey them. The open people have a fit about the only thing that matters is the price today is $0 and don't worry about anything else, but the free people have a thing about freedom and long term success and free flow of ideas etc.
Consider this brief comparison:
"open" stuff is good, or better, for you. See BSD type licenses.
"free" stuff is good, or better, for everyone in the ecology, which includes you as part of it. Its good for you too, additionally its also good for everyone else. See GPL type licenses.
You can probably detect a slight bias in my BSD vs GPL opinion, but it seems reality has a bias toward GPL so uh, OK then.
(Score: 2) by dmc on Friday July 24, @03:06AM (7 children)
My primary issue with the FSF is their stance on software patents. I think patents matter a lot. (I reread Atlas Shrugged quite differently now that I am more than twice as old as when I started out as a zealous libertarian. So called 'critical race theory' (and reparations and whatnot) is something I think Libertarians ought to talk more about amongst themselves. But I still feel pretty much the same about patents as I did after that first read of AS when I was about 18. I'm not suggesting our current Trump/GITMO situation isn't so fucked up that even some major new patent legislation would be a game changer, but I do think the next generation should keep the idea of the patent system well in mind when trying to grok the history of the whole communism/capitalism/socialism/nationalism/patriotism thing including aspects like 'dirty war' and the CIA giving covertly LSD laced cigars to their political opponents.
But yeah, follow the money while questioning motives (iirc EFF seemed intimately associated with AT&T long ago and I never heard about that changing. Linux foundation seems to be similarly associated with megacorps).
$0.02...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 24, @03:19AM (2 children)
I don't think Hepting was what you think it was?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepting_v._AT%26T [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by dmc on Friday July 24, @06:05AM (1 child)
I don't think what I said was what you think it was? I made no such reference. I was referring to my vague memory of news/bio/researching, more like fundage/donor employee-cross-membership kind of thing. Could well have been misremembered. Still, worth researching where their fundamental support comes from. I just have a low opinion of one very specific blog post or whatever of theirs. I suspect that was what motivated me to research the organization but that was well over a decade ago by now. Searching the current wikipedia page on eff for at&t didn't yield any hits. Oh well.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday July 24, @03:12PM
Looking here corporate grants are like 4% of their income now so they don't really seem to have a corporate front.
https://www.eff.org/about/annual-reports-and-financials [eff.org]
One of the founders was the Lotus123 guy who went into what amounts to proto internet-startup stuff and donating.
Another's an early Sun microsystems guy, GNU author back in the MIT days, and RFC author.
And the third was a kid of a political dynasty who ended up founding the Grateful Dead later getting into all kinds of computer stuff.
So its possible you're thinking of MIT, Sun Microsystems, Lotus-1-2-3 ...? I thnk the biggest crossover would be with the GNU project.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Thexalon on Friday July 24, @04:00AM (2 children)
That patent system has 2 sides to it:
1. On the one hand, it creates good financial incentives to invent new stuff. That also encourages investors and entrepreneurs to pay research scientists, which can be useful.
2. On the other hand, it reduces the value of the new stuff to society by putting up financial and legal barriers about how that new invention can be used or exploited.
That's why tools like patents should have the limited term they do.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by dmc on Friday July 24, @06:11AM
Sure, and the devil is in the details of how you limit that term. The devil also seems to inhabit the whitehouse lately.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Friday July 24, @07:47AM
The patent system now only works as an expensive lottery - with only negatives - there are no longer 2 sides.
That is not true.
Research scientists get paid to do research, as the result of that research is improvements to products, which is profitable, as such improvements are first to market - patents only have a negative impact on this process.
When a company wants patents to be applied for, the focus is trying to identify something, some other business could develop and actually produce, so that other business can be later extorted for a fat cut of their revenue - even if that means that the company ends up making no profit and as a result, discontinues that product, or closes down.
Patents cost several hundred dollars to apply for (but that's a small fraction of the thousands of dollars it costs for a lawyer to write it up in magic patentese) and may be in "review" for months or years and be rejected (but well written enough patentese befuddles the reviewer so hard, that they can't find the 14 existing patents that apply to the same thing and as a result, almost always just rubber stamps it - even if the patent is on the wheel), but if the company or NPE wins that lottery and also manages to find a company that actually is selling a good product that the patent applies too, then such company can be sued for millions.
The only winners 99.9999995% of the time are the lawyers - but you only hear from the single "genius extortionist" that managed to win the lottery and extort a business for 1 million+ - just like how you only hear from the 1st winner of traditional lotteries (the 0th winner is the house of course) and not the millions of losers.
Patents were originally of an actual somewhat limited term - 3 years - pushing the term out to 10 and then 20 years was clearly ludicrous.
When it comes to proprietary software, few "product cycles" exceed 6 months - thus it's logically doesn't work out that something that might be relevant for up to 6 months, is restricted for 20 years.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bentonite on Friday July 24, @07:24AM
The FSF takes the correct stance that software patents should not exist - any honest proprietary software company agrees with them too.
A software patent gives someone the power, who has gone and patented something like, calculating, 2*4+4*4, but in a for loop, to any business for money or demand that small businesses cease operating.
IBM would agree too, if they didn't have tens of thousands of patents and therefore has no problem shrugging off extortion attempts by a business that actually sells something - IBM does the extorting - you don't.
It has always gone like this; "That's a cute patent you have there, but we have this one, and this one and this one that applies to your business and if that's not enough, we'll go back and get more. How about we cross license?" and then IBM gets another patent.
IBM has only previously had issues with Non-Practicing Entities, as you can't patent, extorting people for money with the legal system, but they wrote off those costs as the cost of doing business and more recently have joined patent pools to mitigate the problem, which I guess would allow always being able to find a patent that covers the same math, that was filed before.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Friday July 24, @06:51AM
That almost perfect - too bad it contains several errors - but there's a way to report them, so that's fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 25, @02:54PM
It occurred to me today, that we've already horses bolt.
The very word 'software', itself already productises a configuration of a thing you own. Like needing to rent and pay usage fee, not for the electricity, but for the mere configuration change of flipping a lightswitch you already own.
The moment we accepted the word 'soft-ware', we already lost the war. 'Free Soft Ware' is an oxymoron. The word 'ware' means it's a thing for sale. That it's free then immediately becomes of great suspicion in the minds of those not already well acquainted with what it actually IS. And what it actually is, is just the same as a recipe.
We don't call books of recipes 'software', even though that is what they are.
The distinction is merely what is 'executing' that program. A machine or a human.
They were just called 'programs' before they were called 'software'. That is what they are: A list of things scheduled to happen. Perhaps with some data attached or embedded (thank you, OOP).
FSF should rename itself FPF, and excise the term 'software' from it's vocabulary entirely, and so should you, if you care about it.
'Open source' is even more pernicious. It's just 'science'.
You know, that cultural phenomenon that started in the Great Enlightenment, and is the reason why we all can have nice things?
Again: the only distinction: Computer science you only need a computer (and presumably some way to communicate: even if only 'sneaker-net') in order to do. That gets a special name 'open source'. Even, 'open source software'.
Scientists made the world a nice place to live in by openly sharing the how and the why.
'OSS' as approved by 'OSI' still pays lip service to it: There are still 'scientific' papers published, in the 'field' of 'computer science'.
Yet, really, anything anyone writes into a git repo and shares online is no less a scientific publication, even if it doen't have a line of LaTeX in it.
So, please just remind people, when they're talking about 'open source software', they're really talking about 'science as done and shared by the community of international scientists'.
The Framing, matters. Renaming a thing is the first step to eradicating it.
Hard to have the law changed specifically to criminalize doing science to an artefact, yet that's exactly what 'reverse engineering' actually is.
We need to remind people of what the world was like before the Great Enlightenment caught on.
A time when secret societies killed people to prevent them sharing Pythagoras' Theorem.
Modern day multinational corporations are really just secret societies that got legal recognition as entities in their own right, allowed to own things and make contracts.
The whole US of A is just a state propped up by corporations from the begining: A legal system that is built in it's entirety, from it's so-holy Constitution on up, on a concept of legal contracts as being unbreakable and holy.
Very convenient, when you're a corporation that's gotten rich by trading in slaves, and you need a 'safe port' to park your ill-gotten gains, far from the old powers of Europe, far from legal systems where the concept was to try to create a justice system.
US judges have demonstrated that they'll look at a totally one-side, nonsense legal contract, and declare it 'ok' and uphold it, even when it's obviously not even a valid contract, under older legal systems careful not to just give away the power to make such documents to all and sundry. The europian tradition of legal system hemms in what can be a contract with a set of rules entirely designed to protect those who would clearly need that protection: Absent of such rules, USA is totally just a whole country of slaves.
It is the USA that has decided that IP law violations should be criminal matters. They are merely civil law matters everywhere else. A thing you might be fined for, but never imprisoned over.
In the US, not only have people been imprisoned over matters of copyright, they have been imprisoned and died in custody, over matters of copyright of materials in the public domain!
All 'EULA's which are valid in the US, are actually almost all totally invalid everywhere else.
If the agreement isn't given to the purchaser immediately prior to paying, then it amounts to an attempt to change a contract of sale after the fact. Changing any contract after the fact is invalid by itself. A provision that it can be so is also therefore null and void too.
Refusing to function if 'deny' is clicked after the payment is made, is a condition of coercion. Any condition of coercion applying to a contract or agreement likewise invalidates it.
A contract must identify both parties it applies to. 'the buyer' is not an identification. A shrink-wrap contract is automatically invalid as well.
What does this all mean for 'soft-ware'? You are buying, not a license, but a promise. A promise they don't even promise they might not break at any time, and merely not to sue you for breach of copyright.
In non-US jusrisdictions, basic consumer protections are often strong enough in their own right, that 'the extent permitted by local law' you may see mentioned in EULAs is generally actually 'not even slightly'.
Whether BSD or GPL, the waiver given with regards to copyright is itself untested, and untestable. But rest assured that the part about no warantee or fitness for particular purposes applies: But only when you explicitly *didn't* pay for it! If you did pay, then whosoever collected your currency is who is on the hook for all the consumer protection rules.
The courts will probably accept that as things currently stand, if you 'buy' a software license, you at least do agree not to 'reverse engineer' it or share it with others. Amongst a few other restrictions the court would likely agree to be well understood and generally accepted. Most of the commercial interaction in fact will withstand: But most likely there will be a 'boilerplate' version generic EULA for software written. And it almost certainly will include a requirement for at least 12 months warantee (Because *all* purchases, of any kind, get that).
It'll be interesting to see where they stand on security and security update issues. I would expect the software vendor to be on the hook for a lot longer than just the 12 months generic warantee period. The actually acceptable standard of behaviour that has been established is 'support forever', essentially (eg by Valve, gog.com). And if you can't provide that, you should be opening the source so the community of those who have bought it can. Good examples of this would be free software projects such as Blender. But also games such as many of the famous iD software titles have opened the program source, although retained the rights to the artwork/content under established copyright handling of those things.
The moment that judges understand what software and OSS is according to this post, is the moment that the wool that certain scammers have been holding over their eyes, will be removed. And they will not likely side with the scammers. It is their express job to protect society from the machinations of those who would tear down our civilisation from the very foundations. And those foundations are those of the Great Enlightenment. Make a judge understand this, and all judges will rightfully become just as hardcore defenders of 'free programs' as ever the FSF were.
They just need to understand that computers are not magical, and are not 'special'. Computers do not actually need 'new, special laws' for them. The old case studies and established precident set by scammers trying their tricks already all applies.