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The Free Software Movement is Barking Up the Wrong Tree

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

canopic jug writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:13PM (6 children)

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:13PM (#614405) Journal

    No, it's not.

    The best way to explain free software to people is with case studies of vendor lock-in. “We need our software to do x.” Well, that's great and all. If you have free software, the response from IT is “Sure, we need t amount of time and a budget of $amount” and then it's simply another business decision. If you have proprietary, user- and even entire industry-subjugating software, the response from IT is “for the thousandth time NO.”

    I've gone so far down that road that I've had to back up my “no” with the CFAA and DMCA. That is the position people don't understand. Yes, I'm a programmer. No, I cannot do what you want me to do with this software because what I would need to do is ILLEGAL.

    But the assertion in TFS is not wrong, either. Proprietary software is what enables vendors to abuse their users. If you have proprietary software, and you don't like what it's doing, what are you going to do? Bitch about it? Fly off the handle with some conspiracy theory about how all assigned males are conspiring to prevent women from being programmers?

    Well, I'd rather have free software. When I have free software, and it does something that a lot of people don't like, then I just roll up my sleeves and get to work.

    It's not about some specific abuse or something that's gone too far. It's fundamentally about what you can do if you don't like how a program works.

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  • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:28PM (1 child)

    by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:28PM (#614421)

    That is the position people don't understand. Yes, I'm a programmer. No, I cannot do what you want me to do with this software because what I would need to do is ILLEGAL.

    Mention exposing the company to legal liability and show them the articles on some of the Business Software Alliance raids. Hopefully one of the company lawyers would nip this in the bud.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Tuesday December 26 2017, @10:33PM (3 children)

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

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

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:33PM (2 children)

      by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:33PM (#614774) Journal
      Even that's not the whole story. A lot of proprietary software projects include libraries that are licensed under specific terms and so you'd also need to acquire your suppliers' suppliers (for example, when Sun open sourced Solaris, they had to strip out the locale code from libc, because they had licensed a proprietary implementation from IBM and did not have the rights to release the source code, at all, let alone under an open source license). In some cases, the supplier provided a binary-only blob and has subsequently gone out of business and the receivers lost the code. Yahoo ended up in this situation with respect to a few things and so has some insane patches to FreeBSD to allow them to run a 32-bit library inside a 64-bit process.
      --
      sudo mod me up

      • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday December 27 2017, @06:43PM (1 child)

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

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

        The procedure for this:

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

        • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday January 07 2018, @01:09AM

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

          I suspect they thought of that.