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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: 2) by choose another one on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:20PM

    by choose another one (515) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:20PM (#614769)

    Actually, this is not true in this case.
    The "or later" clause specifies that the version of the license chosen must be "published by the Free Software Foundation", and the articles of incorporation (or whatever the non-profit equivalent is) for the FSF was specifically crafted with the "evil replicant" problem in mind. That is; if every member of the FSF board was replaced by 90s-Microsoft evil replicants, they would still be legally compelled to continue the stated mission supporting software freedom.

    Actually it is more subtle than that, and less clear cut.

    The GPL itself expressly commits to new versions being "similar in spirit" to current, but as GPLv3 showed, even "similar in spirit" is a matter of opinion, and what you are buying if you use "or later" is a license similar in spirit in the opinion of the FSF. I still do not understand, for instance, why the anti-tivo clause only applies to devices used by "consumers" and not business/professional users - it seems such a license can only be "similar in spirit" for one set of users (either anti-tivo was in the spirit of GPL before or it wasn't, it can't be both).

    Unfortunately "similar in spirit" also does not mean "compatible with previous versions" or "compatible with the same other software licences you were using" or "compatible with the terms of the contracts you have with your customers" (which is what caused BSD to limit to only using GPLv2 versions pf GCC etc., and switch to Clang/LLVM, allegedly) or...

    Linus saw these sort of problems coming and avoided them, Linux may end up with other problems as a result, but it hasn't so far (AFAICS).

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