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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!
(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.
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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.
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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.