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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, 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