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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: 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