I think you've misread something somewhere. Here is what the FSF says about "Open Source," and it doesn't seem like animosity: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...
"We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects."
Their stance has moderated over the decades. Also, it's not only what I've read from them online, I'm also referring to direct person to person interactions. Again, it's not the intellectual underpinnings, it's the stuff around it. If they're cleaning up their act in terms of outreach, then power to them. I would love to see a more politically effective FSF.
* Software freedom is important because it produces quality software.
* Software freedom is important because it protects the user from mistreatment.
Open Source is important because it gives both users and developers control. Open Source is the ability to fork.
And the irony of the situation is that these ideals where also embodied in Free Software, however the FSF has forgotten them, at least judging by their current behavior.
For example AGPL should not be considered either an open-source or a free software license, because it redefines what redistribution is, effectively placing limits on usage. Up until GCC version 4.5 it didn't support plugins, being a monolithic thing, out of fear that proprietary tools could make use of it; you can thank LLVM for the positive changes in that area. And here's a recent fuckup of the FSF, that's very close to my heart, because I'm an Emacs user - apparently Emacs must hate MacOS, even though many Emacs contributors and plugins authors are using it: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/emacs-25.1/etc/NE...
Which meant that as soon as you distributed GPL licensed software you also had to adhere to the license of sharing your improvements in source code.
Then when the internet through the web became popular you could use GPL software without distributing it and many use cases which didn't exist previously for the distribution options in GPL just didn't create the intended effect where users who changed the software and distributed it should also share their changes.
I would argue that AGPL didn't redefine what distribution is, but the capabilities and the use of the web redefined what distribution is, through software as a service. AGPL was an attempt to align the license with the original intent of GPL, which was to say that if you redistributed the software and change it, share your changes.
I'd largely disagree with that. I see "Open source" described (and describe it myself) as something that has many advantages as a way of developing software and developing communities (users and developers) around that software. But, at the same time, it's absolutely about letting users maintain control and being able to directly influence the direction of development.
> The mere ability to read source isn't enough to support independent peer review and rapid evolutionary selection. For rapid evolution to happen, people need to be able to experiment with and redistribute modifications.
No mention of user freedoms or why this is important to users, just some nebulous claim that this is related to "evolution" and "experimentation".
The entire OSD is written like this, with claims that the 10 completely-arbitrary-with-no-real-logic-behind-them tennants of "open source" will somehow make your software better. How? They don't say. The four software freedoms make sense if you discuss them from the context of freedom, but the 10 "open source" rights don't make sense outside the context of freedom.
"Open source" was meant to be a way to frame the discussion in different terms. Yet by saying that it was "for the explicit purpose of de-emphasizing user freedom" you sneakily imply motives to the people who coined and promoted the term. Once parsed out, rhetorically it's about as sensible as post-9/11 "they hate us for our freedom" discourse in the US.
Yes, and the free software movement's main "terms" are user freedom. So by your own admission, "open source" was coined to de-emphasising user freedom (or rather, framing the discussion around "terms" different than user freedom). It's a matter of public record where the term "Open Source" came from.
"Open source", as a term, is about emphasizing a different set of benefits that come from license terms that let anyone run, modify and distribute code for any purpose they choose. The careful way you word your comments to highlight negatives and avoid positives makes it seem obvious that you don't like that and want to make it sound sinister when it isn't. My advice to you would be, if you're going to lie, at least be honest about it!
Because such an argument would be incorrect (not just a "re-framing", it would be a fundamentally flawed argument). Aside from the naming, free software fundamentally gives users the right to sell software as well.
> The careful way you word your comments to highlight negatives and avoid positives makes it seem obvious that you don't like that and want to make it sound sinister when it isn't.
The positives of "open source" are the same positives as free software. The only difference is the framing, which is a negative IMO. I'm not sure how you'd like me to discuss my issues with "open source" -- should I list the benefits (that are identical to free software) while doing a comparison to free software? Such a comparison would be redundant.
The only tangible benefit of the term "open source" is that it is more friendly to corporations because "free" has two meanings in English. But since it only takes a minute or two to clarify the meaning, I don't see why that should be a priority when the downside is that you don't educate users about the importance of user freedom.
I have no idea who first put the words "open source" together, and neither do you. I think it's much more likely someone grabbed the term and added their own agenda to it after it was already popular. Regardless, assuming the original intention was as you claim, that doesn't mean everyone who uses that term now shares that view.
Perhaps you should read the site in question rather than guessing.
https://opensource.org/history
> The “open source” label was created at a strategy session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California, shortly after the announcement of the release of the Netscape source code. [..] The conferees also believed that it would be useful to have a single label that identified this approach and distinguished it from the philosophically- and politically-focused label "free software." Brainstorming for this new label eventually converged on the term "open source", originally suggested by Christine Peterson.
Wrong.
"Revision 1.29 February 9 1998 esr Changed ``free software'' to ``open source''. "
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
https://archive.org/stream/CathedralAndTheBazaar/cathedral-bazaar_djvu.txt
Anything else I said still stands though - including that it's foolish to try and paint everyone with the same brush.
You can be sure I would have done that with MS Office and OneDrive in the File menu, or reboots without permission on Windows 10 if I could.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
With a bit less animosity further down: "The official definition of “open source software” (which is published by the Open Source Initiative and is too long to include here) was derived indirectly from our criteria for free software. It is not the same; it is a little looser in some respects. Nonetheless, their definition agrees with our definition in most cases."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
“This procedure thus implies a certain logic of exception: every ideological Universal–for example freedom, equality–is 'false’ in so far as it necessarily includes a specific case which breaks its unity, lays open its falsity. Freedom, for example: a universal notion comprising a number of species (freedom of speech and press, freedom of consciousness, freedom of commerce, political freedom, and so on) but also, by means of a structural necessity, a specific freedom (that of the worker to sell freely his own labour on the market) which subverts this universal notion. That is to say, this freedom is the very opposite of effective freedom: by selling his labour 'freely’, the worker loses his freedom–the real content of this free act of sale is the worker’s enslavement to capital. The crucial point is, of course, that it is precisely this paradoxical freedom, the form of its opposite, which closes the circle of 'bourgeois freedoms’. - Slavoj Zizek
Freedom is one such example since it cannot belong to everyone when competing interests are at play. That might be a strange way to slice it though, since the language we use to describe freedom is probably not as well defined as we think.
"proprietary modifications will not be allowed"
Stallman wrote my favorite text editor, and the original version of the C compiler I've fiddled with for the past decade, so I can't complain about the guy. He's a living legend. I just think that the potential negative results of hard-line free software purism don't get enough discussion within the free software community.
I see misunderstandings and misstatements. Firstly, it's incorrect to say he has no idea of the current state of affairs "outside his freedom bubble" (a term that sounds derogatory and insulting to me). Look up his posts on Uber, AirBnB, Amazon [1] and several others and decide for yourself if he seems as clueless as you believe him to be (but remember he always talks from the premise of freedom). First hand experience is not a necessity in order to criticize something. We all criticize things without first hand experience, based on hearsay, based on what we've read on social media (just because something came from "a friend") and so on.
He does resort to strong absolutist positions in his posts, but do we have anyone else like him in the world? Honestly, I consider myself a "weak person" who succumbs to the pleasures of life taking the easy route when I look at his writings and his stance, and I wish we had more people like him with a lot more money and influence to fight for our freedoms and create things that would make the world and its people free over time (whereas in the last few decades we've been seeing our freedoms taken and controlled by large, fast growing corporations).
But I went to hear him speak a while back and came away feeling more anti-free-software than before hearing him.
I feel that sometimes we expect that an acceptable outcomes is reachable. Sadly, it often isn't. A large part of my growing up has been realizing this.
More to the point, the only real mistake I see environmentalism might have made is come in too hard in the middle. We needed to stir up the shit to get enough people on board. But after that, you need to calm down and get grinding on affecting change. Shooting down progressive action for 'not being good enough' is a great way of preventing progress.
A more hard line stance on greenhouse gas emissions is an alternative. You can claim that this isn't a viable alternative, but viability is made by a majority trying.
I'm not just looking at outcomes. Ten years ago we knew that immediately halting greenhouse emissions wasn't enough to stop climate change, but there wasn't even a push to do that. We weren't even trying for desirable outcomes, so I don't think it's unreasonable to say our methods were bad.
> I feel that sometimes we expect that an acceptable outcomes is reachable. Sadly, it often isn't. A large part of my growing up has been realizing this.
You claim that taking a hard line stance for an acceptable outcome is unreachable, but the right has been making this work for years. They take an extreme right stance, even more extreme than they want, knowing that the left will compromise and the right will get what they want.
You can't claim that compromise is a winning strategy when over and over the left compromises and loses while the right takes hard line stances and wins.
> More to the point, the only real mistake I see environmentalism might have made is come in too hard in the middle. We needed to stir up the shit to get enough people on board. But after that, you need to calm down and get grinding on affecting change. Shooting down progressive action for 'not being good enough' is a great way of preventing progress.
History does not bear out this assertion.
Ozone.
I disagree with this.
There are things you can (are allowed to) do, things you know you can't do, and things that are inconceivable / impossible.
His position is that #2 is evil (because knowing you could fix that printer driver if only you were allowed to is fucking annoying), and there is a moral duty to minimize it.
I think that #1 is good and should be maximized, and there is very little practical difference between #2 and #3. Minimizing #2 at the expense of also reducing #1 is bad and harmful.
In practice, there is a flow of things from #3 to #2 to #1. Things are moved out of the impossible with funds from paying customers, and then made open by people re-implementing them once the hard exploratory part is done.
There is also a smaller flow of things directly from #3 to #1. Some research is publicly funded or due to individual curiosity, instead of corporate internal. Some kinds of products can be funded from support instead of initial sales.
Destroying category #2 would choke off the first, much larger, flow. The second would not be able to make up the difference. This result would be good according to Stallman's ethics / priorities. I think it would be bad.
Note that there is some flaw to #3 to #2 even when public funding is involved. Many patents were born that way. This abomination should of course stop yesterday. Because right now, the flow from #3 to #1 is smaller than it has rights to be.
Destroying #2 doesn't have to choke off the flow from the impossible to the possible, if adjust our society around it. Stuff like ending capitalism may do. (Of course, let's not do USSR "communism", it obviously didn't work. To be honest, I'm not sure what a good solution should look like. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve mega-corporations that own more money than entire nation-states.)
I honestly cannot tell exactly what the parent comment is referring to with #1 #2 #3, but a mutual change of societal incentives for writing software enabled by Free Software is what RMS suggested in the GNU Manifesto:
"In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming"
In response to “Programmers need to make a living somehow.”
> All sorts of development can be funded with a Software Tax:
> Suppose everyone who buys a computer has to pay x percent of the price as a software tax. The government gives this to an agency like the NSF to spend on software development.
Just what software needs. A bunch of politics to decide who gets funded and who doesn't
In response to “Won't everyone stop programming without a monetary incentive?”
We get
> What the facts show is that people will program for reasons other than riches; but if given a chance to make a lot of money as well, they will come to expect and demand it. Low-paying organizations do poorly in competition with high-paying ones, but they do not have to do badly if the high-paying ones are banned.
So the GNU solution is to ban making money from software. Hmmm
No. That's a misreading, and you're taking it out of context. The GNU solution there is to ban proprietary software companies doing their thing (those companies happen to be high-paying as a consequence of doing what Stallman thinks should be banned).
It's a reasonable point, if your ethics are such that what the high-paying software companies do is, on the face of it, unethical. Sure, the ethical software producers might make less money, but that's not the same thing. Mind you, after banning the unethical ones, they might make more than they did before.
For the analagous argument, everyone agrees that pre-1860, the highest-paying cotton producers in the USA should have been banned - not because they were the richest, but because of what they did to become the richest.
WRT the second one, shouldn't we be free to write closed source software?
The list at the beginning: things you can do (#1), things you're not allowed to do (#2), things that are still in the great unknown (#3). Hadn't realized that was confusing, thanks.
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the postscarcity world
This both is putting the cart somewhat before the horse, and works better by increasing category #1 (what you can do) rather than destroying category #2 (what you're not allowed to do).
So should we limit companies that operate at a global scale to revenue or profits to that of the worlds smallest nations? Where do you draw your line? Or do you limit companies from ever operating at the scale that many of them do? What has permitted them to get so big in the first place and is that a good or bad thing?
It's all very well in theory, but it doesn't work in practice.
I don't think principles are matters of fact. A set of principles may be consistent with each other, and/or you may agree with them, but that is not to say that one who holds them is correct.
Stallman is flexible enough to accept using closed hardware, closed firmware shipped with a device, non-GPL licenses.
On the other hand, patent and copyright laws...
I'd say it's the exact opposite: Stallman is a hopeless idealist with absolutely no anchor in reality. The only thing that keeps the FSF relevant is the people running it besides Stallman.
Stallman is completely wrong in all these statements.
He's very shortsighted in fact, his views are 19th century if anything, and they're not even very intellectually founded, or well expressed.
Do not dismiss him too quickly.
By the way, the concept of IP is obviously dysfunctional: ideas and expressions are non rival goods. They are not moved, borrowed, nor stolen; they are only copied from substrate to substrate (be it a mind, a piece of paper, or a computer). Property rules simply don't work there.
What does work is monopoly rules, such as copyright, patents, and trademarks. The use of "property" to describe such limited state granted monopolies is an obvious piece of newspeak, an Orwellian ploy to make those laws look better than they are, and frame the discussion: if you're against monopoly, you're a normal person. If you're against property, you must be a thief of sorts.
Your argument against "nonrival" would imply that if a manufacturer creates surplus product, its ok to steal the surplus because no one else needa it.. even if they go bankrupt because no one then buys the non surplus.
And a Marxist would say that labor ia property, and its rheft to deprive a laborer of ownership of their labor. All property is a legal fiction, you cant arbitrarily decide that one kind ia legitimate and the others aren't. Rivalry is just one factor.
I may side with the Native Americans on that one.
There is this idea of a Land Value Tax, where most or all taxes would be taken on naked soil. Such a tax would effectively abolish land ownership, because everyone would effectively rent it from the state. Long story short, it looks like it might work.
you'll think differently once you've planted your crops in it
Nowhere does rms claim this implication, so this is just a strawman. He doesn't even oppose "IP" as a whole (except for the term itself), just those restrictions which conflict with the Four Freedoms.
He's very shortsighted in fact, his views are 19th century if anything, and they're not even very intellectually founded, or well expressed.
Says the person who fails to make a single argument to justify their position.
Let's use environmentalism as an analogy. There is a place for an absolutist intellectual position, when it comes to the underlying science. However, much of the tremendous progress that has been made with respect to the global environment has been a tenacious "foot in the door, while they're slamming it" struggle, where allies and politics are vital. This is why I found the FSF animosity towards "Open Source" perplexing. If a group is advocating for freedom, I find it perplexing when they seem to be coercing me to be free in exactly the way they deem correct. While leadership is vital in any movement (I think that leaderless movements generally fall off the rails and tend to spawn extremist groups) one of the primary reasons leadership is vital is to set the tone and morality of the movement. A firm philosophical and intellectual grounding is also vital, but it can't stand alone if the tone and morality of the movement allows it to succumb to any human group's natural tendency towards jingoism. RMS always got the intellectual far-seeing right. In terms of tone and politics: fairly close to dead wrong. Basically, he could impress college aged me, then alienate working aged me.