Re:Copyleft and community licenses are not without merit, bu...
by joshuamorton on Saturday December 22, 2018 @10:09PM
(#18744154)
>There is a very strong argument of what is better for a society -- restrictions on fewer people so that a larger group of people have more freedom, or more freedem for fewer people so that a larger group have less freedom?
This isn't a good rule either. Enslaving all black people in the US would give a minority less freedom, but a majority more freedom (presumably anyway, given the economic potential). It's still horribly unethical. My point here is that you can't just make these sweeping generalizations about freedoms. Each freedom has to be compared with the ones it affects carefully. "My freedom makes more people freer" is not a sound argument. Why is that freedom better, and why is it better to society as a whole than the alternatives (and of course questions of whether or not utilitarianism is even a valid ethical system under which to analyze these problems).
>How do you explain the prevalence of free software under the GPL for the past 30 years? If the GPL couldn't work, then we wouldn't be living in the world we have today.
The question is not "would GPL software still exist under the GPL" its "would non-GPL software exist under the GPL". It's not "GPL can't work for anything" but "can GPL work for all of the things that are currently Apache/MIT/BSD"? And would those things (and all of their derivatives exist under the GPL?)
Because then you are making a value judgement on software that does exist. Would your chromium (and v8 and node) or your llvm or your apache anything (spark, hadoop, beam, etc. which are used in all kinds of proprietary work) be as successful if companies couldn't keep their proprietary bits proprietary?
The opportunity cost of the GPL is, potentially, things like those. You're discounting them because "we can't know the value of software that doesn't exist" or whatever nonsense, but we know of a lot of non-GPL OSS, and its extraordinarily valuable.
So the biggest question is: would the increase in end user freedom be worth the loss of all currently nonfree software? If not, what percentage of a loss is "acceptable"? Would losing LLVM but not Chromium be acceptable? If Apache never existed, would that be Ok as long as all of Google's open source work was GPL'd instead? Would the world be a better place if it was exactly the same except that all machine learning work was proprietary?
None of those sound like wins, and the ability to use Chromium or Tensorflow or Beam or LLVM all sound like net increases in freedom to me. And net improvements to the average person's life.
This isn't a good rule either. Enslaving all black people in the US would give a minority less freedom, but a majority more freedom (presumably anyway, given the economic potential). It's still horribly unethical. My point here is that you can't just make these sweeping generalizations about freedoms. Each freedom has to be compared with the ones it affects carefully. "My freedom makes more people freer" is not a sound argument. Why is that freedom better, and why is it better to society as a whole than the alternatives (and of course questions of whether or not utilitarianism is even a valid ethical system under which to analyze these problems).
>How do you explain the prevalence of free software under the GPL for the past 30 years? If the GPL couldn't work, then we wouldn't be living in the world we have today.
The question is not "would GPL software still exist under the GPL" its "would non-GPL software exist under the GPL". It's not "GPL can't work for anything" but "can GPL work for all of the things that are currently Apache/MIT/BSD"? And would those things (and all of their derivatives exist under the GPL?)
Because then you are making a value judgement on software that does exist. Would your chromium (and v8 and node) or your llvm or your apache anything (spark, hadoop, beam, etc. which are used in all kinds of proprietary work) be as successful if companies couldn't keep their proprietary bits proprietary?
The opportunity cost of the GPL is, potentially, things like those. You're discounting them because "we can't know the value of software that doesn't exist" or whatever nonsense, but we know of a lot of non-GPL OSS, and its extraordinarily valuable.
So the biggest question is: would the increase in end user freedom be worth the loss of all currently nonfree software? If not, what percentage of a loss is "acceptable"? Would losing LLVM but not Chromium be acceptable? If Apache never existed, would that be Ok as long as all of Google's open source work was GPL'd instead? Would the world be a better place if it was exactly the same except that all machine learning work was proprietary?
None of those sound like wins, and the ability to use Chromium or Tensorflow or Beam or LLVM all sound like net increases in freedom to me. And net improvements to the average person's life.