I was very surprised by that sentence, because "immoral commercial software" is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the lack of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don't build it up into a strawman.
I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.
Being commercial is independent to being proprietary; there is a lot of non-commercial proprietary software and there is also some commercial free software. Regarding the immorality, it is definitely common to justify the necessity of free software on the grounds that proprietary software is immoral towards the users: they cannot know, verify, or control what the program does to them. In the writings of Richard Stallman you certainly find the notion that free software is a necessity precisely because proprietary software is unethical.
The GameBoy used proprietary software. Was that unethical?
Stallman's position is not extreme. It is consistent and firm, but he tries to reach a reasonable compromise. In political parlance you could say that he's a reformist, not a radical. Notice that he argues that it is OK to use proprietary softare, for example for developing free software if it is the only option, or for communicating with other people that cannot use free software at the moment (e.g., zoom meetings). If that is the case, he urges you to at least tell your colleagues from time to time that there are other options and that you would prefer to use free software:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/saying-no-even-once.html
The linked text is very clear and cannot be construed at all as "extreme". At the same time, he holds that while we can reach temporary compromises, proprietary software is always unethical and that we should strive towards freer options.
Right, and that's exactly what I'm referring to. It's pretty extreme how categorically the FSF applies the term 'unethical'. I'm not saying Stallman is incapable of ever making compromises.
If Vim were proprietary, I probably wouldn't use it, but freeware isn't unethical.
On the point of Zoom meetings, the FSF have just begun offering a Jitsi service to all Associate Members of the FSF.
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-gives-freedom-respec...
However, with respect to the GamBoy itself, the issue is that when I buy a GameBoy, I am not able to inspect it, nor am I able to correct it if it is not not working properly. The GameBoy is not unethical in itself. It is forcing your customers to accept a "No user serviceable parts" license in terms of the software that is deemed unethical. Not being able to inspect the code to see what it is doing may have ramifications for the user -- perhaps not so obvious on a device that has no network, but it is where it starts.
One of the big problems with the Free Software movement, IMHO, is that it has been confused as being a software creation issue. It is not. It is 100% a consumer rights issue. One of the most important parts of free software is that if I did not give my software to you, then I have no responsibilities towards you at all. If I don't give you a binary, then I never have to give you source code. If you get the binary from somewhere else, I still don't have to give you source code -- the person who gave you the binary does.
This is about choosing a license that treats your customer well and about nothing else at all. For decades people have wittingly and unwittingly attempted to spin this as some frothing at the mouth religious issue. It is not. It is purely a consumer rights issue.
Good point.
> Not being able to inspect the code to see what it is doing may have ramifications for the user -- perhaps not so obvious on a device that has no network, but it is where it starts.
Sure. This connects to data and privacy concerns.
> If I don't give you a binary, then I never have to give you source code.
True of the GPL, but not of the Affero GPL. Also, permissive Free Software licences like Apache impose no such requirements, but are still Free Software licences. Free Software isn't the same thing as copyleft. (Of course, if you distribute binaries but refuse to share the source, then what you are doing is no longer Free Software.)
> It is purely a consumer rights issue.
This makes for easy contrast with the Open Source movement, which is good, but I think it's a little misleading. As an analogy, the right-to-repair movement doesn't expect hardware companies to hand over their design documents, they're just seeking to end open hostility toward third-party repairs.
I fully appreciate Stallman's 4 Freedoms, including Freedom 1, the right to study software, but I'm not sure I'd quite call it a consumer rights matter. Payware proprietary software licenses prevent you from freely copying/distributing the software. Patents and design patents can do a similar thing with hardware. That's not really a consumer rights problem.
To put that another way, I can see the sense in treating Freedom 0 (freedom to run the program as you wish) and Freedom 1 (freedom to study how the program works) as consumer rights issues. I'm not convinced though that Freedom 2 (freedom to redistribute copies) and Freedom 3 (freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions) are consumer rights issues.
They are clearly consumer rights issues, to me. Whether you think they are important consumer rights issues is quite another matter ;-). Freedom 3, IMHO is definitely more important that Freedom 2. If you've managed to fix an issue, but are prevented from helping other people to fix the issue, I think it's problematic. As a consumer, I definitely value Freedom 2. Personally, I'm not sure I would consider it an ethical issue.
However, whether or not Freedom 2 is really an ethical issue, I think it's fairly straightforward to understand how people find Free software, as a whole, an ethical consumer rights issue. I'm not saying that everybody in the world is going to agree with the stance (and clearly many don't), but it's not much of a stretch to at least understand the position.
More edits for clarity. I should probably just go to sleep :-)
The confusion is on your end. Section 3 of GPLv2 requires you make the source available to any third party, not just your customer (and GPLv3's provisions are similar).
There is exactly one set of circumstances that permit you to say "no" to any and all non-customers, and it involves not limiting the initial distribution to just binaries. That is, iff you provide binaries together with the source to the customer who's giving out copies of the binaries themselves, then it is their responsibility and not yours, and only in that instance are you allowed to turn down third-party requests for source. This would also hinge on having a customer who would be fine giving out copies of the binaries they received from you in step 1 but for some reason wants not to give out copies of the source code that they received with it.
See also https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.htm...
> the Affero GPL only differs in that I would have to give you source code (edit: previously typed "software") if I supply a binary for you to use over a network
That doesn't sound right. You don't have to distribute a binary for the Affero GPL to require you to release your source. From the FSF:
> The GNU Affero General Public License is a modified version of the ordinary GNU GPL version 3. It has one added requirement: if you run a modified program on a server and let other users communicate with it there, your server must also allow them to download the source code corresponding to the modified version running there.
Edit (programmer needs sleep badly): Clearly it doesn't have to be a binary. It's any executable over a network. But you don't have to give the source cod to everyone, that's really my only point :-)
Games that are only meant to be played once are a good example and can be compared to a ticket to the cinema. It does not make sense to allow to resell those games.
Modern consoles are able to offer a multiplayer experience free of the cheating that plagues many PC games. That's because they're bolted-down and deny users the freedom the modify the software. To the customer, that has real value.
And it doesn't offer me any value if I do wish to cheat
The fact that people can cheat, does not force you to cheat when playing. This is exactly the same thing in sports.
In online PC gaming, cheating is a real problem, as people are able to modify the game to their advantage. This is next to impossible on modern consoles, and cheating is much less of a problem there.
I don't begrudge anyone who wants to opt-in to a designated cheat-based multiplayer session, of course, but it can be a real problem for 'ordinary' gamers.
Do you want to force every company (not just software ones) to release the entire business details, processes, designs, contacts, experience... for every product they sell? Do you want to force every company (not just software ones) to give each customer an easy way to clone every product?
Because for software-only or design-only companies, that is what it means.
There are alternative means to make companies behave, like regulations, certifications, inspections, fines, contracts, etc. in every other field. Why software/design companies need to be different?
Dude, I don't want to force anybody to do anything. Even if it is unethical, nobody's saying that proprietary software should be illegal (except maybe when it is paid for by public resources, but this is another issue).
I'm just refusing to partake in the proliferation of proprietary software, by my acts, and by telling other people why they might consider to do so.
I don’t like closed software either and always prefer a open source product if it is good enough. But going to the point of calling "immoral" and "unethical" the work of other engineers who do sell their software as fairly as possible given the constraints of reality is a bit rude.
you can verify, modify a program without having access to processes, designs, contacts, etc. It's much harder without those but it's definitely possible. You're also aware that you can fix your own car, your fridge, your house if you ever want it. Those objects don't actively fight to stay un-repair-able (although the times are changing)
as far as cloning goes, I'm sure you're aware that there are many clones of your television, phone, etc. sold every day.
But in the end, it's a political choice. Either you agree with the fact that some people protect "their" idea (that they had by studying others' ideas), make profit out of it by keeping it a secret, that is, making sure it won't reach the greater part of mankind but only their customer base. Or you don't agree with that. RMS doesn't and he shows he can do it with an appropriate level of incoherence (notice that most free software, in turns, is written or proprietary hardware : just try to reverse engineer a CPU).
So it's not black and white. And if in some field there are rules, laws, etc. don't forget they were put in place also to protect commercial interest (in place of general interest). Software being new, it gives us (the idealists) an opportunity to propose another approach.
You can fix material defects. You cannot change the design, which is what you can do if you release the source code.
The same way you can make small fixes in a program relatively easily, for instance updating a dependency or patching small bugs in the binary.
So you are agreeing with me.
> as far as cloning goes, I'm sure you're aware that there are many clones of your television, phone, etc. sold every day.
You cannot clone them for free without cost, which is the problem with software given the source code.
> making sure it won't reach the greater part of mankind but only their customer base
Do you really think a business does not want to sell? Marketing is about telling everyone about your product.
To improve the use of proprietary systems is a misguided goal. Our aim, rather, is to eliminate them. We include support for some proprietary systems in GNU Emacs in the hope that running Emacs on them will give users a taste of freedom and thus lead them to free themselves.
This does not mean all proprietary software is like this, but the developer/user power imbalance is present in all proprietary software to a much greater extent than free* software.
*Free does not mean non-commercial, it's cool to want to get paid for software, including free software.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
Back when free software was still a new thing on college campuses, there were proprietary software vendors who owned and monetized a heck of a lot.
Whether Microsoft's Server CALs for IIS (yes, that was a thing) or Oracle or Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Bell or ATT, there were a lot of vendors monetizing on both the server and the desktop.
Yes, software running on my machine might have been my data but there were numerous cases of that very same proprietary software where the data files were inaccessible.
In short, you owned the machine and that was fine but you didn't have a license to the data format and that meant you were...well, locked in and monetized by that particular vendor.
I'm not really going to speak to the moral judgement you made about free software since free software or proprietary software can both be used for whatever immoral ends.
Like seriously, "seems how a lot of software engineers* are ultimately paid these data" (by proprietary companies). Google is a proprietary software company, so is Facebook, so is twitter. All companies that relentlessly abuse users.
Free software advocates meanwhile have a social network with a few hundred thousand active users, they've got privacy-respecting search engines, and have operating systems that don't spy on you.
Proprietary software caused the problems you're ranting about, and your comment reeks of "I work at a company that sells proprietary software and am trying desperately to pin my own sins on people releasing software making the world more free."
I'm nowhere near a free software extremist. Many of the people I find admirable release proprietary software. But your comment is ridiculous. Proprietary software is undeniably immoral.
* "Engineers" is the wrong term because software engineers don't exist.
- GPL code can be used in a program you do not distribute
- Not distributing can be done by running it on a server instead of local machines
- Run on server almost always means users don't own data
It's missing a step, which is that the GPL code in the world was so important that people NEEDED to use it so much that they were willing to change the way they distribute (or don't) their software... that's a pretty tough claim to make out. What's the evidence for that?
The AGPL is one of the strangest licenses to me, coming from a foundation that considers running code you can't read or modify as a violation of your human rights, but also making a license designed for software running on someone else's computer entirely, where you have no possibility of any amount of control.
In general I think it is wrong to try and characterize Amazon's developers as being some kind of strange beasts who have somehow figured out how to use open source better than everyone else. They are the same as every other corporate developer in that they'll always take the easiest and cheapest path to success.
This would include the freedom to know what code is running,and the freedom to modify that code and run you own version. The ideal outcome of someone running an AGPL server would be that if you find a bug or if they decide to terminate the service, you can host your own version, so you are not locked in.
Unfortunately, it turns out that this freedom is very hard to actually guarantee, as the deployment and monitoring of a server can be as daunting as the actual application logic itself. This is somewhat similar to the case of releasing GPL code without the instructions for building that code, but probably far worse.
You seem to have assumed I am personally someone who was bitten by this, which is not the case. I am not even a firm believer in FLOSS values. I am just a by-stander observing how these things are used in practice as opposed to their ideals.
By the way, even Mongo's initial use of the AGPL was somewhat counter to the spirit of the thing - they also believed that the deployment part is going to be too hard for many companies, so they hoped that companies would come to them to pay for hosted deployments. If they were using the AGPL according to its spirit, they could have made their own deployment and monitoring scripts public and would have defeated Amazon's lock-in attempts that way (of course they could never do that, their whole purpose was to create that lock-in effect for themselves).
One of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Also a complete failure to understand the philosophy behind the success of FLOSS.
Generic problems that are widely shared with limited variations in functional need are successful FLOSS solutions or platforms.
Specific problems that are more nuanced and meet niche requirements are what works best in commercial software.
It philosophically makes no sense to call something immoral because a subset of entities are happy to pay for it to achieve their goals. Symbiotically most FLOSS is supported by these solutions which are often based on them.
Paying or not paying has nothing to do with the immorality of proprietary software.
You can pay for software even if it is not proprietary.
I suggest you to watch any talk by Richard Stallman, if you want to understand why some people think proprietary software to be immoral. You might not agree, but for sure it is not something that "philosophically makes no sense".
You can, hardly anyone does though. Donate buttons make a pittance. Nearly all the times I've given one I get back an almost embarrassingly grateful response because A. the amount I give is always a small fraction of the value I've gained and B. it's obviously a rare event for the receiver.
And offering paid support or development is not unheard of either.
And open source vs. closed source doesn't really drastically change anything here, since you could just charge support per installation (and they could try to lie about how many installations there are, etc.).
Care to elaborate on that statement?
Is there something wrong with jobs at local market rates? No different to how you are paid.
Yea, I've met Stallman, been to plenty of his talks and had this same discussion for the last 15-20 years. Thanks for the advice though.
> immorality of proprietary software.
I don't believe it is. Plenty of others accept a perfectly valid dual magisteria as I proposed. Even in the commonly cited logically incongruous value systems that redefine the baseline of ethics I think that view can be accommodated.
But the blanket statement that "proprietary software is immoral" is fundamentally broken
Software engineers not only do exist on my home country, it is a professional title protected by law, not something that one calls themselves after a six week bootcamp.
And lots of Windows software isn't available on OSX either (and vice versa).. How are you gonna blame that on the FOSS community?
Announce any "evil proprietary" software in places like HN, which should be about doing business to start with, and the top comments happen to be about forking, making FOSS clones and not paying a dime to evil overloards.
Qt being discussed here is a very good example, tons of comments on how not to pay Qt, switch to alternatives, and how much evil they are for wanting remuneration for their work.
Naturally companies then turn into the Apple, Google and Microsoft customer communities instead.
You are essentially arguing that making software available for Linux as well increases the probability of FOSS clones. I would argue the inverse, since the motivation to create a FOSS clone is much higher if such software doesn't exist at all for a given platform (since some people will just buy the software and be done with it).
Assuming the terms and prices are fair and no "bad practices" are going on (no excessive EULA/DRM, no ads, no enforced subscriptions, no online requirement, etc.), how is that immoral?
The world does not owe devs a business model, you are right. The same way, the world does not owe users a solution under whatever terms they want, either.
I think there's an argument to be made that the work that compilers perform might as well be DRM. Granted, the obfuscating effect of source-to-binary translation is in most cases incidental to the compiler's main purpose, but it's an effect that can be felt nonetheless.
It is like people going to the cinema expecting to be given all the details, including technical documents and whatnot about how the movie was made.
If there's a bug, the user can fix it only if the source code is available.
> It is like people going to the cinema expecting to be given all the details, including technical documents and whatnot about how the movie was made.
Well, movies do include credits, detailing who did what. From there, you could research what the "what" is and know more or less how the movie was made.
Disclaimer: I have no care either way between OSS or commercial software, beyond liking to contribute and support OSS projects, and working on proprietary applications (and being generally ok with it). So I'm replying not with an intent to proselytize; just thought I could address your points.
The point is that proprietary software is inherently that kind of bad practice - it means users can't fix bugs they encounter, or can't share their bugfixes. This is particularly vexing when the vendor also disclaims all warranties on the software, which is usual practice - reserving the right to sell something broken and unfixable.
Compare e.g. car right-to-repair laws that require manufacturers to make their repair manuals available.
I don't know what would work for you. If you're doing in-person support for your users, that may well be a lot more valuable than the software itself. Maybe that's a viable business, or maybe it isn't. Again, the world doesn't owe you a business model. If you're selling shrink-wrapped software then my honest opinion is that that business is dying (with or without the open-source movement) and it's better to get out of it.
If pacemakers really need software updates, then regulate that companies are required to provide the updates or release the code if unable to do so for any reason.
At this point no discussion can be had as it depends on a persons own beliefs which are rarely changed by fact or argument. This also skips over any nuance concerning the benefits, costs, and externalities of a particular subject.
There are definitely many exceptions, such as Mozilla and GNU and others, but some of the highest profile software fall in either the first category (Linux, Clang, Kubernetes, Docker, MySQL, OpenJDK, PostgreSQL) or the second (old AGPL MongoDB, ElasticSearch, CentOS).
Free software is software that respects the 4 freedoms:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.
Cloud services are not free software, whatever the license. Nonfree software is immoral.
That depends on the cloud service in question. The "big three" (AWS, Azure, GCP) certainly are not, but there are a lot of small/niche hosters running Kubernetes, OpenStack and other FOSS cloud software.
What part of that doesn't make sense? If the program is going to run on someone else's system then you'll need access to that system to be able to modify it to do your computing as you wish.
If you borrow my linux notebook for an hour and I don't give you access to chaning the software on it, doesn't change that linux is free software.
In the same way that free software distributers are not required to distribute your desired patches. They perform a service of distribution (or cloud providers: running the software)
But I think I get that you consider cloud services non-free outside of the pure software aspect. I think, though, that there's still meaningful distinction between providers running direct free software which you could essentially clone completely and run your own version and such that run closed versions, which do not allow that.
With regard to the individual software each customer uses, often small/niche hosts do allow each customer to inspect and modify the software. That's kind of the point of cloud VM hosting, that you "have root" and can even modify your kernel if you wish.
But that changes if you publish an interface to the software on your cloud machine, and allow others to use it. Now it's a "service" and that software is no longer free, because you have denied the four freedoms to its users.
Software as a service cannot be free software - it is a fundamental contradiction.
Makes sense. I don't mind proprietary software as long as it doesn't exploit its users.
> If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.
Um, what? This is one of the most absurd statements I've seen this week. Whether a software is free or proprietary has absolutely nothing to do with the surveillance business. I fail to understand how you can demonize free software developers for enabling the surveillance economy or whatever when there are many, many proprietary software out there that's specifically developed for the sole purpose of spying on you. You might as well condemn hardware companies for selling computers because that also enables the surveillance economy too.
Propriatery for me means closed source, not free (as in freedom). All the free applications that spy on you do not share their source code, therefore are in nature propriatery.
As far as I understand Qt considers to put a 12-month delay before opening up its source code.
I think this would be a zero-sum game for Qt in the long term. They will continue to milk their existing commercial userbase, but lose the support of the community.
That doesn't sound right. There's an asymmetry here that you're ignoring. To use FSF-esque terminology:
Freedom-respecting software must be Free Software, and any software it relies on must be Free.
Surveillance technology can use Free Software, but can just as easily use proprietary solutions.
> Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations
Agree.
Erm, you appear to be too young to remember mainframes. The wheel merely turns.
> If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.
Complaining about frying pans because someone whacked you over the head with one is silly.
Just because someone is running their proprietary software on top of open source infrastructure does not make their software any less proprietary.
You can sell user data using free or proprietary software.
People call it immoral, in part because you can't modify it to tailor it to your needs, which I understand. When you buy a computer, you can repair or modify it.
No one has called it immoral because of the usage that was done of it (ie good or evil).
I believe open-source is about altruism. It's not a business model to gain users and thereafter trick them or forcing them to pay.
> (...)
> Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than
So, you are also calling proprietary software immoral? Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Regarding your argument; of course, there may be some free software that is also immoral due to other reasons than its licensing.
Actually if you admit the existence of SAAS and regardless of its own issues, it using Free Software is still strictly better than it using only proprietary software.
And in regard to owning your own data thanks to proprietary software on your own devices, in practice this is just plainly false now: look at Windows 10 vs most Linux distro.
You imply that immorality cannot be avoided, so let's accept it. According to your reasoning, some people are killers so lets close prisons.
The software used for collecting and selling user data is proprietary, all of it. This is because:
1. if it were developed as open source, in the open, people could inspect what it does
2. profiling user data is most often a company's core competency, the trade secret that they won't give away
If not, then please point out to free software packages I can use to collect and profile user data, because I have a business idea I'd like to try and no resources for software development.
Oh, do you mean those companies run their proprietary stuff on top of Linux? Well, if not Linux, it would have been Solaris, or Windows. The higher cost wouldn't have been much of a deterrence, in capitalism due to competition the cost does eventually come down.
Vendor lock-in is immoral, though.
Except you're wrong, it's the fact we never got property rights and software became licensed to begin with. We should be living in a world where we had rights to source code and program ownership from the beginning. You don't seem to get Microsoft and big software companies benefited from 200 years of big media companies lobbying away the public domain and any rights to own works. Copyright was the back door to get rid of property rights from the public.
Software licensing is what lead us to this DRM dystopia, you can't have DRM if you own the bits you buy outright at point of purchase instead of "licensing them".
It's the software licensing model for the public where the public has no right to own the software it buys that's at the root of the madness. Not free software advocates.
The reality is we desperately needs property rights for consumers, I've watched for 20 years as the PC game industry stole PC games by client-server back ending them to take the files hostage on remote PC's...
Software as a service and DRM enabled by lack of property rights for the public is the real enemy of privacy and freedom buddy.
We should have had the right to own software like we own our clothes and houses. We can own our cars, houses and repair them, but we can't do that with software.
So huge swatches of human history are being kept in corporate vaults behind lock and key.
Companies like irdeto are pure scum in trying to game encrypt binaries. Don't get me started on mobile gacha games.
The whole software ecosystem is made on bad american IP law where the software buyer has no rights and all the cards are held by big tech companies.
Don't blame free software advocates. Blame lack of the public having any ownership rights over the software it buys.
We now live in a world where Microsoft can claim they "own" the files on my computer via American IP law magic and I don't really have a right to use my software and computer how I see fit because of bs IP laws written by american corporate lobbyists.
So whole swaths of video game and PC software history are being actively destroyed and done knowingly so.
Microsoft is planning to lock down the PC and, DRM like steam, origin, uplay, MMO's, client-server software is all about the end of freedom on the PC as an open platform.
I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in.
Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data.
Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.