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A short critique of Stallmanism

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Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#21

Post by greyman »

milesrout wrote: post #17
greyman wrote: post #14

> Stallman's rhetoric is filled with this problematic logic on all layers: from trying to correct other people's terminology Yes, this is my main obstacle accepting RMS. In my opinion, he took the word "free", made a term "free software", and described it in accordance with his agenda, while what he advocated only partially conforms to the meaning of the word "free" or "freedom". There are certainly licenses offering…

>There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to take something and make it closed source with or without changes. Only if you consider 'freedom' to include the right to restrict end user freedom. The GPL protects the freedom of users. If I license something as GPL then that means I'm saying "I want anyone to be able to use this, and if you want t…

I don't know, I don't feel I am in some camp. His license grants some permissions and forbids something else. I just don't feel the word "freedom" fits into what he wants to achieve. Just let's call it some other way and I am fine with it. This is just grabbing a positive word, twist it, and use for his own agenda. And I am not willing to play such a game.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#22

Post by milesrout »

trav4225 wrote: post #7
throwaway729 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although your comment is a fair one, this critique is tactical/strategic rather than political/ideological. That is, the author assumes you mostly agree with Stallman's end goals, and from there argues for a different set of strategies.

Definitely agree. I just wanted to point out that, even though it often seems otherwise, there are indeed people in the technological community who have deep problems with the FSF philosophies.

I honestly don't think that I've ever seen any evidence of that. I'm not saying there aren't, though.

Everyone I've ever seen that disagrees with the FSF either:

- doesn't understand what 'freedom' means in the context of software, thinking only in terms of software developers and not in terms of users, when users are the only ones that actually matter, or - doesn't understand that free software isn't opposed to making money from software.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#23

Post by throwaway729 »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #15
trav4225 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely agree. I just wanted to point out that, even though it often seems otherwise, there are indeed people in the technological community who have deep problems with the FSF philosophies.

Are there? I would believe that there are many who don't care, or many who are dismissive at a rather shallow level. But I'm not aware of having seen a good, intellectual critique of "free" software.

There are many criticisms of the various freedoms embodied by Stallmanism's notion of free software (to borrow a term from the article). A thorough rebuttal of the entire viewpoint requires, IMO:

1. An ardent defense of capitalism and private property.

2. A critique of open source as a superior software development methodology.

You'll find shades of (1) in various defenses of competing open source licenses (e.g. BSD). But also, (1) is a pretty common attitude in software development circles (a majority of the libertarians I know are software people).

(2) is a lot less common in developer crowds, I think in part because when evaluated as a purely factual and categorical claim, it's trivial to prove false. Many of the most successful software projects in the world are open source.

The economic argument against (2) is far more common -- and is made in this thread by sprafa for example.

Surprisingly, there are also moral arguments against (2) -- see e.g. https://acmsonline.org/home2/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VanD...

TBF the moral case against (2) probably really is as rare as you claim (which is a good thing IMO).

But the intersection of (1) and (2) isn't impossible to imagine, and I think there are a lot of developers who get close to this confluence of opinions. Or at least a lot closer than they are to "Stallmanist" freedom.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#24

Post by milesrout »

geofft wrote: post #10

Thanks for posting this. I like this a lot and it clearly argues a lot of what I don't like about Stallman's free software advocacy. Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; software is a tool for accomplishing things in the world, including moral or immoral things. When Stallman says that it's better to have no software to do a task than non-free software, it so…

>Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself;

I disagree. Proprietary software is anti-user and anti-developer. In my experience, even the sort of people that don't care either way about whether their operating system is open source get upset at the idea of the View Source button on a webpage going away, for example.

Free software is ethically good in comparison to proprietary software, which is definitely ethically bad in its own right.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#25

Post by prodigal_erik »

sprafa wrote: post #6
throwaway729 wrote: post #2

> it is not a solution for people to simply stop using e.g. Gmail. I strongly disagree with this part. For example, if you think the primary problem with GMail is user privacy, then the only solutions are legal or technical. And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. The problem with Stallman's approach…

The problem with this is incentives. Without the profit motive, and without revolutionary support programs like the ones Stallman imagines, people simply have got to pay rent somehow. And FOSS, as Stallman describes it, does not pay rent. So programmers end up working in proprietary applications, often building up on top of FOSS or Open-source to build better user capture and lock-in and winning the market share.

The incentive was supposed to be access to a growing library of copylefted code. But we somehow abandoned POSIX in favor of a half-assed scripting language where a critical mass of desirable code doesn't exist yet.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#26

Post by icebraining »

geofft wrote: post #10

Thanks for posting this. I like this a lot and it clearly argues a lot of what I don't like about Stallman's free software advocacy. Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; software is a tool for accomplishing things in the world, including moral or immoral things. When Stallman says that it's better to have no software to do a task than non-free software, it so…

I think the argument in your first paragraph mostly misses the mark: yes, software is a tool, but Stallman doesn't actually criticize the software, he criticizes the way it is licensed to people. And his analysis does have a consequentialist component - he discusses at length the actual harmful effects of non-free software.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#27

Post by krapp »

geofft wrote: post #10

Thanks for posting this. I like this a lot and it clearly argues a lot of what I don't like about Stallman's free software advocacy. Free software isn't a moral good in itself, and non-free software isn't a moral evil in itself; software is a tool for accomplishing things in the world, including moral or immoral things. When Stallman says that it's better to have no software to do a task than non-free software, it so…

Regarding freedom 4, I've always assumed (possibly erroneously) that Stallman envisioned "software" as being limited more or less exclusively to Unixlike C programs. It really doesn't make a lot of sense as an axiom if you assume software will eventually become too complex to be comprehensible to a single individual, or that the typical software user won't require a working knowledge of CS and C compiler and be able to edit and compile from source.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#28

Post by krapp »

sprafa wrote: post #4

essentially brilliant. I've been thinking more and more about how Stallman has blocked perhaps the only effective way to make companies make more open-source software: allow DRM to work properly with open-source code. That is, the main issue with making open-source software is that anyone can copy it, thus placing the value of your software at 0. But if DRM effectively put a a stop to this, by not allowing you to run…

Stallman isn't concerned with open source code, but with free software. The difference being a moral philosophical framework that makes DRM unacceptable in any form, because it limits the ways in which the user can modify and redistribute software.

No one owns software under the free software philosophy, not even the original creators - code belongs equally to everyone. Since no one owns the code, no one has the right to make demands or to restrict another person's use of the code.

I don't think this is anti-capitalist, so much as capital agnostic. Whether you can or can't make money with free software isn't relevant, all that matters is that the users' freedom is respected. Within that framework you're free to make as much money as you want with the code that you write... and so is everyone else.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#30

Post by throwaway729 »

milesrout wrote: post #19
throwaway729 wrote: post #2

> it is not a solution for people to simply stop using e.g. Gmail. I strongly disagree with this part. For example, if you think the primary problem with GMail is user privacy, then the only solutions are legal or technical. And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. The problem with Stallman's approach…

>And the legal framework required to protect privacy for GMail users is utterly draconian -- to the point that Google would probably just shutter the service. Could you elaborate on this? The idea of the law protecting peoples' privacy is not really new or untested. I don't think you need to be anywhere near what I would call draconian to be able to protect peoples' privacy legally.

Hm, thanks for making me think more about this.

I still don't think GMail could've come into existence without the carrot of user data. Maybe now that it does exist Google has a vested interest in keeping people inside its platform, which would mean my statement is incorrect.

Maybe I'll just weaken my statement to this: I think a GMail replacement would be far easier to achieve than a strong legal framework protecting users' privacy.

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