A short critique of Stallmanism

In case anyone's wondering, we (hackaday) probably would have allowed the author to use this art, provided we get a link back to the post or some credit to Joe. In the absence of that, we're just going to point and laugh at this guy for clearly demonstrating he doesn't understand copyright.

GPL conditions are primarily concerned with freedom from external restraint, such as patents, proprietary licenses and DRM. Negative liberty, which is the freedom from interference by other people, is the other side of the coin from positive liberty, ie the possession of the power and resources to fulfil one's own potential. All FLOSS licenses has positive freedoms, but not all grant negative freedom.

This article suggests that RMS ought to make his own leftist beliefs an explicit part of the free software movement. As the author is aware, RMS has generally tried not to do this, recognizing that free software advocates can have a wide range of beliefs about other issues, even if a plurality of people in the movement are hold leftist views. In general, RMS has stood for the effort of trying to find common cause around specific issues and principles among people who might radically disagree about other things (another example was the League for Programming Freedom, a single-issue campaign against software patents that actively aspired to include people who disagree with RMS about free software!).

It's true that the big-tent concept could fail as a tactical matter if it turns out that the success of one cause really is indispensable to the success of another, which is a big part of what this article is claiming. But I wish the article had engaged a bit more with the fact that RMS does not appear to agree with this analysis and has consistently wanted people with non-leftist views to join the free software movement, including enthusiastic supporters of capitalism and private property. In other words, it's not an oversight or an accident. (To be clear about this, the classic formulation of RMS's free software philosophy calls for not regarding software as private property -- for example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" -- but stakes out no position on regarding, say, financial instruments, airplanes, factories, companies, plots of land, or apartment buildings as private property. Hence many more people could agree with it.)

It's a title for a concept, it isn't a redefinition of the word "free." It is always capitalized. Software can't even be free or unfree in any way other than gratis, unless you're talking about software behind a restrictive firewall - software isn't a person or an animal, generally isn't thought of as having agency or desires, and couldn't care less (or more) about the aspects of whatever license it is distributed under - licensing is for people.

It's unbelievable that this could be the main obstacle in accepting a philosophical and political idea that has material effects on the human condition. What do you do when a "stop" light turns green?

Communism is an economic system of physical goods and services, digital and intellectual things aren't either so I don't think it's useful to equate the two. Digital media is easily obtained by anyone so is made with a lock to which the key is sold. The keys are usually some form of digital media, so a central authority is needed to validate the keys. The validation process is also digital, so laws get made to threaten anyone that tries to bypass that process and, instead of preventing attacks on ships, those laws get used to mess up peoples lives that usually don't deserve it. Software is just a big, messy math function, and trying to sell it is just as silly as trying to sell addition. Sell goods; sell services (even the service of writing software); but trying to sell the software itself is pretty much insane; the only way to win at it is to treat your customers like no-good, lying thieves.