Free software misses the point of open source. Open source wants to make the world a better place without strings attached, while free software just wants to push some bizzare ideology.
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
131–140 of 426 posts
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
So just because he happens to be the president of an organization means he can’t defend his colleague on an unrelated private message board? The chilling effect of such a policy essentially means that all advocacy groups must be led by slick marketing politicians, always on-point and on-brand, even if off camera.
If he’s defending his colleague having sex with a 17 year old who had been trafficked for sex since she was 15, then yes I don’t think any president of an organization should do that.
His entire argument was that it was possible that he had no idea that she was a trafficking victim when she approached him, it could have been a regular prostitute from his point of view. However Stallman didn't downplay the harm that's been done to the girl and he didn't rule out the possibility that his friend indeed knew about all of that.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#133That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for thousands of dollars. So even if havin…
Yeah, I wouldn't put anything under a "GPL or any later version" for the time being.
Writing anyone or any organisation a blank cheque is problematic. Even if they are perfection personified now, will they be in the future? Will it be run by none of the same people? Will they have an entirely different agenda to the one you agree with?
If you can't know these things with sufficient certainty, definitely pick your license. Then only change it deliberately for your own purposes with your own goals and ideals driving it.
Devils advocate: maybe gpl will never have a later version you could possibly disagree with as it's too important to too many people just like you.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's notable that all of these anecdotes are from back in the '90s and before; since I assume Stallman's accusers dug around very hard for material and this is the best they could find, it stands to reason that he probably has long since improved in that regard. Moreover, the same cluster of people among others has seriously been arguing ( https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... ) that a mattr…
I don't think it is even worth focusing in on specific issues; throwing mud at Stallman's character is post-hoc rationalisation for a situation created by thoughtcrime. Even if the mud sticks, the major problem is that Stallman was forced to resign after what appears to be (from public info) a moral panic. People acting on moral panics is really bad; good process is slow process. There are real complaints about Stall…
I don’t mean to quibble and I really want to strsss this next point: I’m absolutely as lost as we all seem to be regarding how some people in our communities should be dealt with. I don’t yet know how we’ll choose to handle them. But anyway, using the term “thoughtcrime” feels incredibly disingenuous and could easily be misconstrued as intentionally inflammatory. Obviously you wouldn’t be intentionally inflammatory on HN so Im guessing you’re accidentally using the incorrect term–since most of the accounts we’ve seen are actual actions he has taken, it did not stay inside his mind, it was manifested into actual action in the real world towards other people, this just isn’t “thoughtcrime.” Even the people who were closest to him are very publicly discussing that there were a great many actual real world actions which made them feel everything from uncomfortable to intentionally avoiding him, again, even the people closest to him say these incidents were happening out in the open and happening regular enough to make them uncomfortable even when they weren’t the targets of his behavior.
Like I said, I had an immense amount of respect for him, I met him quite a few times, but I’m as lost as we all seem to be on how our communities should deal with folks like this. Either way, let’s at least try our best on HN to not accidentally inflame or accidentally mislead people.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things that really soured me to working as a biologist was being told the data we collected would not be allowed to be made freely available, as we originally proposed and was accepted in our grant proposal. Instead it would be locked away in a government database, available for a fee despite the data being collected using tax dollars, after we'd been working for over a year and a half on the project and h…
That sounds really frustrating. Fortunately many countries now have open data legislation. For example, in the US, since 2013 by executive order (M-13-13) and this year (Evidencemaking in Policy/Open Data Act), federally funded projects must eventually release their data to the public or include a plan explaining why national security or privacy reasons prevent it. I think it’s getting better.
This was during the reign of Prime minister Stephen Harper. Most funding towards the environment was cut during that time and scientists in Canada silenced fairly heavily. It was when all this:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scien...
was happening.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#136There's also the beauty in the point of Free Software: it's for freedom. This means it's okay that others profit. It's about you having power. That means you have the power to profit too. All you gotta share is the code for what you distribute. I like free software not because no one is making money. I like people making money. I like it because I can change it. That's important and everyone who gets upset simply bec…
What I could never get my head around when reading about free software is how can people, especially individuals or small companies make money making free software. Sure you can sell it but then the buyer is free to sell it for half the price. One way is if the software is a marketing tool for selling something else. Then people sharing or using it is good for marketing the other service. Another way is if the produc…
Think about it in terms of the misv (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ISV) business model instead of more mass market stuff. Your customers are paying you to install it, upgrade it, create backups, etc. They have no idea what to do with the source code and even if someone creates a setup wizard they have no idea how to setup all the other stuff they need. OSS provides a way for them to pool the development cost, customers and business avoid the bus factor and customers potentially get competition. Customers pay to have problems solved.
Of course these days this business model is being overtaken by SaaS and the bus takes out the developer and their data.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the things that really soured me to working as a biologist was being told the data we collected would not be allowed to be made freely available, as we originally proposed and was accepted in our grant proposal. Instead it would be locked away in a government database, available for a fee despite the data being collected using tax dollars, after we'd been working for over a year and a half on the project and h…
That sounds really frustrating. Fortunately many countries now have open data legislation. For example, in the US, since 2013 by executive order (M-13-13) and this year (Evidencemaking in Policy/Open Data Act), federally funded projects must eventually release their data to the public or include a plan explaining why national security or privacy reasons prevent it. I think it’s getting better.
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Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Allowed to" is not the same as "required to." Open science people generally want people who publish papers to be required to publish the data. This might be in a public repository, or with the journal, and if there is a fee, that fee should effectively only cover cost. Stallman's conception of free software says that you should be able to charge as much as you want. Hence, these are different concepts. What I mean i…
Well, when you purchase GPL licensed software, the author is required to supply you also with the source code, and you must be allowed to redistribute this (under terms and conditions.) Sure, there are distinctive features for each domain, but in broad strokes, I don't see the above description as very different from the one following: When you purchase access to an open-data paper, the author is required to supply y…
"when you purchase GPL" .. sure.
But there's nothing to force me to provide you with the software until you've given me money. Even if I used someone else's GPL'ed software in my software, I can simply not distribute it until someone gives me $100,000.
"When you purchase access to an open-data paper"
Some provisos first. Some papers are gratis, and don't require being purchased. (Eg, author-pays papers.) Also, I think you are defining "open-data paper" that way, making your argument a bit tautological.
Those aside, I'm pointing out that the "open-data paper" movement started independently and likely co-temporally, if not earlier than, the free software movement.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free software isn't about making data openly available. Stallman, at https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html , argues that free software developers should "charge as much as they wish or can, ... if you are redistributing copies of free software, you might as well charge a substantial fee and make some money ." If you have useful data, the free software principles say that you might as well charge a lot of money…
If I'm understanding right, those journals still kept it copyrighted, without copy-left provisions. It's more like the notion of open source, where the source may be viewable but isn't necessarily available for redistribution. While Stallman says you can charge as much as you can, his terms say that once someone buys it they can immediately undercut you, and he admits that limits the amount you could charge sustainab…
>If I'm understanding right, those journals still kept it copyrighted, without copy-left provisions. It's more like the notion of open source, where the source may be viewable but isn't necessarily available for redistribution.
The publication, yes. The structure, no. You can go download the structure of any and every known and published protein from any organism in the world for free with no copyright restrictions from the PDB. And that structure will be heavily scrutinized and reviewed before it's accessible.
That said, working in structural biology, it's incredible how quickly that field attached to open source, and in particular, free software. The big players in the field (coot, Relion, PEET and IMID) are all GPL. Additionally, software like PyMOL, Chimera, Phenix etc are available for free, sometimes with source. Those are basically all the software in the structural biologist toolset, with HKL2000 perhaps being the only paid software on anyone's workstation.
I suspect there's probably multiple reasons for this phenomenon. There's not many structural biologist, and of the few that there are, many are in academia and have no money to spend on software. Additionally, the field moves so rapidly that most software is actually piecemealed toolkits from tons of labs. Also, anything algorithmic requires substantial analysis if you want to publish data acquired with it, meaning it needs to be open. Finally, 99% of structural biology is done on Linux, so there's simply a culture aspect as well.
Re: Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software (2007)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's a shame that RMS has to spout forth on every issue, and in the current climate of outrage, science may have lost an important transformational voice. The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. At the very least we would be having co…
> The four freedoms are truly revolutionary and have grown on me over the years. If he had been a bit more focussed and perhaps even a little pragmatic it wouldn't be hard to view him as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates like figure. If he had been a lot more pragmatic, he probably could have put the whole free software thing on hold for 20 years, and been one of the early microcomputer billionaires either alongside Jobs an…
No.
In the intervening years somebody else would have done substantially what RMS did: it's not like he's the only hacker of his era who believes software should be free.
There's no guarantee he would have been successful in business and, even if he was, he would have undermined his moral authority on free software. People don't in general have serious doubts about RMS's motivations even if they don't agree with him - he's a true believer - but they can be much more cynical about Google or Facebook and their open source efforts.