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A short critique of Stallmanism

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Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#121

Post by AsyncAwait »

fryguy wrote: post #95
Ace17 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are certainly licenses offering more freedom than GPL v3. More freedom to who? Users, distributors, maintainers, vendors, service providers? You can't guarantee complete freedom to each of them simultaneously. For example, allowing distributors to do everything they want (e.g not providing source code) will prevent users to do everything they want (e.g modifying the program). So it makes no sense to talk abou…

There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT. Copyright is about being able to copy the software. GPL places restrictions on who is able to copy your software. BSD/MIT place less restrictions. It's black and white; there is no argument. When a project includes code from another project (be it GPL or MIT), it is creating a new work under copyright. What GPL…

> There is absolutely no possible way that you can defend GPL as being more free than licenses like BSD/MIT.

If you define free in terms of users and individual developers, GPL is absolutely more free than BSD/MIT, but if you define it in terms of software development houses, MIT is much more "free" than the GPL indeed.

The argument against the GPL having restrictions on what you can do with the code as to not take away freedom, is like the U.S Constitution having restrictions on what the government is allowed to do to restrict your freedom.

Nobody would argue that the right to free speech is restrictive, because it takes away your right to restrict free speech, or would they?

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#122

Post by Fnoord »

petertodd wrote: post #93
schoen wrote: post #55

(Here I'm focusing on part 2 and the conclusion of the article, not part 1.) 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…

Indeed, as an independent consultant I'm far more inclined to use LGPL/AGPL/GPL licences for work that I think I could sell commercially precisely because I see those licenses and private property/capitalism as very compatible. Quite simply, I'm happy if you either pay me money or code for the right to use my code; the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka…

> Meanwhile I often joke that the highly permissive BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are for commies.

On the contrary.

Let us use Politicalcompass [1] as spectrum. Gist of it: x = left v. right economics, y = libertarian vs authoritarian.

Now, communism (not Trotsky; the communism as we have seen in countries in the 20th century) is left on x, but high on y because its highly authoritarian.

BSD/MIT/etc. licenses are more permissive than GPL, and its obvious GPL is more authoritarian in this way. But because the GPL enforces the code to (mostly) stay the way it is, it is more left-wing than BSD/MIT/etc.

[1] https://politicalcompass.org

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#123

Post by Fnoord »

cbdfghh wrote: post #72

IMHO, Stallman made two mistakes: 1. He moved into politics (which is in my HO, one of the failure points of a lot of tech people. Everyone has a right to an opinion, but certain people have more talent at politics than others, and certain people have more talents at code than others). He's a great programmer, and could have pushed the FSF community directly by committing and improving code. And even if he can't code…

> What new coding projects were they involved in since HURD started (OK. Replicant.)?

"New" is difficult to assess.

I'd say: GPLv3, Libreboot (fork of Coreboot). But it depends on what you find important. A starting point is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation#High_...

> 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. > Who's their 2nd in command?

Fallacy, easily disproven at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation#Struc...

I guess you never heard of Eben Moglen (who's a lawyer and does great work with advocacy and public speeches), or Bradley Kuhn from FSF Europe.

> Who'll take over after he passes on?

Did you know who'd gonna take over Microsoft or Apple beforehand? No.

> What will the FSF look like in 30 years?

What will USA, Microsoft, Google, or Apple look like in 30 years? shrug

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#124

Post by Fnoord »

Frondo wrote: post #105
tedks wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""" 2. He doesn't let the FSF be larger than him. Who's their 2nd in command? Who'll take over after he passes on? What will the FSF look like in 30 years? """ I don't actually know who the second-in-command (if there is such a position, the FSF seems very flat) is. But the first-in-command is John Sullivan and has been for like, ten years? A long time at least. I don't think anyone will ever replace rms. You can't n…

The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS. (I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p ) What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns. What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker. What RMS did was profound and…

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish

This is you growing older and wiser, and his old rhetoric being outdated (someone like Eben Moglen, or even Edward Snowden is more up2date). You'll find the same to be true in other idealistic writings or speeches.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#125

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

smsm42 wrote: post #94
petertodd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, as an independent consultant I'm far more inclined to use LGPL/AGPL/GPL licences for work that I think I could sell commercially precisely because I see those licenses and private property/capitalism as very compatible. Quite simply, I'm happy if you either pay me money or code for the right to use my code; the users who contribute neither are more often than not still benefiting me via a wider userbase - aka…

I've seen a lot of companies using GPL/AGPL for exactly the same purpose - to prevent other commercial companies from reusing their code. It is especially common in areas where added-value customizations are valuable - i.e., if you have GPL (or, usually, dual-licensed commercial/GPL) core for, say, document handling system, you can market it as open-source, take contributions, and build add-on business on it, but if…

> but if a competitor comes out and wants to use your core, they now have to publish source for all their add-ons, so you can have them for free.

1. Strictly speaking, they don't have to publish anything, they have to provide the source code under the GPL to their customers/users.

2. They probably will make those addons GPL-only, so, if you want to incorprate them into your product, you have to make all your addons GPL as well.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#126

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

throwaway729 wrote: post #11
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…

Patents were intended (in part) to have this sort of effect -- free the knowledge while still allowing the creator to profit. It's the kind of thing that makes sense but is incredibly hard to get right technically or politically.

If patents for software required a copy of the source to be available, then I think we'd be there already.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#127

Post by andrepd »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #74
swhipple wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add on to your point, this is called the 'paradox of freedom' -- that you cannot have both unlimited freedom and ensure freedom for the future. At the end of WWII, Karl Popper defended state interventionism with an argument citing the paradox of tolerance [1], and claimed ensuring a tolerant society in the name of tolerance, even when paradoxically intolerant. A parallel argument can be made in Stallman's case for…

That's a general point, but I think it missed the criticism that the FSF's definition of software freedom fails on its own terms. In practice the "freedom" is exclusive to a highly educated and exclusive technocracy. The same freedoms are not available to the general public. This may seem pedantic, but IMO it undermines the argument about software freedom, because Stallman has never shown the slightest interest in ma…

>The idea that if you want to promote software freedom you need to make tools and systems that ordinary people can modify - preferably without learning Emacs - doesn't seem to have occurred to him. It seems that in Stallman's world the public are supposed to become MIT-grade hackers before they can earn their freedom.

No, because freedom of modification and the guarantee that such modifications must also be released with a similar licence means everybody, programmers and non-programmers, benefit from that freedom, directly because they modified the source code, or indirectly because they can freely use that modified software, respectively.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#128

Post by adn »

throwaway212122 wrote: post #120
Frondo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the world 30 years from now doesn't need RMS. (I realize that sounds callous, but my long-term partner split from me today and I'm a little drunk, so spare me :p ) What the world in the short-term and 30 years from now needs is someone new to think about and develop philosophies around today's software freedom concerns. What's that look like? I dunno, I'm not that thinker. What RMS did was profound and…

> The last few years, everything he's written seems goofy and childish. What people don't seem to realize (also in Torvalds discussions) is that people simply wrote like that on the Internet up to around 2005-2008. These people also produced most of the software that the millenials are now churning around or write middleware for. What I find disturbing is the trend that millenials spend more time learning how to writ…

There's really nothing wrong with making a concerted effort to be more polite or accepting on the internet or anywhere else for that matter. Framing wanting to have good self-presentation and wanting to be a great coder as mutually exclusive is clearly disingenuous.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#129

Post by chippy »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #88

Ideologue, idealist, zealot, weird person? All fine with me. I don't like that he starts with some good ideas, but then slippery slopes his way to see existential threats to our life liberty and happiness. It starts out making sense and takes on an air of paranoia.

Although it's interesting to see the types of threats he has outlined in the past and how at the time when he was saying it people were calling them paranoid, and looking back we can see that he wasn't paranoid, but on point and predictive.

Perhaps the things we think are paranoia now are similar. They may not be apparent, but perhaps they are similarly on point and predictive.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#130

Post by phpnode »

gkya wrote: post #119
labster wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I get it, they're both socialists and all. But Bernie is the opposite of what OP describes. Stallman is a purist, Sanders is a realist. Stallman fights to keep "GNU/" attached to "Linux", while Sanders talks about the fake news coming to people on Facebook's closed platform.

Well, want it or not GNU/ is a big part of Linux distros, at least until a distro with an alternative userland and c library makes it to the top. And even then most of open source has some GNU somewhere in the foundation.

The insistence that Linux be called GNU/Linux when even Linus calls it Linux is exactly the kind of behaviour that alienates people who would otherwise align with them.

There is also no requirement that a Linux distribution includes any GNU software at all, should we refer to them as e.g Busybox/Linux?

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