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A short critique of Stallmanism

jancorazza.com

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Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#41
post #3

IMO, the fundamental problems with Stallmanism are not to be found in its tactics and execution, but rather in the very core of the philosophy itself.

I completely disagree. There are some problems with the free software movement but the fundamental idea behind it is essentially inarguable: proprietary software is anti-user.

(Free software supporter here.)

Thomas Schelling mentions the notion of "incomplete antagonism": you could have partly opposed interests to someone else's but still have ways in which you can cooperate with each other. Other people thinking about trade have suggested that this is almost always the case, even, maybe surprisingly, when people have directly opposed values in some respects (but not others).

http://www.amirrorclear.net/files/moral-trade.pdf

When you're buying most things from other people, you might have an "incomplete antagonism" because you may each want to get the best deal you can at the expense of the other person -- driving a hard bargain, so to speak. But you might still appreciate the opportunity to trade and not necessarily resent the other party to the trade (I wish that the vegan sandwich I just bought at LAX had cost me $8 instead of $19, but I'm still grateful that I could buy it at all).

Most attempts to defend proprietary software that aren't based in "romantic authorship" (emphasizing a special moral relationship between creators and their creative works that would make their preferences or interests count in a way that other people's don't) would probably focus on the benefits of trade: proprietary software fails to optimize perfectly for the user's interests and includes some intentional disadvantages for the user, yet many users could willingly accept these limitations because they've been bundled with benefits that the users appreciate, or because they help to incentivize activities the users appreciate (like continued development or support of the software).

This is normally the case for situations where trade can occur: each party may be asked to accept things that aren't that party's most preferred outcome, even deliberately where an alternative that that party prefers is logically conceivable. For example, if you rent a physical object then you might not be able to use it for any purpose, or if you hire someone then they might not be willing to perform any task you ask them to, or if you buy something then you might have to pay for it -- even though if others were making your interests their first priority, none of these limitations would exist. Presumably proprietary software advocates think that "selling software" is mostly akin to selling other things, where private ownership and sales work (fairly well|extremely well|better than any available alternative) for allocating resources, incentivizing productive activities, and increasing people's welfare, and that it's only anti-user in the ways that the costs or restrictions accompanying other kinds of trades are anti-customer.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#42
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.

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 maki…

free software isn't opposed to making money from software

It's not opposed to trying to make money, but it does mostly prevent actually making money. If software wasn't copyrightable I suspect most desktop software and video games would never have been created. This argument dates back to the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#43
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> His license grants some permissions and forbids something else. I just don't feel the word "freedom" fits into what he wants to achieve.

What do you think "freedom" is? We are here because we are not free. And that is called "freedom". :)

Freedom may be considered as a set of values that can be exercised on every human. So that is very limited. Say like "I wish not to be harassed in the public." So that means, "I shouldn't harass someone else in the public." If you say you need the second, and not accept the first, you can't call it a "freedom" in a communal sense.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#44
I think this is pretty great analysis, really. Sobering, so to say. I know all of this, but tend to ignore quite often. This is because (unlike Stallman) I don't think I'm fighting a war, I'm just living the way I think is "right". But is it really not my war? In the and, I do believe it would be a better world if some goals of Stallman have been achieved.

However, this analysis has the same flaws it points out in the movement of stallmanism: pointing out the problem is not the same as proposing a solution. Take this Gmail example. I absolutely hate it and would love it to disappear, but expressing it the usual way — as pointed out — is useless, if not harmful. Why people use Gmail or Google Docs? Because it's handy, obviously. They need something that does something like these services do, and google products simply happen to be better than alternatives. And they seem free too.

So what should I do instead of demonstratively avoiding them? Propose something better not only for myself, but for other people too. Give them a better option. Obviously. But the truth is I can't do that. I do not have any "smart solution" and Gmail is "free" not because it costs nothing to operate it, but because Google has shitload of money.

And the same is true for nearly every popular service and non-trivial piece of software. We may bring up Linux and Blender all we want, but the sad truth is free software just sucks. There is no open-source alternative for AutoCAD or Native Instruments, because it requires way too much domain-knowledge for your typical Finnish CS student to make one. Making this stuff is expensive as in "money". And "making money" a.k.a "business" is dirty game, so you don't make it easy for your competition to copy stuff you wasted your money to make. Blender is an exception that does not prove the rule.

Fighting for FOSS is basically fighting for communism. People outside of USA tend to agree this is nice idea, but we still haven't seen working implementations of that.

So, if I don't have a better war strategy, how can I complain? Do I think it would be better if Stallman was not fighting this silly war of his own? I guess I don't. Even if "normal people" tend to make fun of him, at least they know about him and this FOSS stuff. Well, at least some of them do.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#45

Oh, this is hilarious. The art for this blog post was taken from here: http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ This art was taken without crediting the artist, and without permission from either the artist or the publisher.

I agree that this is bad form, though, as the original article is very supportive of the Free Software movement, the author may have assumed a Gratis usage of the image. I could not find on Hackaday any specific information about using their content, or not, but they do explicitly mention their general copyrights in their footer... Edit: what I did not say, is that because there is nothing explicit it can not be assu…

You can't assume gratis usage of anything.

The free software movement, creative commons, and anything surrounding copyleft is predicated on the fact that everything is copyrighted at its creation. Copyleft is a 'hack' of sorts of copyright, in that the author or owner of a piece of work gives everyone else explicit permission to use it. You can't have copyleft without copyright, and everything is copyright unless it's explicitly copyleft. This isn't 'bad form'. This is copyright infringement and possibly the best teaching moment you could ever have.

The idea that the author of the above post would assume gratis usage of something shows how little even technical people understand how copyright and copyleft works. I could use this as a jumping off point to the actual failures of Stallman, where instead of educating people on these issues for the last thirty years, he's spending his time rhyming Uber with Goober, i.e. https://stallman.org/uber.html, but I digress.

As the author of the Hackaday piece, I'm cool with the author of the OP using the graphic, only because it's hilarious. Shout out to our resident artist, joe kim: http://theartofjoekim.tumblr.com/ He does awesome work.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#46
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's imagine a world exactly like our current world, except that I am allowed to punch anybody in the nose at any time, with no negative consequences for myself. Is that world "more free" than this one? My point is that "freedom" is a messy concept, and the freedom to do one thing (punch somebody in the nose, or to make proprietary software) is often at odds with the freedom to do another (go about your business wit…

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 copyleft to be claimed in the name of freedom.

It's also worth noting that it is not only Stallman's FSF that uses this definition w.r.t intellectual property nowadays. Lessig's CC adopted the same terminology for their share-alike license (-SA), which has the goal of preserving freedom, while -NC or -ND are considered non-free because they contain restrictions not related to this purpose. The same is true in the greater free-culture community and academic contexts from my experience.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25998

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#47
post #13
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…

>My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer/owner authorization. How can you stop someone from running code they have access to? If I write a new program but use routines from yours, who is the "developer/owner"? I can't picture this scheme.

You can't run someone else's code, unless you have paid them first. And no one you share the code to can do it either, unless they paid the original author of the code.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#48
post #28
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 righ…

We live under a capitalist system that is driven by the profit motive, and the idea that you can have an "agnostic" system for software, separate from the rest of society, seems like a fantasy to me.

Anything that can't be sucessfully integrated by capitalism is fought agaisnt by the system itself, much like an organism defending itself agaisnt a virus. This would deweaponize the whole issue.

If you were to legislate that the user can modify the software, but not redistribute it (at least not unless he shut off his own DRM keys and gave it to someone else, preventing duplication) you would allow for the profit motive AND open-source, which would make it work for everyone.

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#49
post #47
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My view on this is increasingly that software should be forced to be open-source and modifiable by the (individual) user. But it should not allow the user to run the code without the developer/owner authorization. How can you stop someone from running code they have access to? If I write a new program but use routines from yours, who is the "developer/owner"? I can't picture this scheme.

You can't run someone else's code, unless you have paid them first. And no one you share the code to can do it either, unless they paid the original author of the code.

I think the parent's question is not about the policy matter but more like "how could this kind of DRM work?" (technically).

Re: A short critique of Stallmanism

#50

Oh, this is hilarious. The art for this blog post was taken from here: http://hackaday.com/2016/01/13/stallmans-one-mistake/ This art was taken without crediting the artist, and without permission from either the artist or the publisher.

How do you know it was taken without permission? Are you the artist?
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