A short critique of Stallmanism

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 is only that his purism doesn't scale. The solution to that problem -- one that's been demonstrated effective time and again -- is to make purity utterly pragmatic.

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 unlicensed code, you could distribute open-source as much as you'd like, safe in the knowledge that while people could emulate your application, they wouldn't be able to copy your code directly.

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. The developer also should not be allowed to stop users from sharing modifications amongst themselves, as long as they were paying for the original code, so as to stop him from using it as a weapon agaisnt users who modify it and wish to share their mods.

Any other defence of free software is basically an attack on capitalism itself. Regardless of your opinion on capitalism, this is too radical a change for most people.

As I age, I've kinda come to the conclusion that individualism being the driving motivation of so many people in tech (including both proprietary and Free Software advocates) means that we often miss the forest for the trees. Individualist decision-making doesn't solve a problem for the general public, in cases like this. Free Software "won", by some definition of won, the battle when it became the dominant server and mobile OS. But, it continues to lose the war for people's freedom.

I don't actually have a philosophical framework to hang that bit of acquired wisdom on, however, because I, too, have a very individualist mindset that is deeply ingrained. So, coming up with actionable ideas for improving privacy (for example) on a non-individual level is proving difficult; my ideas, thus far, have included helping organize and host cryptoparties, contributing to projects that add encryption to more stuff on the Internet, etc. But, it requires policy, too, probably even moreso, which is far outside of my wheelhouse. Those cryptoparties reached mostly technical users. Those tools for encryption reach mostly technical people who already knew they wanted to encrypt their stuff.

When profit motives are aligned against us (where "us" is the general public that is vaguely uncomfortable with being spied on all the time, by corporations and the state), it's tilting at windmills to stand there, using your Free OS and your Free browser and your Free whatever else, while the whole world uses facebook and Google dozens of times a day. There's only so much an individual can do.

Related, I think, is Mako's 2011 essay "Freedom for Users, Not for Software": http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/freedom-users-not-softwa...

But in practice, that ends up being more of a defense of the AGPL than a call for social action - and the AGPL, if widely adopted, would make the goal of using only free software even more of a burden (since it is GPL-incompatible). The FSF seemed to recognize an actual problem well worth solving, but address it through the tool they were comfortable with, writing licenses. (And the minimal adoption of the AGPL indicates that this didn't actually solve problems, so per consequentialism, we must admit that the AGPL did at most minimal social good.)

It's also worth talking about the resources required to make effective use of free software; freedom #4 is only realistic if you can actually make the changes. If Chrome OS (to take Mako's example) can be effectively hacked on by the second-largest company in the world, but much less effectively by an individual, is that really better than the closed-source OS which only the largest company in the world can hack on? And has free software really changed the social order for the better, compared to the pre-software days?