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Comment by dcgudeman | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate what RMS has done as far as start a movement that I think has contributed greatly to the human existence but when he says things like "The basic point of the free software movement is that nonfree software is unjust and should not exist." I can't but seriously question his judgment. It's one thing to personally want to use free software, it's another to claim that nonfree software "should not exist". If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired. People should be free to offer software under whatever terms they desire likewise people should be able to consume software under whatever terms they are willing to agree to.

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That is the liberal perspective, but one radical perspective would be that unfree software causes significant harm to society as a whole despite individuals having the choice not to use it directly, and so should not exist.

Note that radicals don't necessarily support passing laws to get what they want - the goal of most political radicalism is to cause a change in society, not to force society at gunpoint to do something it doesn't want to.

One can also see harm that the free software movement causes.

RMS tried to prevent emacs from having code completion through clang, modularity in gcc and puts software following his definition of freedom before the software being able to fulfill its task in a good way.

One could argue that a society in which people cared about free software would not require the free software movement to attempt to protect itself in such a manner, though. You can find many similar examples in other movements where the movement needs to protect itself from integration into the status quo without completing its goals.

If one person writes nonfree software and another person voluntarily uses it, I don't think anything "wrong" has transpired.

Beware the fallacy of composition. What may be "right" in a transaction between individuals can be "wrong" over the entire population. One example of this is the mob effect: if one person takes the time to disagree with you it is not a problem. If thousands of people send you messages of disagreement it becomes an unbearable burden.

Likewise for software. One person using nonfree software made by another person is not much of a problem. When thousands of people use the same nonfree software it becomes a problem due to lock-in, network effects, etc.

> Beware the fallacy of composition. What may be "right" in a transaction between individuals can be "wrong" over the entire population.

I think this issue is philosophically contentious, and interesting. Even if you don't accept that premise, I wouldn't describe this as a fallacy.

I think fallacy is best used to describe a logical non-sequitur/invalid conclusion. It's independent of whether we agree on the assumptions.

Premise 1: Socrates is a man. Premise 2: All men are mortal. Invalid conclusion: Therefore Pigs can fly.

That's been RMS & FSF's position for decades. They view it as wrong that you have software which you do not have the four freedom for.

Many legal and ethnical systems have limitations on what you can consent to. You're not allowed to consent to work for less than the minimum wage, for example

This is a little bit different. The only reason proprietary software exists is the copyright clause in the Constitution, which grants the government a right to issue limited-time monopolies to creators of original works.

Revoking a government-granted monopoly is very libertarian. Revoking mutual consent is the opposite.

Of course, this deals only with the freedom to copy/distribute, which is IMO the most interesting one anyway.

For example, from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sys.mac.announce/... :

"allowing system software to be distributed free of charge via these organizations has limited our ability to convince Apple resellers to distribute and promote Apple system software products to their customers."

This is only an American perspective.

This is one of the cases where the American perspective just gives us a convenient language for discussing something more universal. By an accident of history, the US constitution cements inside a legal document the result of debates and lobbying that was going on all over the western world at the time.

Others at the time were also discussing the propriety of IP, and eventually agreed in favour of a limited form of it. Over time, it got strengthened further.

Proprietary software would also exist without any copyright, people would just guard their trade secrets, obfuscate code and put it server-side more than they already do now. The free software movement uses copyright to protect the freedoms, it is not a "libertarian" movement and never claimed to be. It wants to ensure that programmers and users of software have the four freedoms that RMS has laid out in many talks.

Perhaps a BSD style license is what you personally prefer. RMS has argued against such licenses for decades. Even if you disagree with him, please don't blame him for being inconsistent or defending a view that is not thought through.

Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.

> Also, if you do not like the GPL, then you should perhaps be consistent and not use GPL software at all.

The reasons one sometimes has to use GPL software are quite similar for the reasons one sometimes has to use proprietary software. So the answer for GPL haters should rather be: avoid using GPL software (if possible), but more importantly: don't contribute to GPL software and contribute to software with "better" licensing so that one can (in future) create devices that are proprietary-software-free and copyleft-free at the same time.

Not everyone agrees with libertarianism

Proprietary software can be that way via unavailable source code and/or DRM without any government monopoly. So, legal elimination of proprietary software would require abolishing copyright and patent laws and mandating source release for published works along with prohibition of DRM.

However, if they were really radical they would license the whole GNU stack under the AGPL, because one cannot use SAAS software without the server side portion.

I find the FSF stance a bit inconsistent here.

There were discussions about doing just that for the GPLv3 when it was under discussion.

Where you sit on this scale of secrecy is very much a matter of what you expect to get out of participating in the software 'business'.

RMS' movement allows for little wiggle room when it comes to 'free software', because it is a movement. Unless you're willing to join a movement, its perfectly okay to criticize it from the skirts - but the point is, RMS has set those skirts at a boundary of his choosing, according to an ideology.

That ideology has done a lot of good for the world. It is worth considering seriously, just what the world would be like today without a Free Software movement happening, as it did, over the last 40 years. 40 years of software development culture has existed with this ideology in its midst; what of the world, were it not so?

They're all ideologies, and some work better than others. We just don't recognize ours as such from the inside.

RMS's ideology seems to work better than the mainstream one.

There are two obvious objections to that:

1. If a person is uninformed about the consequences of their decision and the alternatives that they could choose from, is that a voluntary decision? I think it would be very difficult to actually defend the position that the majority of software users decide voluntarily to use proprietary software.

Sure, if someone voluntarily buys cigarettes and smokes, I guess they should be free to do so as well. From that it does not follow that you shouldn't object to cigarettes existing (and in particular to them being offered by vendors to the unsuspecting public).

2. Economists know a concept they call externalities. Those are effects that one's economic transactions have on parties not involved in the transactions, like, for example, pollution of the environment that other people live in. Non-free software very often has negative externalities, in particular due to network effects that lead to de-facto monopolies and lock-in. Negative externalities are a good reason to object to what other people decide to do voluntarily.

Can you provide a single political movement that is fully optional in their goal.

Would a vegetarian say that if a person voluntarily buy animal factory meat, then there is nothing wrong with it.

Would a environmentalist say that if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car, then there is nothing wrong with the manufacturer selling it.

Would a anti-war activist say that if a person voluntarily join the military, then there is nothing wrong with war?

I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that they are fine so long the thing they are working against is done voluntarily.

Do all vegetarians try to "replace and eliminate" meat-consumption for the whole population? How do you view those that do?

> if a person voluntarily buy a polluting car,

Everyone is affected by the pollution, so a bad comparison.

> person voluntarily join the military,

Again people are involuntarily affected by war.

> I am looking at a list of political movements, and I can't see a single one which would say that they are fine so long the thing they are working against is done voluntarily.

How about "No means no" campaigns? Sex is fine as long as it's done voluntarily by all parties.

The broader point is externalities are involved in the use of software by a multitude of people.

Even consentual sex can have such impacts when--for example--overpopulaton leads to starvation.

>Do all vegetarians try to "replace and eliminate" meat-consumption for the whole population? How do you view those that do?

Everyone is affected, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

"No means no" is about rape, so can people voluntarily be raped? If I look up the definition of rape, will I find the word "consent", as in, rape is an act when someone is involuntarily being involved in an sexual act. You can not voluntarily be raped. People can pretend, but then people can pretend that they are dragons and live on the moon.

I wonder what will likely happen when RMS dies.

This.

That's a question I often ask. From what I know, RMS got some money in the bank that allows him to live the way he chooses. That is : spare some of its time advocating and building the free software movement. He's also very charismatic (well, in its very own way, I must admit).

He basically incarnates one thing : there's no compromise. He proves his position by shutting him off the proprietary world. And that's super tough to do. If he ever used non free software, his uncompromising position would be weakened.

So, FSF needs to be able to replace that sort of, non compromising, super talented and really smart person.

Has anybody ever seen someone close to that ? Then only one I see is Eben Moglen (although its technical talent is not in IT)

Eben has recently argued for combining code under GPL and GPL incompatible licenses, which could lead to the combination of code under GPL and proprietary licenses. I regard him as compromised by his corporate clients.

ouch, didn't know that... Would you care to give a link where this is explained ?

Here's some background: http://info9.net/wiki/tmarble/posts/is-slfc-shooting-open-so...

And a statement last week from the former Debian Project Leader: http://gensho.acc.umu.se/pub/debian-meetings/2016/debconf16/...

Oh, I dunno. It's possible that free software could solve a lot of problems and that non free software causes problems. I think it's great that RMS is an advocate. We need an ecosystem of ideas to evolve to something that makes sense and evangelists like RMS help that evolutionary process.

It's quite a shallow idea that right and wrong in life are exclusively related to consent. Just building on that concept (not to compare to software issues), one could say that it's fine to own slaves as long as they consent to selling themselves to you. Ethics is clearly far more complex than just the issue of consent. And that even ignores the issue that the real world is far removed from the abstract principle of consent given imperfect power balances and imperfect knowledge on each side.

The "wrong" is where that software prevents you from exercising precisely the kind of choice that you are arguing for.

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