Richard Stallman Explains [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
I first read about RMS in 1999 in an Australian PC Authority magazine, it also featured an interview with Linux Torvalds. The distinction between the two personalities was felt keenly at the time as well. RMS really hasn't changed in those 18 years.
When you attack his values and stances, he falls back to that sentence. When you argue: But aren't you restricting freedom when you would keep a creator from sharing his software under his own terms? He comes back to "Proprietary software is evil" in the end. He is incapable of defending beyond that point. I think Bryan makes some very good points in the podcast below [0] that RMS fails to answer properly to.
I love open source, I love the philosophy, I want to use as much FOSS as possible and I see how it ultimately will protect our society, I get that. But I see no evil whatsoever in someone making a software tool and selling only the binaries to someone who is happy to use said binaries under the terms the seller and buyer agree upon. That to me is freedom, nobody is forced in that scenario.
GPL vs BSD all over again. Freedoms conflict. The one "freedom" RMS would restrict is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others (one's users). One has to chose at some point. Since there are more users than creators, the freedom of many users is more important than the freedom of one creator. (Assuming any two humans have roughly the same moral value.)
So yes, we would restrict a bit of freedom. But that's the only way to prevent even greater restrictions.
By the way, RMS never called permissive licences evil. Just weak. And he's not opposed to GPL/proprietary dual licencing, as long as the two versions are the same. It's not weaker than a permissive licence, and the creator has another way to make a profit.
I'm afraid, but correct me if I'm wrong, that if RMS would be dictator of the world, he would rob people of the freedom to offer their products under their conditions. To me, the RMS world is less free.
We could even start to argue things like: In RMS world there would be less software so less ways for people to express themselves freely. Photoshop frees a lot of people from the inability to express themselves in the exact way they want.
What is freedom? To me it is the freedom to make deals with others under your conditions and the freedom to reject deals of others because they don't match the conditions you like. This works even when everybody has said attitude, that is the beauty of it.
In part only. You cannot ignore the freedom of whoever that choice of licence affects.
We already have restrictions over deals one can make. Stuff like "Grab this gun and kill yourself on camera for the enjoyment of our snuff movies fans. In exchange, your family will get $1M." Sure, it sounds extreme, but many people would give their lives for their family, and I'm sure some sick powerful people take advantage of this.
Which leads to my next point:
> The buyer has the freedom to reject the deal.
Not really.
There's a point where the actual choice is between using such and such spying service or proprietary software, or stop participating in society altogether.
Don't want your position to be tracked at all times? Imagine your life without a cell phone. Many people would lose friends if they quit Facebook —if only because they would no longer receive their messages.
The real reason why so many people are using proprietary software is because they don't have a choice. Microsoft Word is a prime example: everybody uses it, so everybody else has to use it.
---
No matter how you cut it, freedoms conflict. You cannot maximise the freedom of the provider without sacrificing the freedom of consumers. More generally, you cannot maximise the freedom of anyone without sacrificing the freedom of everyone else —if only by a little bit.
That's freedom's most basic principle: one's freedom stops at others'. One way or another, there's a limit. The question is where we should put that limit.
It's not quite as binary.
Creative urges and most other human endeavours do not exist in a vacuum.
If you are at a friend's house--say a fellow artist, and he shows you how to effortlessly create new art with Photoshop. You might be impressed and enthused and say: "This is great! I want to be part of this," but your artist-friend would have to say: "I'm sorry, but I can't give you a copy, I promised I wouldn't do that" or, more likely, he would have to break laws to support you in your enthusiasm.
Now, had your friend be using GIMP he would gladly have given you a copy. Not only because he's your friend and wants to support you creatively, but also because more users generally leads to more development and a better program. He's not just helping you, he's helping himself as part of a greater creative community.
So no, Photoshop doesn't completely free you. Someone would have to break the law, or you would have to submit yourself to an arbiter to ask them if you can be part of their community. Usually they just ask for money and a promise not to let anyone else be part of that community without referring those people to them.
Free Software lets you share your ambitions without breaking laws or referring to an arbiter. It's a decision you have to make for yourself, but one choice does not free more people to express themselves by default, even if it might feel more free towards your own person at a particular time, but that freedom is not transitive.
However, my Photoshop inclined friends would experience the absence of the liquify and Refine Edge tool as an inhibition of their desire to reach their goal (the image they have in mind). In that sense, Photoshop is an enabler for their wishes, Photoshop gives them the freedom to make what they want.
Do you mean the "funding" (more like "income") that Adobe generates by selling their software instead of giving the source code away?
Replies are rate-limited. The deeper the thread, the longer the down time. There might be other criteria.
I mean the income that Adobe extracts from their customers. The only thing they generated in this case is Photoshop itself. This nitpicking aside, yes, that's what I was talking about.
Couldn't the funding that currently goes to Adobe be devoted to further the development of GIMP instead?
In RMS world all software woud be GPL licensed, including photoshop. In his view there are other ways software companies can make money than selling licenses, and it is up to their customers to demand them to do that.
It's impractical to be sure, but crazier things have happened given enough time.
[1]: https://www.gimp.org/about/
All praise to GIMP, Inkscape and Krita, but they only exist because some proprietary software already existed and created the demand for an free alternative.
There are countless free software projects that were created as alternatives to proprietary software and have exceeded the original by orders of magnitude. If you want to look at a measure of success other than "amount of work you can do with free software" then that's what you should be looking at. Improvement and innovation often doesn't come from some massive new technology, it's always gradual improvements that really make the difference.
What I am arguing is simply that if proprietary software was forbidden, a lot of innovation would be restricted.
Imagine today if we were living in RMS world and everyone that writes software needed to have their software openly published and freely distributed. How many would simply not even start? Would there be a Microsoft, Google or Apple or Facebook? No. Who would be the big player that would have any interest in seeing the development of any technology that could threaten their business?
Most "innovation" would happen in academic settings, and it would never make the jump to any industry.
But more importantly, a discussion of "what could've been" is not really helpful to a discussion of what we should do today. I could equally argue that if users were more empowered than they are now, that you would see much higher levels of technical literacy and much more innovation. Do I have evidence to back that up? No, but neither do you.
I can give you more examples of free software that didn't have a proprietary counterpart, but I don't think that you really want such examples. You want to discuss an alternate universe where proprietary software doesn't exist.
> Would there be a Microsoft, Google or Apple or Facebook? No.
How on Earth could you possibly know that? You're possibly right that they wouldn't be identical to their current counterparts (they probably wouldn't be able to mistreat their users to the same extent), but those companies and those products might still exist.
Social networks existed before Facebook. Hand-held computers existed before Apple. Search engines existed before Google. Operating systems existed before Microsoft.
And I would claim that you have no evidence for such a statement. Given how much technical innovation happened in the hobbyist computer revolution that predated the "software revolution" (where proprietary software was unheard of) I would argue the opposite. But neither of us can possibly know what would've been in an alternate timeline.
But using that as an excuse to keep believing that "we could have gotten where we are only with Free Software" is a cop-out. We don't need to have an alternate timeline. We can think of our existing one as the (non-linear) superposition of two competing philosophies and their development: the hobbyist/academic/free one & the commercial/private/proprietary/profit-motive-based one on the other. We can surely come up with some kind of model to see how the "free economy" would fare if there was no "proprietary" agent.
You have said it yourself: there was a revolution going on, but it was only affecting the hobbyists, the enthusiasts. It took the "proprietary" side to exist to make it computing something as universal as it has become.
Without proprietary software, there would be no BSD 4.4, Linus would not have anything to clone for the PC, there would be no Free/Open/NetBSD, and so on.
Remove these from the "software economy" of today, and what would we have? Minix? HURD? "Innovative", alright. But certainly never able to compete with the proprietary (or proprietary-clones) alternatives at any point in time.
It's very short sighted to think everything else would be the same except for software licenses.
Is that also a problem with capitalism, or a problem with "not capitalism"?
I'm not sure food trade is evil. Forbidding it doesn't make much sense to me. Regulating it however makes a whole lot of sense. But we already do.
Isn't the cold war finished by now? Surely there could be viable alternatives to the current corporate capitalism veering cyberpunk?
The idea was that capitalism gives you a choice between proprietary, shitty, or non-existent software. Not much of a choice. Photoshop is often showed as an example where free alternatives aren't up to snuff (I personally don't have an opinion on this one).
Hence the short "requires".
I don't view software on a spectrum from proprietary through shitty to non-existent. I view it more as a two-by-two matrix of high quality/shitty on one axis and FOSS/proprietary on the other. All four quadrants are populated.
The economic incentives that capitalism and proprietary software provide allow for the massive investments that Adobe is able to make in Photoshop/CSuite, by providing a clear path to financial returns on those investments.
In the 22 years since GIMP started, it hasn't caught Photoshop. (There are many other examples where free or open source software has caught and surpassed the proprietary alternatives/previous market leaders.)
I think it's important to look in that quadrant, though. Why does that quadrant exist? In my judgement, it's beacuse such software requires a large amount of research and time to be devoted to it, and while certain free software projects are able to catch up to it, they are few and far between.
The next question to ask is why such development-intensive software is proprietary. In my judgement, the answer to that is because the development must be funded somehow, primarily in the case of programming that funding is wages. Open source/free software business models, while existing, do not have the same return, especially for these sorts of programs (though they do for Red Hat for instance.)
So presumably, such software could exist being free software if its developers were already accounted for in terms of wages, so they can spend more time making it.
This is where alternatives to capitalism enter - Socialist systems do not have wages, and people have much more free time to pursue their interests, while being sustained by communal production, to which they also participate in part. As such, such development may be possible under Socialism, but not capitalism. There is much less incentive to have proprietary software under Socialism.
If we are getting closer to living in a post-scarcity world, it is thanks to these "horrible" things Capitalism brings us like private property, freedom to enterprise, rule of law that enables trade, etc, etc.
"In Socialism people have more free time to pursue their interests"? People in North Korea are more busy trying not to starve to death. Venezuela is facing shortages of toilet paper, and their government is pushing for forced labor. How can one even think that there will ever be a society rich enough to afford people universally free to do whatever they want?
I do see many problems with capitalism itself, though, so I didn't word my initial comment as well as I should have. I should have said "it would indicate a problem with capitalism".
But the argument still needs to be made that proprietary software licences are part of that set.
Nobody is stopping anyone. If you create some software, you're free to share it (or not) under whatever terms you like. RMS would not stop you, and would not want to stop you (although he may try to persuade you to favour FOSS terms if you were to discuss it). What RMS would do is avoid your software if your terms aren't FOSS, and perhaps he'd encourage others to make a FOSS alternative if it looks like that might be useful.
Of course, this is assuming that the software in question really was made by that "creator". If it actually contains a bunch of other people's work (e.g. FOSS components) then it's not "his" to dictate the terms of. It's this latter situation where the GPL/BSD debate takes place, and it would be a strawman to claim that the GPL restricts a "creator" from doing what they want with "their own work" (since it's precisely the bits which they didn't create and aren't theirs that are the point of the discussion).
> I'm afraid, but correct me if I'm wrong, that if RMS would be dictator of the world, he would rob people of the freedom to offer their products under their conditions. To me, the RMS world is less free.
No, in RMS's ideal world everyone is free to use whatever terms they like, but most users would shun anything that denies them the '4 freedoms' they've come to expect from everything else.
Whilst "freedom of speech" is important, it doesn't imply we should have "freedom of having-people-agree-with-you". Likewise, "freedom to license however you want" doesn't imply "freedom to have-people-use-your-stuff".
I understand that such a position basically strips away all human dignity and reduces everything to a "might is right" argument, but is that not very much true in many ways? We agree on the freedoms we want to have protected and are more lax about those less important.
Yes this is a ridiculous example and yes there are many examples where explicitly negotiating terms is not necessary. When this is, and when it not, is a cultural thing. I mean I shake hands with a woman without second thought, an Islamic Imam may need some special compensation before agreeing to it.
I'm pushing this discussion to the edge because it feels extremely significant to me. Pushing it over my own boundaries also is a way of testing my premises. I'm certainly willing to change my mind.
Few French people don't know this proverb. It surprised me when I noticed US citizens were much less cognizant of it. Maybe because Freedom is praised so highly we cannot even acknowledge its fundamental limitations?
If someone is at liberty to kill you, your freedom to live peacefully might be severely limited. If someone has the freedom to spread lies about you, your freedom to preserve your own reputation might be severely limited. And so on.
Oh, and they did an episode immediately after that show where they decided to talk about RMS's arguments "behind his back" so-to-speak[2]. Personally that episode is the reason why I stopped watching LAS, because it was clear that their own personal biases were getting in the way of what they were talking about.
Other people have already debated the reasons why user freedom is different to "vendor freedom" (and why the former is more important than the latter). In short, it's the difference between "freedom from being harmed" and "freedom to harm others". Also please remember that vendors are also often users, so user freedom does benefit them as well.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0y0oXU8YNk [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn9WWVmINGg
It's not important who benefits, it's import that one should have the right to offer ones own creation under their own terms.
I hope you're aware that this is the oldest argument in the book.
It literally goes back to Plato and arguments about how you can be free if you're not free to make other people slaves.
He may have been the first (recorded) philosopher to make that point. But he's not exactly the last to think about this, and the enlightenment was largely about finding a good answer to it.
Basically (hyper-abridged version), the answer is self-ownership, and self-ownership precludes selling yourself into slavery, because once you've sold yourself, you don't own yourself and therefore cannot accept consideration for the sale, which then is invalid (a sale without consideration isn't a sale, it's a give (or take!) away). It does not preclude contracting a limited commitment (eg. to do work for renumeration), nor does it preclude accepting conditions in such a contract.
At the risk of being down-voted (but less so due to this very sentence), the quote below can be true for everyone and I believe it to be very important Interpreting it I would say that a creator is free to choose a license, any attempt to try and force the use of another license upon a creator than that of his choosing will lead to paradoxes in freedom. I.e., such a definition can not be applied to all humans (for example: I can force conditions upon you by which you should share your work, you can do so to me and you can they force me to not share my work or at least under arbitrary conditions):
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
-John Galt (Ayn Rand; Atlas Shrugged, which is a nice book if you like the philosophy of freedom)
With regards to forcing "a mind" I love this piece of literature: [0]
[0] http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/physical_force.html
An excerpt:
Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins. When you declare that men are irrational animals and propose to treat them as such, you define thereby your own character and can no longer claim the sanction of reason—as no advocate of contradictions can claim it. There can be no “right” to destroy the source of rights, the only means of judging right and wrong: the mind.
You are saying to me: "Nice work you got there, now, I am going to use it under my conditions. Oh you don't want me to share the software? Too bad, not sharing is evil! I'm sharing it anyway."
Yes, you are free to say this but then I can choose not to share my software with you. I will only give you my software if you agree to MY conditions. I made the software hoping to share it with people on my terms, so that I can earn a living from it.
Am I evil for expecting you to honor the terms we agreed upon when we made the exchange of your money for my software product? Am I evil for setting terms that I like for the trade that we are making?
Imo any party can have any terms in a trade, if you agree to mine and I agree to yours we have a deal, otherwise: go find another solution to your problem.
Proprietary software depend on copyright to prevent owners, which today often mean property owners of physical objects with DRM in them. Property owner is deprived of all rights that personal property is normally given to their owners. That power is instead taken by those that produced the object.
If sale of property actually follow traditional first sale principles and gave the new owner rights which used to be naturally aspect of private property, then practically all freedoms under Richard Stallman definition is given. You don't have to give away the apple (in the classical example), but once sold you can't have copyright or patents preventing the new owner from using the apple to grew a orchard.
Noone guarantees you that a year from now you will be able to find anyone who is willing to fix your plumbing. That does not mean you might as well have proprietary Microplumb products installed in your house that noone can repair or extend without permission from Microplumb Inc.
You can observe that most software is leased, not sold, thus restrictions apply. And indeed - the same holds in physical world; if you're the house/appliance/car, you might not be able to use it the way you like, or get whoever you like to repair it. But that's precisely the problem! Renting instead of owning has serious drawbacks, and Stallman is fighting against those, trying keep us at something more akin to personal ownership model.
If you have any open-source project, you've probably received a lot of e-mails like that.
So defending the freedom of the creator to sharing software under her own terms is way less important than defending the freedom of users.
Note that I may choose the GPL for my creation and you may share said creation in that case. But only because I choose the GPL as the conditions that applies to my creation.
In fact, I love the GPL, it makes the world a better place but a creator is the only one that can apply it to his creation, not you nor society at large, not in the name of common good or anything else. The creator only, you shall not force a creator lest he will stop creating and you will be worse off because of it.
It is not the user rights which allow them to do whatever they want. I totally agree that one must not violate the terms expressed by the author.
I don't like to talk about "my" creation or "yours" or somebody's. Because every creator is inspired from previous ones. Someone obviously works for a certain amount of time, but the concept of paternity is strange given all the inspiration. When I write free software, I always consider it would not have been possible to do it without libraries and other inspiration. So it's normal to give back the product of my time to the world, which gave me the base to do it.
I create things not to do business, but to make the world match my ideas and hope people will follow and improve. And I would really be pleased if somebody has a complaint or criticism, and takes the time to "fix" it concretely by coding it, not just expressing it.
In arts (music, painting, etc) this is natural, as in science and research. About computer science, how people can improve then if it's not free software? That would be a "use it or drop it" situation, not adapted for collective improvement.
So using free software licenses, as a creator, makes the world better. The contrary doesn't make the world worse, but freezes it until free software appears. That's waste of time in a sense!
That's why I don't recommend people to use proprietary software. Because it maintains the world in a situation which is not ideal, globally.
I understand people want to make money for a living. But there are economic models quite OK with free software. We have to find a way, I mean collectively, to finance free software. That would be an improvement for society,better than defending proprietary software.
Finally pardon my English, I'm not native.
What if there's 100 open source alternatives already?
So it is basically about the freedom to copy someone else's work without compensation.
Karen Sandler and several security researcher want free software freedom in regard to medical devices. They want to verify the code and even out the power balance between those that depend on the code for their life and the producer of it. That too is not about "copy someone else's work without compensation".
Yesterday there was an article that said that voting machines should be open source. The concern people have there is not about "copy someone else's work without compensation".
That has nothing to do with the GPL or the three freedoms though.
But to reiterate the four freedoms:
Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose. With DRM this is impossible. The DRM business model to prevent generic parts rely on users not having freedom 0.
Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works. Without this researchers can't do inspection of medical software or voting machines.
Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program. Without this a person can't improve their tractor that they bought, even if they are by law the private property owner of the device.
That leaves:
Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
So for the cases above, three out of four software freedoms is required.
With a proprietary product, the vendor can make changes behind your back via the auto-update backdoor, and you cannot do anything about it. With an open-source product, if a user does not like what the vendor is doing in the new version, they can just stick with the old version.
(It used to work that way with proprietary software, too, but today I cannot really think of software that cannot be forcefully end-of-lifed by the vendor. For example, look at how Samsung disabled the Note 7 phones with OTA updates.)
The free software freedoms are what allow any end-user to freely choose anyone they want for audits, repairs and extensions of their software, instead of being dependent on a monopolistic supplier. Whether the individual user has any clue of software development is completely irrelevant.
If you don't like the GPL write your own damn software
That is the essential question you must answer. Arguments against are legion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_copyright
The GPL license is not an end in itself. It is simply a holding action – a means to carve out a bit of freedom for end users using the current rules of copyright.
That is the Open Source vs Free Software debate in alot of ways
Stallman and the Free Software movement is about the USERS freedom, ensuring that the END USER of software retains the rights to modify, use, and examine the software they use
Where Open Source is mainly focused on the DEVELOPER of the software, most Open Source advocates are developers that want to have their libraries, dev tools, frameworks, languages, compilers, etc all open so they can create closed software for end users, and use code interoperably between projects with out having to worry about Licensing, this is why Open Source favors MIT, BSD, and other non-copy left licenses, where Free Software is GPL
Also you might want to watch the newer interview between Byran Lunduke and Richard Stallman
How is rms doing that? Has he been granted lawmaking powers?
No, he is only putting conditions on the software he made, nothing more. If selling binaries under any agreed terms is freedom, how can giving away source under agreed terms be restricting freedom? Your position is contradictory.
Meanwhile, rms' position is clear and unambiguous: there are four freedoms that users should have, and software either respects them or not.
Same thing can be said about slavery. Some very very small minority may be happy being slaves. The rest of the slaves(people who just use binary) just does not know what it means to be being free(the freedom that comes with changing their software they use at will).
to hopefully explain more clearly...
RS's FOSS agenda is promoting some very very specific legal freedoms for all the people in a state. Not "freedom" in general. Not just for software developers or any other niche group. Those freedoms are specific to software as he believes that it's impact on societies, especially democracies is fundamental now and in the future.
If one were to think FOSS is just "open source" or a "nice thing for developers" one would have entirely missed the point. FOSS _is_ a "nice thing for developers" but that is just a side effect. FOSS is a hard-line political tool to very strongly promote specific kinds of legal rights/freedoms. RS drew a line in the sand and never crosses it. Thats why the GPL is so strict. It's the whole point of it.
His use of the word "evil" can be non-obvious. He sees users of software who have had their legal rights restricted via proprietary licensing as having been harmed (possibly in a very small way, possibly in a very serious way) by that situation, even if they entered into it willingly (with or without knowledge of FOSS's philosophy). Even if the proprietary vendor didn't mindfully intend harm, harm can still be done.
RS is not primarily concerned so much about the tiny individual incidents but the "network-effect" they have on society as whole when multiplied by billions. RS refers to that overall effect on democracy as "evil".
Repeating the same arguments has got to be frustrating and people might pick up on it. (assuming that RMS has very little to say but says it often).
FWIW his reasons of proprietary software being evil are[0]:
* Proprietary software obstructs the use of its programs
* Proprietary software obstructs social cohesion, fragments communities.
* Proprietary software obstructs the customisation and adaption of programs.
* Proprietary software has network effects: if you have skype, I am more likely to have skype.
* Proprietary software prevents choice; swapping out proprietary software with something else can be tricky, if it's not resting on standards then sometimes it's simply impossible.
In fact, it's more vicious: If you have Skype, I am more likely to need Skype.
Stallman doesn't.
Don't forget Stallman saw the destruction of his beloved Hacker Culture of Sharing and Academic Discourse eroded and broken by the LISP machine debacle and the change to a closed anti-sharing approach of UNIX by the newly privatised Bell in the 1980s.
And it was a proprietary printer driver which initiated his epiphany that in a world governed by proprietary software the user would have no freedom or a freedom that could be taken from them so no right to freedom. RMS could easily have made the modification to the driver he wanted but he was not allowed the source code.
From this he invented his four essential freedoms [1] manifesto and the GPL which allowed developers to develop with out fear of the closing of their contributions behind paywalls.
In the early 1990s the Linux kernel flourished with its GPL license ensuring it remained a bastion of freedom.
As Stallman advocates for a future where users have maximum freedom then proprietary software is opposed to that.
If I use Photoshop over GIMP and write tutorials and encourage others to use Photoshop then the world is a little less free for those users in the sense of the four essential freedoms [1]
By this definition proprietary software is opposed to Stallman's vision and insiduously so.
To oppose the freedom of others is in RMS's eyes not a good act, thus it can be rightly called evil in that context and IMHO he is not wrong in this.
Proprietary software 'may' not steal your freedom today but it can lock away your contributions and data tomorrow and one has no recourse - Stallman having lived through this wishes to oppose it and fight for the right to Freedom for us all and forever.
His is a glorious vision and he is not wrong, without free software competing with it, proprietary software would likely offer much less freedom and can and has taken what freedom it offered away !
We will live in an increasingly computerised and robotised society. We must choose : will we only have tenuous freedom exchanged for conveniences and mind-candy, rescindable freedoms only for some given by the whim of corporations; or will we work together on GNU and other Free projects and live as Free peoples of the solar system ?
Free as in Liberty, Egality, & Community.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Oh ye of little faith, history has so far found that :
How does he reconcile this with, say, being in possession of his own DNA, but not knowing how to compile from source.
Is RMS really free if he can't inspect, modify, and tinker with, his own software and hardware.
In the RMS World there would be no life allowed unless all life came with GPL'ed Abiogenesis.
Because non-free abiogenesis is unethical.
In a world, where almost all software was proprietary, and open source only made sense if you're living in towers of academia - RMS made sense and contributed greatly to society. Nowadays - not so much.
It isn't worth it to restrict freedom of creator and force him to write open source software for minimal increase in the freedom of the users, when there is already an open source alternative for the given task.
I am sitting in an office of 500+ Windows machines compared to 2 FreeBSD (and no Linux) machines.
I have to use Outlook otherwise I can't book meetings.
I must use Slack otherwise I can't communicate with my colleagues. (Or, alternatively, Skype For Business, but same issue)
"Free Software" is _not_ winning anywhere that isn't servers. (and they have fierce competition there too).
You've just proved his point more than you ever wanted.
> checking email
On the (probably) proprietary Mail or Gmail app.
> waiting in line
On the (probably) proprietary app for whichever thing you're staying in line for.
> playing Angry Birds
...
> making a photograph
...
> or checking up on Facebook
...!
Who care if the kernel, heavily modified and buried 100 layers deep is Open Source if all the apps users actually use are proprietary?
I guess by this definition any open sourced library that an "end user app" uses doesn't count either.
FOSS has barely "won" the lower levels of the stack and the highly technical niches. But the more you move towards user-facing applications, the more proprietary things become.
I realize historically there was only low level software that existed. These days we've got much higher level services which really could benefit from free software.
He hits on these ideas. Maybe he'd be open to working on these sorts of things.
Services have gotten to the level where they are taking a piece of people's livelihoods. Uber & Airbnb takes 20-30%. why?
Amazon is a system of warehousing & distribution... could something like that be run in a distributed / cooperative way which provides as much opportunity to 3rd party retailers as it does Amazon? A level playing field.
These are the sorts of things that the free software movement could move towards now.
Absolutely wrong. The interviewer even said at one point "The things you're describing I believe should be of a concern to many more people than they are." You're totally off.
FWIW, I pronounce 'GNU' as 'nu'.
So "servants" is far from how he views volunteers. And after working closely with him for a few years within GNU, I don't feel at all like a servant---there is mutual respect, and we're not afraid to state our opinions or disagree with one-another. Much of the time he makes me feel like I work beside him, not below him. It's quite constructive.
And this is typical with others as well.
Jonas' original response: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-07/msg00...
My criticism of him is a separate, but similar, issue. I believe that he misses some of the social aspects of modern life, and that's why he views certain innocuous proprietary behaviors as totally damning. Based on his occasional emails to other members of the MIT community, he also seems to have a lack of empathy for people (not just organizations) who don't share his disdain for non-free things.
Not to mention that I find it difficult to see eye to eye with any man who would use a public urinal without shoes on.
What does diminished mean? I mean, like as a person he's not impressive? When I remember I'm reading a comment that's hiding behind a pseudonym, they are also diminished in my eyes.
He is currently using Lenovo thinkpad X60, flashing free bios, then install Trisquel(Ubuntu minus non-free binary blobs).
Probably harder to install than most of us do(get non-free binary blob infected compute and install linux kernel with a lot of non-free binary blobs)
And to be honest, how often do most people need to reinstall their OS? I would be surprised if he has reinstalled more than 3 times in 5 years.
If it doesn't, then It requires a few hours mindlessly running around until you find some stupid flag that was set. Which I might as well leave to somebody else to do.
That this is the state of software is a pretty damn good thing, that most of it has become busywork. But its still busywork and I don't why I'd ever want to do it more than a couple times (once I know the general process)
And GNU project software (with a few important exceptions, of course) now feels more like a legacy, than a salvation. It has it's own statute of limitations, so to say.
So I don't see how complaining without actually making a difference helps someone.
Even the Linux kernel started off with a weird non-free license until Torvalds decided the GPL was a good fit, changing his views on commercial-restrictions after hearing RMS talk.
RMS is a philosopher of sorts and is already seen historically as a fundamentally important figure in the philosophy and ethics of technology.
Sure, the ideas would be out there some way even if RMS wasn't around. Similarly, biological evolution was inherently an idea that was even being thought about by others at the time of Darwin, but we still acknowledge Darwin's major contributions even though we'd almost certainly at some point know everything we know now even if Darwin had never published anything.
A video where he talks about never installing his own OS.
If a moderately-intelligent, moderately-literate beginner can't install your operating system, then your operating system (or at least, its user interface) is crap.
Edit: Just to be clear, I'm responding to the quote, not calling Linux crap. I run a combination of Linux and Windows machines and VMs and they're both very straightforward to install, a complete beginner can just click next / next / next and still get it working.
Distros like Slackware or Gentoo give you more complicated setups but they are designed for experienced users.
There are so many places online to get help with a Linux install now. If you stick with the main distros as most do for there first taste of Linux its really simple.
My decade's worth of experiences having to transfer over wired (wired!) NIC drivers onto computers that are completely supported by the average Linux distro because Windows doesn't ship with them strongly suggests otherwise.
Windows has thankfully gotten better about this lately (e.g. in the Windows 10 era), but the continued lack of drivers in the default install is really annoying when said drivers are for devices that virtually every free operating system supports out of the box.
Sidenote: I was really happy to successfully install it on the same disk as linux and not crap up my bootloader.
(1) Isn't knowledge also power? In this context, developers have the knowledge. Users who aren't programmers don't control free software any more than they do paid software. Further, training more users to become developers requires money.
(2) Corporations don't exist unless they serve users in some way. There's an interdependency that I think Stallman ignores.
That said, free software is important, and a useful way to challenge the paid model.
Please note "free" has nothing to do with price, but with end-user freedom (to use/study/modify/share).
(example answer to your question: custom/internal software).
The parent comment is correct that free software has put magnitudes less food on kids bellies.
And yet, my and others' salaries have been paid for over six years writing free software without it ever being published publicly by its users, despite being GPL licensed.
It's true that our customer base is not very large, though.
At the same time it empowered those who could not afford to pay or could not pay (legal/geo-restrictions, DRM etc).
uh... citation needed?
How many open source companies are there? By open source company I mean companies whose each software product is open source. How many are public companies? Maybe, even just compare those to companies who's products are "open core", which seems to include most (all?) of the open source SaaS offerings.
Or look just at the largest public software companies and estimate their commoditization through open source and community participation through open source.
Indeed there are many engineers who earn a living by maintaining an open source code base. To their employer, the software is free to modify and customize and free from licensing, but there is still a cost (the developer's salary, etc.) to maintain it, so not free in the sense of cost.
Others develop and distribute software and rely on voluntary payment. But if there were no volunteers, would they still be able to produce and maintain that code? Some would, purely as a hobby, labor of love or mission. They'd still need a day job where they get paid for writing code...
"Think 'free' as in 'free speech', not 'free beer'."
When we're talking about software, "Open Source" and "Free Software" are mostly synonymous. However:
The Free Software movement concerns itself with preventing software users to be at the mercy of software vendors/providers (on things where it's technically not needed). This requires, amongst other things, (unobfuscated) source code access.
The Open Source movement has different goals, mostly non-ethics oriented, about a collaborative model of development.
It happens that these different goals meet similar requirements, and that both movements were started by hackers initially wanting source code access.
Stallman does not object to commercial software. He objects to proprietary software. You may charge for free software as much as you like.
> But at some point in the food chain, software developers need to put food on the table and send their kids to school. How does that happen if all software is free?
Support, sponsorships by proprietary software makers, donations from people who want to make a better world. Not even the technical folks have the time or would want to get the source code for software and maintain it all the time. So some dedicated person would still be working on the maintenance and improvement of the software. Free software doesn't mean one cannot sell it either. It's just that others will also have the same freedom to sell it if they invest the time and money to compile/build/distribute it.
Before anyone asks how a lone developer would find the market, that problem exists even for developers of proprietary software (mobile app stores are great examples of the huge skew in the distribution of total earnings from app sales across developers/companies).
RMS's concern with YouTube is that they use proprietary JavaScript and they use patented media formats. However, RMS has always made it clear that if you have the ability "at hand" to rip DVDs then purchasing a DVD is not unethical. Both of the pieces of software I mentioned allow you to avoid running proprietary software.
His other concern is that RMS wants people to publish things he appears in in a way that is much easier to access with only free software. The Internet Archive and CCC provide video hosting that is completely free software, with non-patented formats like VP9, and is easy to use. The idea is to make those forms of publishing more widely known about.
[1]: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl [2]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe
Many people confuse this, but being critical of ethical problems with the way technology is built in practice need not have anything to do with being anti-technology in general.
We should simply not allow that, and let big companies just develop the hardware.
You are free to deal with these companies or not. Whether you agree with these companies and their ways is irrelevant. This is same as not agreeing with another persons' religion, you are free do choose a way to lead your life, don't try to force your way upon others. Others happily share their data with Google and reap the benefits of a very helpful Google Home assistant.
Direct your efforts towards educating these people about the potential downsides, yes, but don't try to use law or other forms of powers to change their ways. That is not freedom.
Absolute freedom does not exist. Every kind of freedom requires sacrifices.
Don't get me wrong, I love the GPL, I love free software! Choosing a license though, GPL or proprietary, is entirely up to the author of a piece of code though. Forcing open licenses upon authors is detrimental to freedom in general.
Worrying or not worrying about it has nothing to do with the ethics of breaking the GPL (or any license).
If he doesn't want to use any commercial software. This includes IntelliJ or other IDEs? Good luck writing software! Then again, the time he saves from not dealing with iOS provisioning might give him a couple extra years to write other software.
Man that interviewer is dumb. Says he is surprised he didn't vote Trump? Eh?