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> This discussion is one level higher, it is about the freedom of the creator to choose a license for his software.

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.

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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.

> Photoshop frees a lot of people from the inability to express themselves in the exact way they want.

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.

I agree! And I use Gimp for that very reason!

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.

Surely GIMP could copy those tools, as well as any missing functionality?

Couldn't the funding that currently goes to Adobe be devoted to further the development of GIMP instead?

Not sure why I can't reply to you loup-vaillant but here it is:

Do you mean the "funding" (more like "income") that Adobe generates by selling their software instead of giving the source code away?

> Not sure why I can't reply to you

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.

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.

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.

In RMS' world Photoshop wouldn't even come to existence.

The question is indeed: would Adobe have created Photoshop in RMS world.

It's very short sighted to think everything else would be the same except for software licenses.

In a capitalistic society where proprietary software were forbidden, we may not have Photoshop. To me, that indicates a problem with capitalism itself.

In a capitalist world where food could not be sold or traded for consideration, I believe we would obviously not have restaurants/supermarkets and it seems very likely either more people would need to be farmers and/or more people would starve.

Is that also a problem with capitalism, or a problem with "not capitalism"?

I was just saying that if capitalism requires proprietary software, then capitalism has a problem. The unstated (yet obvious) assumption was that proprietary software is evil.

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?

Capitalism doesn't require proprietary software, but it enables it.

A little good faith, will you?

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".

It's not for a lack of good faith in interpreting your words (IMO), but a genuine difference of opinion on a critical point.

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.)

Well, I agree. Capitalism may not need proprietary software. I was mostly exploring rglullis's hypothesis above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977956

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".

>In the 22 years since GIMP started, it hasn't caught Photoshop.

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.

Oh, please. When are going to stop making objective comparisons between the Real World and crazy Utopias?

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?

Just in the image management space, we do have GIMP [1], Inkscape [2], Krita [3], just to name a few FOSS applications using GPL that come to my mind right now, among many others. Photoshop may probably not have come into existence in RMS's world, but that wouldn't have precluded any of these from coming up (even if they appear not to be of the same caliber or if they seem like clones of proprietary applications). Your statement would've made a lot of sense probably several decades ago though.

[1]: https://www.gimp.org/about/

[2]: https://inkscape.org/en/about/license/

[3]: https://docs.krita.org/KritaFAQ

As much as I am big supporter of FOSS - writing open source software as much as I can, financially support developers, and actively try to avoid proprietary solutions when there is an adequate free alternative - I am yet to see any kind of open-source software that is original or that it has managed to create a new industry on its own.

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.

That's true for proprietary software as well. Hell, most software is a remake of something that existed in the past. You can find examples of original free software projects that have caused real change (one that comes to mind is the whole Zones/Jails/Containers thing), but that's not really a good measure of whether free software is succeeding.

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.

I never said that FOSS is worse than proprietary software. This is not what the discussion is about.

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.

That feels like a backwards argument to me. There are many free software companies (RedHat, SUSE, Canonical, etc) that create plenty of innovative software. I'm sure you know the difference between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech", but your argument appears to be conflating proprietary and commercial. Especially when you start discussing academic settings (which, by the way, uses a lot of proprietary software).

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.

The discussion is not about "what could've been", much less about "what should we do today". It is mainly about what "would've been if we lived in a world where RMS managed to forbid proprietary/closed-source software". I posit that if this prevailed in the 70's or 80's, there would simply be no software revolution.

> I posit that if this prevailed in the 70's or 80's, there would simply be no software revolution.

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.

You are right that we can not make a perfectly quantifiable experiment to check the rate of innovation in a "purely Free, RMS-style" world vs the current one where proprietary software is also allowed.

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.

And this is a good thing.

There are limits on what is enforcable in a contract. Like, you cannot enslave yourself. It is true that that limits freedoms in some sense. But it serves to protect freedoms that society at large deems more important.

There is indeed a set of contracts with the property that banning them makes people more free. This set is non-empty.

But the argument still needs to be made that proprietary software licences are part of that set.

Sure, but (a) RMS actually does make that argument and (b) he AFAIK doesn't actually call for making proprietary software illegal, but just tries to convince people to not produce, endorse, or use it.

Ah, then someone should reply to the top-level comment with a link to where RMS makes that argument.

> But aren't you restricting freedom when you would keep a creator from sharing his software under his own terms?

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".