Surprised Spotify's antitrust claims are not mentioned there
Edit: All right so this website is meant to make a library of opposition against big corporations. I understand now
Edit: All right so this website is meant to make a library of opposition against big corporations. I understand now
Stallman has been the leading proponent of software freedom for many, many decades. He isn't inherently against big corps, he is against what a lot of big corps do.
IE: I only see it as Apple having extreme upfront costs, keeping poor people away from developing.
1. Do they limit the freedom of the developer to keep source code private?
2. Do they make it harder to sustain a living wage through the labor of writing software?
I’m fully supportive of “attribution” licenses like MIT, BSD, Apache 2. But, I don’t think Stallman considers those “free software”.
He does, though they arent copyleft.
There's a clash between user's and developer's freedoms: if a developer is free to keep the source code private, then said software's users are not free to study, change it, and distribute those changes.
The free software movement prioritizes user's freedoms (the 4 essential freedoms [1]) over developer's freedoms. You seem to do the opposite.
> 2. Do they make it harder to sustain a living wage through the labor of writing software?
Your wording makes it hard to answer the question. If you get paid purely to write software, it doesn't matter if said software is free software or not. If you sell software copies/licenses to pay for your development, then it is objectively harder to earn as much.
The (A)GPL aim is to retain the freedom of the user to view, modify, compile, and redistribute their changes. They explicitly limit the freedom of the developer to close their source would that the user has those freedoms.
To use an extreme example that I'm not using as an example for moral equivalence, but as a procedural one: laws against any (e.g. theft, murder, trespassing, &c) limit the abilities of one party for the benefit of another.
Licenses like the MIT and bsd license take the opposite approach: they give the developer the freedom to use the code as they want, including closing it from inspection and modification by the end user.
Both allow someone to be constrained in some way. It's just a matter of who.
> 2. Do they make it harder to sustain a living wage through the labor of writing software?
I mean, RedHat seems to be doing OK? The recent kerfuffle about mongo and elastic search seem to be because they chose more permissive license at the start, and not a copyleft.
So, who knows? Business is hard and no one factor makes or breaks your chances?
Of course if Spotify is able to win its suit, iOS development will become far more costly, Apple won’t be able to distribute free apps at no charge anymore, like it does for Spotify.
The other (perhaps more compelling) argument is that Apple is only able to invest this level of security in its products because of its spectacular profits, which would likely be much lower if iOS were open source.
That's basically the gist of it.
EDIT: To whoeever downvoted this, I'm just relaying the argument.
Apple’s business model also aligns with user privacy (so far).
It’s also worth considering Apple’s CEO personally values privacy because he had to keep his sexuality a secret his entire life until he reached such a prominent position he felt safe to speak out.
I agree that the strongest evidence is the source code, compiler code, and electronics schematics. However, there are other forms of evidence.
It indicates that Apple software is secure, it doesn't indicate that it is secure because it is closed-source. It might be even more secure if it were open source, because then many more people would be looking for vulnerabilities in it.
I think Apple’s products would be more secure if they were more open. I appreciate that the core is open (Darwin, WebKit, Swift, LLVM).
All philosophies are inconsistent?
> (See the paradox of closed source microwaves)
That's not a paradox. Binary blobs are okay if, and only if, there is no way to update them anyway. This means there is no way for the copyright holder of the software to force a user to cede their software freedom, so the point is moot.
> software should be libre because libre software provides the most value to the most people due to the 0 marginal cost of software
Software should be libre because it allows users to not be beholden to anything but their own interests. Value and cost are very secondary considerations.
> even if it's less profitable to the creators
That's not a criterium.
> due to the security benefits of closed platforms
Citation very much needed.
> Stallman formed his views when he was working at MIT, with his material support from donations
No. He was working, at MIT, you just stated that.
> The economics of his philosophy are tainted by that foundational flaw.
I think you might want to get better acquainted with "his philosophy", the economics of it, before diving head first into an argument based on nothing but ad-hoc analysis of shaky assertions.
The only difference between universal food and universal toilets seems to be the cost - i.e. it would be much more affordable for government to supply free toilets than free food for everyone. In this view his argument makes sense - both the need to eat and the need to pee when in public are fundamental, so if we can take care of at least one of them (toilets), then it's still better than nothing.
> I have concluded that the least we can do, to eliminate pay toilets, is to avoid giving them money. Instead of paying them, I go to great lengths to find some other toilet.
> Please join me in rejecting pay toilets firmly.
Usually they're pretty nice compared to the free toilets.