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Comment by rplevy | Hacker News Reader

It's important to ask whether society benefits from proprietary source code whether it be controversial claims to patents on genetic data or software. Proprietary ownership of code harms society by limiting farmers, scientists, end users from having their rightful freedom and flexibility. The short term benefit to individuals gained by selling licenses does not excuse the resulting restriction of freedom, because it is viable to make money on free software. Stallman is an idealist who bases his demands on what an ideal world should be like. The case for software freedom (including the case for its economic viability) has been made repeatedly, most notably by Stallman. But the anti-freedom argument has never been convincingly spelled out, to my knowledge.

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The "anti-freedom argument" (which should actually be called the pro-proprietary argument, because nobody sane is against free software) is fairly simple: there can be both and both can coexist peacefully. We can (and do) have Linux and Windows, and use them for different things. The market and individuals decide which is better for what task.

Some people say Ubuntu is finally a usable desktop OS for average Joe. Even if that's true, it took how many decades for free operating systems to reach that mark? They're at least 20 years behind in crossing the line (though perhaps now gaining ground rapidly).

The financial incentive enabled by proprietary software gives us things like Photoshop (sorry, GIMP still sucks) and Illustrator, Flash, Windows or OSX.

Certainly nobody would suggest that the open source community be legally prevented from making a Photoshop or Outlook or IE competitor. So why can't we have both and let the market decide? Why must proprietary be evil?

>Why must proprietary be evil?

Because rms says so

Why must proprietary be evil?

Personally I think it's a mistake to argue along the lines of good/evil.

The biggest problem with both proprietary and free software actually lies in the ignorance of the people who license and deploy either form without understanding the consequences, especially the technical and legal ability to access data and historic documents.

The fact that the two coexist does not constitute a valid argument for how things should be, in a better world. There are many less-than-ideal things that coexist together with superior alternatives. For example there are countries where women are required to cover their entire face in public, but the fact that they coexist with secularly governed nations does not validate theocracy as not being oppressive. Similarly we have two ways of doing things coexisting with free and proprietary, and the world would be a better place if one of the alternatives was simply not present.

The line about financial incentive is very disputable as it is all about personal preferences. I personally prefer emacs over eclipse (emacs just rules), gimp over photoshop (photoshop is bloated, doesn't run in Linux as far as I know, and I know how to use Gimp better), Inkscape is awesome, Flash sucks big time, and Windows is needless to say, horrible.

Free OS took 20 years? No I think freedom at the level of the OS was the original way of doing things, from the very beginning. It's the proprietary software that got in the way making it difficult for modern free OSes to catch up by constantly setting hurdles by requiring free software to reverse engineer things that needed to be compatible.

But how things should be is the way they are, with both existing and the market deciding. Why should RMS decide how they should be, rather than the market and the individuals who comprise it?

Comparing a free market, in which free software competes with proprietary, to an oppressive theocracy is pointless.

I agree with much of your position, however:

> Some people say Ubuntu is finally a usable desktop OS for average Joe. Even if that's true, it took how many decades for free operating systems to reach that mark? They're at least 20 years behind in crossing the line...

Let's look at those 20 years up to the release of XP--would you consider (any flavor of) DOS usable for the average Joe? What about Win95/98, with its dll issues and where simply browsing the internet would blue-screen a computer?

Fact is, by todays standards, it took Microsoft ~20 years to have something suitable for the average Joe.

Additionally, ironically, Free Software is the main advantage Ubuntu has over something like XP/Vista regarding usability for the average. Having a centralized index of freely available software, all of which is downloaded/installed/patched on a regular basis using a unified interface is huge.

(not that a payment system is wholly incompatible with a centralized software repository, but it certainly would be difficult to unify proprietary software due in no small part to the wide variety of DRM implementations)

I can't see in what way you can call "freedom" restricting individuals from enter mutually-beneficious contracts. Governments must intervene to prevent abusive clauses. There are some limitations that would be reasonable like making a deposit of the source code for cases of disappearing vendors, forcing software vendors to honor the buyers' right to their own data...

But the basic fact is that someone can create and sell licenses for a closed source program that would not be profitable unless it's made for many customers. Sometimes an open source program can be made for the same niche and offer similar quality. But not always.

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