Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?

> My interest in free or open source software has never been either political or industrial. My interest has always been educational. That is, access to the source code provided the opportunity to learn from it. So, in the same spirit as the Open Source / Free Software distinction, I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.

As far as I can tell, the L in "FLOSS" is typically "libre," not "Liberal." I feel like the author is vastly and misleadingly inflating his relevance in this post.

> I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.

I can find no evidence of this term being used anywhere outside of this piece; FLOSS is consistently expanded by people discussing the term as “Free/Libre and Open Source", where “Libre” disambiguates the sense of “free”.

The author may have coined a term that happens to spelled identically to a popular term, but the clear insinuation that the popular term refers to the authors hobby horse is grossly misleading and obviously deliberately so.

People are focusing on the "liberal software" part but boy is the article full of dismissiveness of the real concerns of people who care about freedom and social justice where it connects with software. "Software vendors won’t usually be inserting spyware into their wares." Are you sure about that? It sounds like someone has been selectively reading the news for the last decade or so, somehow the author skipped the Snowden leaks and if you need something more recent, the controversy around Zoom.

This is a terrible document that is riddled with so many inaccuracies that it doesn't convince anyone other than the uninformed. If anything, the last few years have highlighted the need for Free Software and proved many of the alarmist warnings of advocates were prescient actually and not so alarmist.

> In the GPLv3 (and it was there in GPLv2 and v1) clauses 15 and 16 are the Disclaimer of Warranty and the Limitation of Liability. To be fair, proprietary software licenses have the same clauses, but the free-softers cannot claim the moral high ground here. These licenses assert that if the software causes any harm, the people who wrote it aren’t liable (limitation of liability).

This is an inane argument. Limiting your liability isn't some kind of moral evil. The potential for harm due to defects always exists, and if you provide a good or service to someone, you have to negotiate with that person who will accept the liability for it.

Generic software licenses limit liability because it's usually much cheaper for the end user to assume the liability as they have far greater knowledge of their practical risks.

A developer can absolutely make an agreement in which he takes on the liability. He's going to need to be paid to take that liability on, to both spend the time to eliminate defects, but also to purchase insurance so that he isn't bankrupted when a defect inevitably gets through and causes harm.

What a hugely misinformed, but well coordinated, direct attack. Just look at the timing and how many of them came after RMS was reappointed to the FSF board of directors. The message behind this guy's article has nothing to do with his views about Free Software; it's rather "Ditch RMS for good or we'll submerge the FSF under a pile of mud".

> So, for example, if it were to turn out that, all other things being equal, providing source code for libraries could be shown to produce software of inferior quality (and there is much evidence to support such a conclusion) [...]

Wait, WHAT?!

This is not an accidental negation, he refers to it in the rest of the paragraph.

This person must be trolling or testing bullshit arguments to see which ones sort of fly, for use in whatever bullshit-oriented job they do.

I admit I did not read the whole essay, but I think the idea of free software is more relevant today than ever, and is only getting more so. In fact, I think we're approaching the "runaway" part of an exponential curve.

We're in a place where non-programmers and non-hackers are waking up to the importance of transparency and data ownership, and there's no way to achieve that without free software.

I like the idea of public software mentioned in the article, which I understand to be software which is fully transparent and verifiable by everyone, which also sounds a lot like free software.

I think the term "public" is more understandable by a non-technical person, and I may adopt using it after some consideration.

I sure as hell won't install a browser extension if its source code isn't publicly available; I don't see how the government should or even could protect us from every update made to all of the software packages I import (even if the punishment for malware is severe); and large corporations may be able to get their hands on source code, but I don't trust them either. The FSF may be stuck in the '80s in some ways, but their fundamental principles are solid. I much prefer their vision to one that has users "freed" from source code, trusting large and opaque companies and government agencies, whose interests may not align with mine, to shield me from malicious actors, of which there are many. Honestly, if anyone is stuck in the past and not relevant anymore, it's not the FSF; it's people who downplay malicious actors, fail to recognize that software is often tiny, or updated frequently, or written by someone anonymous or outside of US jurisdiction whose behavior we can't punish with US law. A lot of software is made up of forks too, and not many software forks end up useless like in his anecdote about his company forking Windows... Yeah, this dude obviously hasn't been keeping up to speed since his retirement.

From the article:

> Protecting myself from bad actors is not my job. It is the government’s job.

Following recent events, the EFF, and the dealings of 3-letter agencies in the US, it seems the bad actor we all want to pretect ourselves from is the government.

Stallman is right, and was right so many times. Also, FLOSS is so ubiquitous that you dont even know yr using it. The internet runs on it. Android OS and Apple's OSes all use a lot of it. MS is even caving in.

FLOSS won.

Wow, I just don’t get this article.

If the author does not like GPL, FSF, etc., why don’t they just not participate in GPL and FSF matters. Why not let people choose what they like?

What do I like? I like diversity, all kinds of wonderfully different people, many types of software licenses, different cultures, etc. I would not tell anyone what kind of software license to use in the same way I would not tell someone who to vote for. The world is a better place when we embrace things and people different from our own tastes and selves.

I would have enjoyed the article more if the author had been brief in their criticisms, spending more time on their ideas about how they would license software and organize large public and proprietary projects.

EDIT: I should have also said that I enjoyed the article.

Strangly fixated on how "free software" is not a metonym. I wonder what the author would make of free speech, let alone the fact that grammer is completely irrelevant to the point at hand.

It then marshalls enough other bad arguments in a short enough period to be a gish gallop, and I gave up halfway through.

Honestly I felt the presise had some promise, software has changed and the FSF not so much, but this article does not convince or educate me of it.

Just to pile on to all of the other fallacies and falsehoods in the article

> This conspiracy theory goes something like this: If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell

How is this a conspiracy theory? We literally see it happening in the news all the time. See Solarwinds, NSA backdoors, etc. And on the flip side catching the insertion of malware into the the Great Suspender Chrome extension. These are just the first things that come to mind in 2 seconds.

I should start writing articles. If this inane gibberish could get so much attention, I bet something I write could get just as much attention.

This man figured out how to post on Medium but hasn't figured out how to read an open source license much less google "FLOSS" once. Paradoxical.

> If you can’t examine the source code, then some bad actor might provide you some executable software that has evil baked in, and you wouldn’t be able to tell — whereas the bad actor would not be able get away with such nefariousness if you had access to the source code.

But it's true. People act more socially if they think they are watched or they think they could be watched. They don't actually have to be watched. If people think their source code will be examined, they will do less antisocial things. It is very rare to have deliberately malicious features in free software, whereas we have a whole class of dark patterns in dark software.

The exceptions are things like Chrome or Firefox that are such giant and unwieldy codebases that they might as well be opaque boxes. In the case of Chrome, the Chrome builds you use contain secret sauce from Google in order to make it easier for Google to show you ads, different from Chromium.

Firefox occasionally also tries to embed anti-user features, but then distributors such as Debian may notice them and remove them when repackaging the software.

Again, these two are rare cases.

Mostly, I think FSF's original ideas have been achieved. It is possible today to buy a machine running entirely free software. Major problem now is that such machine is either expensive or old.

It looks like the focus now should turn to hardware. The world needs a free hardware foundation today just like it needed FSF in the 80's.

This definitely riled up a lot of people. The comments point out many flaws, but I’m not seeing rebuttals to what I find to be the core arguments:

* The overlap between what the FSF thinks a majority of users want and what they actually want is minuscule * The FSF failed to inspire new leaders * The FSF, a political foundation, has no governance agenda * The FSF missed the boat on a plurality of software revolutions, causing free software to capture only a small portion of the explosive growth of all FLOSS software

Is any of this incorrect?

This guy is a nutcase trying his best to destroy a revolutionary movement and one of the few tools left for the individual to fight corporate domination. Flagged for being a paid attack.

Earlier summary of his thoughts on "liberal software:

https://lwn.net/Articles/712376/

Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4

>Almost forty years ago, in 1985, the idea of “Free Software” was born.

Seems kind of nonsense. Free software was a thing from the dawn of software. From Wikipedia:

>In the 1950s and into the 1960s almost all software was produced by academics and corporate researchers working in collaboration, often shared as public-domain software.

I’m glad that I’m not the only one frustrated with this post. This is just straight impure political hit piece against RMS.

So, does he really saying we should ditch the FLOSS movement to get better freedom? Well, that’s really a bold idea. Of course, there can be other approaches, but where’s the analysis on the success and fail factors? What was the lesson from the past decades, so big that we should rollback a whole movement? Nothing I can find here.

At the risk of sounding dumb, who is r0ml?

Googling him I find some Pycon videos, and apparently he's worked in various software managerial positions for large banks and consultancies, but I feel like I'm missing some context as to why he feels so strongly about this - did he used to be a FOSS cheerleader who saw some kinda light, or a contributor to a large FOSS project or something?

From my lowly software developer POV, I've never been a software manager for a large bank, so my POV is rather different to the author's I'm assuming...

...I started my attempt to get into software dev by learning .NET because it was dominant in my local market - but this was in the days when Microsoft didn't believe in you having the source code, and everyone used a decompiler (I think it was Reflector?) to figure out what was happening in the code that the documents didn't capture.

Then I was hired by a Java shop and holy shit, having the source on hand, it was like crack, I could understand what was going on, and why shit was breaking, so much easier.

And while I never got into the politics of FSF, GPL v1 and v2 have been, IMO, a massive boon to being able to dive deep and understand, and reasonably often contribute a fix to, your dependencies.

Yep, you don't need those particular licences for that, many others will cover it, but it feels to me, as someone who got into coding in the 90s, that the FSF's approach led the way.

And while most vendors have realised the same (making the source code available only increases developer engagement) I feel we need either the FSF, or something like it, to keep advocating for their position at one extreme of the spectrum, simply if it drags vendors towards them. I still struggle periodically with non-FOSS code, and what really gives me the shits is when it's closed source that's built on top of open source. Looking at you AWS Glue, pretty much a wrapper around Apache Spark, but no source code between the pretty Python layer and the mysterious Java blob that then leads to Spark, coupled with absolute shit docs.

And on a personal note, I don't think advocating for the ability to modify your own devices (the focus of GPL v3) has become any less important as time goes on, in fact, it's even more important, look at the bullshit companies like John Deere etc. are pulling.

There's a legitimate argument in this article that the FSF doesn't promote a legislative program that would assist its aims (software user freedoms) and that this would be a better way to achieve those aims than relying on copyleft and the judicial system.

But it's buried under a lot of rhetoric and bike shedding about the meanings of words that is just as navel-gazing as the supposed faults of the FSF's activity.

This weird tirade does not give any convincing argument for its claims. More SW patents and big daddy government saving us from evil actors? Really? It is either an emotional release of a deranged FSF detractor, or a paid hit piece on Stallmann and FSF. Maybe both.

This is just more of the same propagandizing against anything public. Money hates freedom from its influence. Meanwhile, commercial hardware and software continues to trend towards a high tech prison system where everyone's an inmate.

Some talks by r0ml:

https://debconf17.debconf.org/talks/194/ https://lwn.net/Articles/712376/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4

FOSS will always have a total system optimization benefit. It's totally idiotic to rewrite over and over again 90% of the code in the world just because somebody else owns the code. FOSS fixes that, and by doing so increases global wealth more than anything else in the software sector.

A world without FOSS would be like if everyone who needed a bridge had to invent one from scratch every time.

I used to be neutral to even opposed to many tenants of the free software movement.

But the more I'm involved in supply chain risk management discussions, especially around software and observe the continuing breaches such as Solar Winds, the more I am coming to the realization that the only way to reasonably validate your operating environment is having access to and the ability to evaluate the source code for the software you rely on - and the best evaluation is being able to build, from source and then compare that build to your current production environment.

At one time entering a password to log into your computer was considered a ridiculous requirement that only the biggest businesses could justify, full disk encryption was exotic, hard to manage and had huge performance penalties yet now desktop OS's make it trivial and accessible to even non-technical users. I think source/build validation will one day become commonplace and considered the norm too.

It will probably take longer given the whole philosophy behind closed sourced software, intellectual property, etc. but I think it's inevitable. If instead of Solar Winds the same parties were able to penetrate Microsoft, Apple or Google....

> The Free Software clique is rooted in the deep past, and committed to endlessly rehashing the software controversies of the 1980’s — when mainframes were battling with minicomputers for supremacy.

That sounds a lot like the 2020s, s/mainframes/AWS/

How, in the absence of the AGPL, does one achieve both:

1. Open your source up to the security and privacy conscious communities and users so they can audit it and issue their sign of approval.

2. Defend your product against large organizations with the resources to take your software and improve and operate it cutting you out of the equation.

This is the second article about this for the week, and I have to wonder if it's not a trend that aligns pretty well with the SV diaspora finding out that they're not going to get paid 400% an average persons wage in the outside world.

(I do realize the article is about freedom of technology and not pay)

I do very much like the idea of re-framing software written for the public good as public software, it's a good reminder that the community around us can use software to great benefit, and we can solve problems within our communities not just on the internet with applied open source software.

This is nothing more than a continuation on the attach that FSF and RMS is getting these days.

How this thing got on the front page is amazing.

The techno-maoists like nothing more than destroy institutions and reputations.

Sincerely, I don't understand all this crap. If you want a different model for YOUR software, use that. If you want to use someone else's software shut up, or rewrite it, whatever. The world's your oyster.

If you're not happy with the state of whatever is the FSF, start your own, get people to back you up and Just do it™

Other than that just wear the mask and don't eat Doritos with your feet, specially not while wearing the mask.

What is interesting is that as free software proliferated, the largest consumer software companies shifted from being ones that sold tools that enabled the users to exploit the computer to making services that exploited the users through advertisement.

Previously the large consumer companies sold operating systems, word processors, databases, spreadsheets, utilities, compilers, etc to consumers.

Thanks to free software which has in large part both devalued these types of software by providing them for free, while at the same time enabling massive datacenters because these infrastructure software are free, the consumer software companies make their money selling their user's attention span to advertisers.

Article was pretty good until...

> Protecting myself from bad actors is not my job. It is the government’s job.

I stopped reading at this point.

Also there were many misunderstandings (intentional or otherwise) that detracted a lot. Like "Free as in beer" which is commonly known as no money changing hands (price is free). Not the nonsense the author wrote.

That was a ramble. Of all of the sections, though, what stood out to me was trying to hold open-source software developers responsible for problems their software causes. Does this author seriously think that anyone would open-source a single line of software if it could somehow tie them up in legal action?

Thank you sir, you just reminded me why I need to make a donation to fsf.

This entire premise of this article is refutable with a humble pull request (one actually of millions upon millions), where a proprietary software product was open sourced, and a 20 year old set of bugs fixed:

https://github.com/microsoft/calculator/pull/297

To the author, your want of the world to be flat, does not make it so.

L not for "libre" but for "liberal as in education"? (Which "open source" should already cover, and was the reason for free/libre as something distinct.) At least he acknowledges the root word at the end... And then another new term presented as if it should be as familiar as "shareware" is "public software". This is very confusing to read.

As a long time member of the FSF, the criticisms are pretty on point. I wish they would give up on the GNU/Linux battle, and focus more on protecting people's data. The could easily find comrades with numerous other organizations wanting to protect people's data, and then find new organizations willing to join the free software crusade.

It is interesting how much the author knows about free software awhile also completely missing the point of free software. He references a "bad actor" a lot, as if bad actors are only black hat hackers. Instead, a perfect use case is if certain software was free, many forced upgrades or back end services that send data back to companies would be removed instantly. I don't want free software because I want to hack my own code (usually), but because the level of trust I have on free software is much higher since the software was built with respect of the user.

"The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want"

How can he presume to know what "most software users" want or don't want? I daresay that while most users don't have the know-how or time to edit their programs' source code, they would be agreeable to the other tenets of Free Software such as

"The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose."

Also, while not stated as one of the FSF's four "freedoms", freedom from user-hostile behaviour is strongly associated with the modern notion of free software, and I bet you won't find any consumer opposed to that. Just ask anyone who has struggled with Windows Update's forced automatic reboots how they feel about Microsoft being in their computer's driver seat.

This is such an enormously bad take I don't even really know where to begin.

My #1 problem, I guess, is that all of his complaints seem to be false dichotomies - how is the existence of the FSF preventing you from setting up software libraries or passing legislation? The author states that it is but doesn't really explain...

I wonder how much he got paid to write this.

Before I give my thoughts, I want to say that I really enjoyed this article. I didn't agree with much of it, but I had a good time reading it and I had a few chuckles along the way.

> Free-softwarites like to use beer metaphors (free as in beer). Let me suggest that if one were concerned with bad actors, one wouldn’t drink purchased beer (or free beer). One would brew one’s own beer, because bad actors might have poisoned the beer. And one would have to grow one’s own hops, (as bad actors might have poisoned purchased hops). And what might one use for water to brew the beer? Bad actors might have poisoned the water supply. One would need to dig one’s own well (unless, of course, the bad actors had polluted the water table). This way lies temperance.

This is not cut and dry. It is a spectrum. A spectrum of abstraction layers. There are layers where you trust others more than you trust yourself, and that is where it's OK for small teams with small budgets (technical or financial) to abstract away more and more complexity with another layer. If you're a fairly technical organization with huge budgets, and your market demands extra stability; you run your own infra. Organizations can only implement plans when their capabilities align with their intent. If you lack capability you must reduce your intent or obtain more capability. Capability can be purchased. There is an opportunity cost analysis associated with those decisions. The author of the article seems to assert that every org should just abstract away all complexity all the time just because they can. They don't stop to consider the cost or difficulty associated with that approach.

> ...but having a government agency whose job it is to keep the beer supply safe might be more effective than having each household test the beer they purchase to determine if it is safe...

The author ignores the fact that most of this demographic owns guns to protect their family from that $2 trillion dollar military. But I digress, you're still conflating "Effective" with "Cost effective" which are not the same thing. Most organization would at least perform some rudimentary risk-benefit analysis. If buying beer is 99.999% safe and making beer is 100% safe, is the cost associated with producing beer worth the risk?

And as always the answer is no. Its time has not passed.

There are people wishing to create software in the OSS definition, regardless of politics and ethics.

Who are the critics to tell them what to do with their time? Yes some of their creations will be used for (sometimes perverse) law enforcement, waging wars and what not, so what? The idea that curl should be released under a "no baddies" license is ridiculous.

OSS organizations should ignore all attempts to guilt-trip them into abandoning their spirit.

Those wishing to mix ethics with code are welcome to start their own and rally people away from OSS of course, good luck.

As usual, "a headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

I thought it interesting that the "public software" terminology was floated again. There was some debate in 2016 when Nadia Eghbal brought it up as an alternative to "open source".

https://medium.com/@nayafia/i-hate-the-term-open-source-a65f...

Did this individual get something from Discord or something to write this?

People like this person give double the reason Free Software should continue.

> ...FLOSS, meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.

No. That's not what the L in "FLOSS" stands for, and you don't get to just make it so just because you want to popularize your phony bologna term you created.

Beyond that, reading the article, I have a feeling this individual has been saying this sort of thing since 1985.

Well I expected better from r0ml.

I'm disillusioned with the FSF and RMS too but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Recall that "Free" software began when RMS wanted to fix the software in his printer and Xerox said "No.".

Consider the "right to repair" movement? Farmers can't fix their tractors anymore due to software. That's political and industrial, and yes, educational too.

> I’m willing to support a Public Software Foundation that advocates for [a rational governance framework for software and its effects].

Great! But let's do it without excoriating the old guard? I mean, is Step One really "pick a fight with the FSF"? That's the first thing on the agenda? Apologies for the snark.

I think he's right, though, that the FSF hasn't "moved the needle" and something more is required. Dunno what that would be...

This is a weird converse of the "proprietary is trying to cancel RMS" argument - arguing that proprietary won because RMS has been cancelled? Or something like that?

The idea that Free is evil because it has no warranty is... kind of confusing. The author had an argument regarding support contracts and Object-Only models, and yes that's entirely true. Free can be a two tiered system: you get the code on it's own with no warranty and figure it out yourself, or you can buy a support contract from someone who has already figured everything out and is willing to guide you along. This is a perfectly fine system.

The author is flirting with an actual argument about, say, the quality of `npm`; but it's wrapped around all sorts of weird alternative definitions of "freedom from source code". I call it weird because Free won in a lot of contexts where, at least according to this particular argument, it shouldn't have.

The story about custom versions of Windows is utterly horrifying.

The entire point about code signing is a strawman. The FSF isn't against code signing, they're against technical lockouts that prevent knowledgeable users from installing alternate software versions. Most Linux distros not only have code signing support, but are also signed with Microsoft UEFI keys so they'll boot without special configuration on most PCs.

I entirely agree with the author's contention about software patents and have been thoroughly downvoted in various forums for suggesting that software patents would have been a fairer bargain than copyright. I also think they have a point with the FSF being terribly ineffective at lobbying. Actually, I'd go one further - before Right to Repair became a buzzword the entire movement as a whole hasn't had a consistent thing to rally around.

And then they go straight for a "why don't we have public libraries but for proprietary software" argument. This is so out of left field I don't even. Copyright owners have been very effective at shutting public libraries out of digital distribution. It's even to the point where the Author's Guild is yelling at Amazon to let libraries rent out digital copies. Publishers hate libraries because they're less-lucrative competitors to streaming services that they can sell exclusives to. Nobody in publishing wants easily-negotiated licensing terms for distributors; they want to sell entire works as exclusives to specific platforms at the expense of other platforms.

There's an argument in here somewhere - one about how the FSF has manifestly failed at protecting users more than similarly-aligned organizations (e.g. EFF, Mozilla Foundation). I don't think they got that across very well.

also

>When the GPL was written, when software failed, it meant I didn’t get notifications about printer jams. Today, when software fails, it means I get a lethal dose of radiation.

Therac-25 happened years before the GPL was written. You even cited the Wikipedia article.

I think Linus Torvald said something like: "he don't want to waste time with licences"

Something I can very much agree with.

However, I very much not agree on the article, nor its headline. But I also do not fully agree on the FSF definition of Free Software, either.

I think it is very important, to keep terms simple. So that also a nonexpert - and non-native english speaker can understand what it means. Because I am also a non native speaker, but so is most of the world. And most of the world conflates free with gratis. But I am pretty sure, many english native speakers do so, too. Definitely most websites use the term "wrong", too, with "join for free" etc. Trying to insist on those nunaces, I would consider a uphill battle on a muddy ground and not worth my energy. I would just go with the commonly accepted term.

So free as in not having to pay for it.

Now, that definition alone, would include all the spyware infected freeware from the appstores and co - and this is what people actually expect for free. They get more ads and other limitations instead. They don't know or care, that the source is usually closed. So including the Open-Source in the definition is important.

So Free Open Source Software - FOSS. Sounds good and simple and is pretty much the established term and I would normally use that acronym. FOSS is also easy to spell and to remember.

But .... there is the copyleft. And I am not a great fan on copyleft. So I should use Free Libre Open Source Software? - FLOSS

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

Well, sorry, but that term sounds clumsy. But the FSF named it before me. So I am not trying to change their definition here. I am just saying - I think at its current stage it just helps maintaining the confusion. The discussion here is a good example of it.

Now, but as a programmer, I have to say, the highest degree of freedom with another piece of software I would have with no licence at all - when the code is in the public domain. Because then I can really do what I want with it. Running it as long and where I want it. Change, modify and yes - if I decide to - even not share my changes with others and just charge for the binary I created.

I am not doing the last part, though. But I am really considering publishing my long year pet project directly into the public domain, to avoid most of this.

One of the stories I remember reading that motivated RMS to start free software is how the printer driver was buggy and there was no recourse to it. 40 something years later, we are still facing the same problem - my printer ink costs 100x the actual cost and it doesn’t print in black if one of the color runs out. similarly the reason clang, llvm exists is due to extreme restrictions on how the gnu toolchain can be used. In a free country FSF has full freedom to push for their agenda but at the same time, don’t take my freedoms to pay for and use non-free software because that just works better for me.

Did this person just take the concept of "free" used by "free software" and imply that the meaning of this "free" is as in "having rights"?

I ask because he compared it to frying pans. Frying pans can't be "free", therefor software can't be "free"???

I've always understood "free software" to mean "software that gives the user control over what it does and does not do"

While I think I understand most of his points, I do not think that any of the intents should be relevant to software - like at all.

I mean, I am using and fixing GNU/linux/libre/open software since I was a child and I contribute to a lot of projects...

But every time I see a project where the author didn't have time to fix an issue, it's the same story. Project gets abandoned due to lack of free time, hardfork, maybe with much much luck a softfork, then months of intent of "industrial" programming. Lack of time. Repeat.

This is happening everywhere and the reason why many pivots of intents across the operating system sometimes take multiple years, just see gtk3, gtk4, wayland, QT mobile (oh boi!) and others...

If the intent changes, the current ecosystem is not able to pivot.

And I think the reason is a different one. The Free Software Foundation are something like a churchal institution in my opinion. They spread belief, they convert other believers to their cause and if they don't they try to make an argument why it's the better way to believe.

But much like the church with their people in it, that concept is not sustainable anyhow. Most of the software I use daily (and I am very grateful for) gets shit from the FSF or any other ecosystem. Some software is established, others isn't...but they help my productivity and make me not happy, but efficient and more "industrial" in what I can achieve with them as tools.

The late movement of patreon, onlyfans and others to find a sustainable ecosystem for creators of content still isn't actually sustainable. All the videos that reach only a minority and are still helpful can't be funded with it, so they actually just reflect the same problem: they aren't sustainable, because they are much like the FSF unaware of what's not popular. Patreon's CEO drives probably a shiny car and has a house while many educational video creators (that he at some point probably relied on) don't get shit for their creations.

I think that we have to find a balanced funding model, that is somewhat similar to the initial purpose of taxes when they were invented. But it has to be adaptive to the changing nature of the economics of the system, and should be built in a way that those fees are distributed sustainably, and that people can do what they want, in their paid time, similar to how most people in the basic income movement would argue with its advantages.

It could maybe be solved with a fancy blockchain, and maybe different, I dunno - as long as it's not a financial institution that calculates in business models or a fixed percentage, and as long as it has its people in their focus rather than themselves.

We should change the whole software paradigm that has served us so well for so long because of 1 guy. I want the minutes I spent reading that tedious, stupid article back. Maybe RMS should stay away, if only to save us all from this unseemly moralizing that has infected what used to be a software movement.

There is still a need for it. It keeps us honest and free from being ignorant. Whether you comb through code or not it keeps the ability to innovate supple. Let’s all move forward as a society and not put barriers in the way.

Seems like the cooperate dystopia creeps out even its most hardened defenders by now and the cognitive dissonance lightning has to strike somewhere and that someone is the guy who called it.

Stoikiy muzhik!

Oh, he wants poor students who write free software in their free time and give it away to emulate DJB and also offer $500 for bugs others found in their software.

> Put me down as being in favor of additional legislation to hold software authors liable for any damages they cause.

um, how about we don't do that?

You will own nothing. You will be happy.

Weird article!

the idea hasn't passed - its just not the right circumstances for it to flourish, see for example RMS, the Jesus of Free Software, the one who gives his life for it, the one who is basically being crucified by some people. I see stark similarities.

What’s an example of software that is free (speech) but not free (beer) excluding TiVo style

Flagged. What a bullshit article.

I don't need to even read this to know from the title that it's a FUD piece.

there's a steady droll of anti-free software going on.

I take it to mean that commercial interests are stronger that potential gains enabled by new technological forms of collaboration. We (as a society) are 'choosing' to keep all gains enabled by digital technology private rather than revising the capitalist apparatus which is strained by these new digital possibilities.

tl;dr the author doesn't care about the freedoms that copyleft provides to users and assumes the same is true of everyone.

Ah, another example of the Betteridge's law of headlines[1]. The answer, as usual, is "no".

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

s/software/speech/

I support and defend everyone's access to folly, but understand: this is an unsavory game, and that game will devour its players.

Fortunately we still have RMS to defend Free software

Smells like computer generated text, GPT-3, anyone?

Only reason I think this was not written by GPT-3 is that I suspect GPT-3 would be able to produce much more sense than this drivel... Maybe it was written by GPT-2, I guess.

Articles like this were inevitable once they made this decision. Stupid decision by the FSF has really set back free software.

Nope. Next article.

Does anybody who had time to read the whole thing have a concise summary? From the parts I skimmed it sounds like the author is annoyed by the politics of the FSF. I've heard this argument many times before and in my experience it usually comes from people who only have a superficial understanding of how the GPL actually works. Often this happens as a result of learning what the little they do know from their corporate legal team not from actual software engineers writing free software. "The GPL is politics and inherently incompatible with venture _capitalism_." The GPL puts users first. Good capitalism does that too.

On top of that, the only time I hear people actually complain about free software is if they're trying to incorporate it into their product and don't have the authority to make the business/product call to not worry about the secrecy of their source code (or don't want to). Essentially, they don't respect the license/ethos and just want to use other software for free not with user freedom in mind.

Here's why you use free software:

1. You are building a product where user freedom is important. 2. You don't want a large company to take your software and use their vast resources to pump out improvements and usurp your position in the market (AGPL). 3. You want to mutually benefit from others using your software in a more tangible way than "can I have money look I have github stars". 4. You want to assert your patent position and ensure that nobody can ever lock you out of your product by patenting a derivative work.

Here's when free software is annoying:

1. If you're trying to make money off commodity software (or talent). 2. If your lawyers aren't familiar with how the world writes software and insist that everything your engineers output is a trade secret and will bolster your software portfolio in the event of acquisition (don't work for these companies).

I've also commonly heard the myth that using the GPL slashes your company's value. In the instances where that's happened, the people who let it happen got taken, or they didn't do their diligence and let the GPL slip into their product when their whole strategy was keeping their source secret and then look like fools and direct their anger at the GPL.

Another thing people don't often realize is that as the original copyright holder, you have permission to dual license your work as you see fit. If you're say an enterprise company and trying to woo a big client and they just can't stomach the GPL, then you can choose to license it to them under terms they're willing to work with, if that makes sense for your business. Honestly I think this puts the company that owns the software in a pretty powerful position "oh you like our product but want special treatment, well that's going to cost some $$$".

If Free Software is dead you'd think the linux kernel would be dead, Signal would be dead, etc.

Saying "free software has failed" is like saying "communism has failed".

What the author really means is that the FSF's achievements have not satisfied his expectation. However, expectations are subjective and personal.

That is a perfectly good opinion, but it's an opinion.

The FSF could shut down tomorrow, but the existing GPL software would continue to further the goals of free software, however successful they might be at it. How many organizations can you name that wield that kind of eternal influence? To me that puts them into a row with the French Revolution and Bauhaus.

tldr (from 5,277 words): Users are far more concerned with protection against harms closed-source software may inflict, but access to that source code is a terrible way of preventing those harms. Thus free software advocates are barking up the wrong tree when they condemn closed-source as acts of political tyranny.

editorial 1: What do you care what reasons the free software dorks employ?

editorial 2: Verbosity is an existential threat.

Alright. Let me save you an hour or so, and below I'll point out spots where I take issue.

TL:DR

Through militant refusal to read up on linguistic context, and grammar nazi'ing, the author sets the stage for a complete teardown of Free Software.

Starts of with intentionally not getting the point, keeps going to explaining the historical suck that prompted the Free Software movement and villainizing the movement for forcing source code on people, and for depriving all those software providers of uncontested captive audiences.

Stipulates that whatever RedHat does must be the superior approach to burdening people with source.

Complains about free as in beer, and how they shouldn't use that anyway, because they should brew their own beer if they actually followed their values that spawn out of an alleged origin myth of Free Software being the to protect people from Bad Actors. (Only partially, but never the only goal)

Asserts GPL wouldn't have saved anyone from THERAC-25 (not that the proprietary binary only way did either)...

Honestly couldn't go any further.

Excerpts below. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to weep for the time I'll never get back.

Number one: >Those of us who are interested in issues of freedom and ethics and social justice related to software must explore alternative stratagems to achieve those objectives. The tactics of the Free Software Foundation (the insistence on copylefting software and fighting software patents)

Free Software was only about one thing: creating software that protects the rights of users. If you came to the movement to do anything else... I got nothing.

>The first sign that free software is intellectually bankrupt is that the Free Software Foundation seems unable to develop new generations of leadership.

Hasn't needed to. Stallman and the Board have done just fine, despite what a bunch of folks would like people to believe.

>It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. The Free Software Foundation is famously fixated on insisting that it be given credit for Linux.

Noted; but follow up question: Author seems rather concerned about who shouldn't be take credit, so... Why bring that up exactly? Also, last I checked, GNU never took credit for Linux. Linux is an OS kernel. GNU is the user space traditionally coupled with the Linux kernel. Together they are GNU/Linux, GNU on Linux, or as I endearingly refer to it, "the damn computer".

>Thirdly, the rhetoric of Free Software devotees is awkward and unconvincing. The inflexibility (or inarticulateness) that has failed to evolve the talking points to make them more effective is a failure of politics. To take my own pet peeve, it is unarguable that inanimate objects cannot have freedoms. People have freedoms. Frying pans, as an example, cannot have freedoms. If one were to talk about Free Frying Pans, the only way to interpret that statement is that one is referring to frying pans that one needn’t pay for. When one uses the phrase “free press”, one is not suggesting that the pile of metal and wood that constitutes a printing press machine is entitled to freedoms. The word “press” in that phrase is a figure of speech known as metonymy. It refers to journalists It refers to journalists. “Freedom of the press” is talking about the freedom bestowed on journalists. Most people understand that “the press” refers to the journalist collective. So when one says “free software” or “software freedom” we know that the freedom is not given to an executable file. The expression (unless we are referring to software that we needn’t pay for) is referring to freedom for some group of people that we know as “the software” (y’know, like “the press”). And who are those people who are members of “the software”? That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t try to explain it to me. I was pointing out how nonsensical this framing is.

That entire gem, right there is a crime against any and all form of intellectual honesty, and to boot, falls completely flat rhetorically for me through nothing less than a surgical, malintentioned refusal to make a trivial mental leap. Free Software was never about giving rights to Software; it has always been about the rights transferred to users of Software, as Software in and of itself tends to come package with contractual attachments that are detrimental to those whose lives as individual actors may be adversely effected through the lordship of an extortionate rightsholder. It has always been about making computing safe for people, and increasing adoption of the personal computer through the guarantee of actually being able to control what it does. The author just seems blissfully unaware or inapable of realizing that. I was going to save space and not quote the entire thing, but in the end, I didn't want to be accused of editorializing or trying to engineer the impact of that paragraph. Stand and weep mortals, for this straw man is the straw man to end all straw men. A quick dip through a literary reference later brings us to...

>With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software (at least in the United States) of the rights afforded them by Congress under Article I, Section VIII, Clause VIII. Many programmers are under the impression that “software freedom” is meant to increase the freedoms of software producers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The GNU manifesto and Free Software Foundation take great pains to explain that their intent is to increase the freedom of computer users — at the expense, of course, of software producers. “The Software” is a metonym for software users. The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want, and the freedoms that they wish to restrict for software producers are freedoms that most software producers would rather retain.

Ah! Here's where we see the intent start to come out! Someone wants the freedom to a captive user base, and darn those free software jerks for giving the world an alternative! They shouldn't do that! The Users don't care anyway, and I want all the benefits of being the sole source of software to run and full control over how people use it on their computers, and what changes they can make to it!

>Prior to 1983, (two years before the Free Software Foundation was founded), all computers sold by IBM (which in those days meant pretty much “all computers”) came with the source code to the operating system. Like Linux (although you usually have to download the source code separately nowadays). Every company (because computers were so expensive that individuals couldn’t afford them) had a “data processing” staff which might make changes to the source code should the need arise (fixing problems, adding features). Many companies, however, were not large enough or sophisticated enough to have the kind of staff which could do this effectively. They would prefer to contract out the maintenance of the operating system software to the vendor (IBM). IBM, however, was unwilling to take this on, since everybody had the source code, and might have made modifications. IBM had no way to know what modifications might have been made, and consequently would be unable to accurately estimate how much work might need to be done. Eventually, due to persistent customer demand, they came up with their OCO (Object Code Only) program — in which you could receive the software WITHOUT the source code. In that case, IBM could provide a service contract for their software as they wouldn’t have to contend with individual local modifications. It turns out that computer users mostly wanted freedom FROM source code, rather than the freedom to use the source code to modify their operating system.

Read: Half the reason why computing literacy has tanked so hard, is because a business decided it was too hard to make an estimate, so screw the customer, you only get the binary now.

>Two years later, the Free Software Foundation was founded to try to foist the source code on people who didn’t want it.

>If your counter-argument to that is “but that was the 1980’s and the nature of software has changed since then — so that situation no longer applies” I have two responses. Firstly, the GNU manifesto was written in the 1980’s, and the nature of software has changed since then, so it no longer applies.

A simple yes would have sufficed, though time passing has done naught to invalidate the GNU manifesto.

>Secondly, the largest Free Software business, Red Hat, has always had “freedom from source code” as its business model. A business pays Red Hat with the same licensing scheme as they would for any proprietary commercial operating system, in exchange for which Red Hat frees them from the inconvenience of needing to be exposed to the source code.

And? RedHat also brought such hits as systemd (the undebuggable), pulseaudio, and various other travesties against decent, god fearing sys-admins.

There's a bit more in there that actually has some merit, but I do want to call out the sheer brazen gall on display where the author dredges up how GPL wouldn't negate the bad outcomes related to things like the infamous THERAC-25, cherry picking a scenario where the lay-user would be given the chance to once over the source before a quick procedure, but completely leaving out the thousands of other professional eyes that would have poured over that design to render it safe during deployment.

I can't even finish it right now. I might come back later with a follow-on comment when the indignation and awe at this fellow have had time to dissipate.

The most promising strategy I've come across to address this mystery of how to sustainably fund open source (or how I would put it: how do we create goods that are held in common, goods without capitalist restrictions/gatekeeping mechanisms?), is the rapid conversion of the entire world's economy into a Holo-REA/hREA-run ecosystem and network. Holo-REA/hREA is a community project backed by diverse group of new-economy builders (Valueflo.ws, Mikorizal.org, Sensorica and others). It is a system built using the novel holochain framework (a distributed integrity engine) and will allow us to stigmergically measure the flows of material resources flowing through our communities, and the world, in exactly the same way as it is being carefully measured and managed today, which is: behind the firewalls of big companies, using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems/software.

The new Holo-REA/hREA system allows us to reveal the complex web of relationships behind all material resources that we use in our daily lives (when I say 'resources', it can be anything from raw materials to finished products - in this system every input and every output is a resource). This would mean we have high quality information that helps us to see and steward our delicate exchange/dance with mother earth's ecosystem (an ongoing balancing act).

I'm excited to be closely following this project that aims to grow an open, radically low barrier-to-participate, low barrier-to-entry, encrypted, peer-to-peer version of today's ERP system; what Bob Haugen and Lynn Foster and others call 'Network Resource Planning (NRP) software'.

I hope that this new system will help us to start to recognize all the capitalist gatekeeping of knowledge and science that is going on today, that excludes and keeps most of humanity from accessing their shared inheritance. Digital tech has given us new tools with near-zero marginal cost of reproduction, storage and transmission of information, so we can stop making it artificially scarce. In other words: the new system could help us see more clearly how we are uselessly competing - to monopolize/'own'/turn into '(intellectual) property'- the latest science and innovation (as is done today through trade secrets, patents, copyrights), which, let's be real, really belongs to all children, not just the children of white, global north, capitalist parents.

Through the use of this new system we will also be able to put an end to ecocide, which is currently being committed through: the privatization of land and the subsequent destruction of natural ecosystems, leading to deforestation, groundwater contamination and poisoning, etc; the creation of e-waste due to planned obsolescent, non-repairable black-box tech, as well as the human rights abuses when producing 21st century capitalist commodities (which has lead to catastrophes like Rana Plaza and the 'Playstation War' in Congo), to name two of the major themes of the past few decades.

So yes, we, the working class, can now finally set (scientific) knowledge/technology free; empowering all of mother earth's children.

Although the author isn't clear about his thesis in his writing (which makes people think the whole thing is a conspiratorial attack on the FSF and RMS), there is some good discussion to be had here. I think the verdict is: the author has fundamental disagreements with the anarcho-libertarian roots of Free Software.

I ultimately disagree with most of the article, but I'll just be a devil's advocate here. One of the important points the article makes is about *trust* in software: Do we not trust our fellow developers to adhere to the goodwill ethics of creating technology ("don't do harm"), and if that is the case, do we not trust the government for creating laws and regulations for software to not cause harm? He talks about the need for absolute right of source code as an irrational fear rooting from the fact that "nefarious actors" might sneak malicious things into your computer that can't be audited. Some passionate developers would swear for this right at all costs, but the reality is that most people (both non-technical end users AND corporations) do not really care this at all. Non-technical people, who do not have the ability to really audit source code, would probably want governmental regulation to do the job for them, and corporations always had access to source code when they needed it (often paying huge sums of money for it, to the benefit of the developer of the original code). Many devs will say that the end user ("the commoner") is ignorant about the inner workings of the software and therefore their desires aren't really that important. But isn't software just a tool towards creating a better world, and shouldn't non-devs have a say in this matter when they are the end user (and often the receiver) of that tool? What do "they" really want?

My take on this is: there's actually enough reasons to NOT trust the current state of government at all, regardless if you're a dev or not, and because of this free software still has some value. Both Western/Eastern governments like US, China, etc have routinely showed that they do not really lead software for the common good, when they have been caught eavesdropping on citizens too many times. They are also prone to be lobbied by corporations, and many parties (including the "liberal" ones) have failed to act against those corporations when they have also been spying on users. (Well, the EU is bit of an edge case, but even so these corporations always find a way to go around those regulations). But there's the problem with FSF: they have largely succeeded in creating an ideology among developers for the absolute right of source code, but they have failed to persuade the average end-user for needing to have those same rights. RMS actually relates a bit to this problem: having a controversial programmer of cult-like status as a leader might be welcomed here in HN, but also casts an incredibly poor image on the org which would lead ordinary people lose faith in this whole movement. And it's reasonable to think that even ignoring the glaring RMS controversy, free software organizations have largely interacted only among technical people and haven't gained much interest among the general populace, and haven't been able to produce a significant voice in the parliament.

For further though, there are two additional problems of free software to think about which are not fully touched upon in the article:

- One is that free software is now mostly maintained entirely by the goodwill of unpaid volunteer developers, with the exception of a few prominent projects with substantial corporate backing. A lot of previous free (and open-source) devs have been burnt out by growing maintenance costs with not enough compensation (even sometimes derided for not doing their free work.) Is the current state of unpaid developer labor really sustainable, or should we start to think about alternative models of free-software development when developers might actually be able to pay for food and rent for the goodwill they contribute towards software?

- The second is that free software licenses like GPL ultimately depend upon the law for its enforcement, and therefore depends on the government for it to really have effect. Once the government becomes corrupt enough for GPL to not be enforced (ex. the military starts using Linux for their military drones but refuses to enforce its license), we might seriously need to reconsider alternatives. But then we're asking more weird questions like "what would free software mean and could be enforced in an anarchist society?", which is quite fun to think about.

Wow, what a moron.

The FSF's time has probably passed. However, free software exists independently of the FSF, and is as important as ever.

I've read it all, and he really put the issues I somehow "felt" with free software to words. Maybe there could be a way forward, where developers and users profit. Then I skim this comment section and I'm back to be really, really confused. I'm pretty new to developing software, but the Open Source subject, I don't get.

RMS is back. Let's use this opportunity to predict a future. There's only 50% chance we got it wrong.

Though every Bitcoin-end messiah got it wrong: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin-obituaries/

It's arguable that GPL software is not free (as in freedom). It imposes a cost on some people, but not others.

The people who pay are those who modify the source code and want to distribute the result without contributing their modifications. It doesn't affect users of the software, only people with the skills and motivation to update and improve the software. These people are forced to provide their labor for free if they want to use the software for their purpose.

This of course is by design. But to me the irony is that it disproportionately ends up affecting mostly small programmers and developers who rely on OSS to make an income, while users, notably large corporations who provide cloud services and manufacture hardware, etc, profit handsomely without being forced to contribute any of their money or labor.

Of course AGPL attempts to fix this, but it's only really targeted at some corporate users and the small developer is still at a severe disadvantage.