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Comment by soitgoes | Hacker News Reader

Agreed with a lot of what he was saying about corporations controlling government and society. SOPA seems like a good example of that.

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I have to play devil's advocate here because what you said is interesting.

Why do we not want corporations in control? Does using their software give them real control? How so and how much?

Now once you've answered those questions you then must ask yourself, if the creators of the software used by government agencies has the ability to control those agencies then who should be "in control"?

If only free software was used like Stallman wants then we're just shifting control from one group to another. What's to say that Stallman and the FSF can and will only do good?

Make no mistake here, even though Linux and other free software is driven by the community that doesn't mean there aren't cases where a single developer works alone and releases something as GPL. In addition, while you can always add to a free project the developer has final say of what makes it in and what to leave out. You can put out your own version but if you don't have enough clout then it's unlikely your better version gets used. If Linux was used in government then Stallman has control. If they use Red Hat then they have control. I think Red Hat is an interesting example because while they're free they can still be just as manipulative as any large corporation if they wanted to.

Doesn't it make sense that if you don't want anyone to be "in control" of government agencies through the use of certain software then those agencies would need to roll their own at every level. In the end we're all beholden to the developer whether the software is free or proprietary.

For any open source project, the developer only has a final say on the name. If you disagree with what somebody is doing, you are always free to take the code and change what you like. If Linux is used in the government, the government has control: if they want they could, oh, write their own access control and security system for it. And then release it as open source. But that's patently ridiculous, right?

The whole point of Free Software is that you are not beholden to the developer--you are always free to modify the code yourself or hire somebody else to do it. The government could even maintain their own distro and do everything the way they want. With proprietary software, there are two issues: they are not allowed to modify it legally and it is not practical because you only have a binary.

In fact, the whole point of the GPL is to ensure that not only the original developer does not have absolute control over the source, but that other developers can't do so either.

I get that completely but one of my major points was that because people are writing the software you'll always run into some problem. People by mature have their views which can creep into software. They also make mistakes which could creep in too. And even though a large community submits code to a single project, the project's creator has final say of what makes the final version.

Now, all the points about these issues being mitigated and possibly eradicated are totally right on. What I'm saying though is that this freedom is only truly an advantage if you take advantage of it. Someone who uses free software but doesn't inspect the source, modify it to their liking, and generally just trusts it might as well have gone the proprietary route. That freedom it gives you is essemtially useless unless you're exercising it to your advantage. Granted, I'll give you that you can pretty much trust most major free software but all I'm saying is that you never know, you could have a back door or spyware in the free stuff and won't know it unless you check. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's safe. I'm wondering how many people are using free software to avoid these pitfalls but never look under the hood and just take the developer's word for it that it's secure. "It's FOSS so it must be secure, right?" is how many may think.

To answer your questions, despite what some governments say, corporations are not people. We should strive to allow the people to be in control. By definition, proprietary software grants exclusive control to a private group such as a corporation. People who are using the software have essentially no control over it, they don't know if the program has malicious features, and they can't fix them if they are put there by accident.

No external source is in control of your free software. For this reason governments should always use completely free software. As the software is free they don't have to worry about the whims of Linus or anyone else, most governments actually have their own OS forks like Red Flag Linux in the people's republic of China, Red Star OS in the DPRK, Nova in Cuba, Canaima in Venezuela, etc.

I would argue that there is an external force in control. Case in point: OpenJDK. There's a group of people who have decided for you what is allowed to run on your system. It was okay for the FSF to decide for us that we're not allowed to run Java on our system because why? Because their cause is righteous? There's a whole host of proprietary software we can't run on Linux because someone else is in control. Luckily a bunch of smart people gave us open source alternatives but what happens when a new technology comes out, becomes widely adopted and arguably necessary for day to day computing but we can't get a GPL compliant alternative?

I'm playng devil's advocate again because I'm all for free software but we can't ignore the problems it has just because we're blinded by some allegiance we have to either Stallmam or the greater FSF.

So while we may have a lot more freedom than the alternatives doesn't the requirement to be GPL compliant actually restrict some of our freedoms? Specifically, shouldnt we be free to choose a proprietary technology and not be treated like children?

Users already are free to choose proprietary technologies if they want to. The FSF isn't going to change that, nor are they are trying. It is developers that ought to use completely free software, rejecting all proprietary programs in the process.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I'm not against commercial software. I develop commercial software myself. Where I was in agreement with Stallman was when he was talking about the "empire of the corporations". Looking at what's happening with SOPA, it appears that corporations may get this law past because they have been throwing money at the political parties. This isn't anything new, but watching the debate and seeing it happening before my eyes brought home to me just how corrupt government can be.

Edit: to clarify, I know Stallmam isn't the guy behind Linux. What I'm saying is that it would be reasonable to assume that whatever software he wants us to be using would need to have his stamp of approval and that stamp comes with a lot of opinionated, biased views. And as for being beholden to developers, free software mitigates many issues but it only works in this scenario if the agency has a team dedicated to ensuring the entire code base is up to their standards in which case why not just roll their own?

Stallman does not say that he wants to control what particular software you use - he has simply stated a condition necessary for software to be acceptable to him. Its acceptability or lack thereof is entirely dependent on that pre-stated condition being met, not on his further decision-making.

And if software meets that condition - free for modification and redistribution - then the user (e.g. a government agency) is free to deviate from the maintainer's direction and modify it for internal use.

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