Stallman on GCC, LLVM, and copyleft
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[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7116144
In case anyone doesn't realize this: the ARM64 LLVM backend used by Apple in Xcode 5 to target, for example, the iPhone 5S, is currently not open source. There is a vague promise that it will be merged, but the time frame described was itself long, many months have already passed, and it doesn't really seem like much progress has been made since (although of course things could be happening internally at Apple).
(In fact, none of the code actually backing Xcode 5 or iOS 7, even LGPL code such as WebCore/JavaScriptCore, has yet to be released; but, in the case of the ARM64 backend, there was a specific discussion about it on the mailing list, and in fact some iOS-specific ARM64 patches to LLVM languished seemingly due to the idea that "well, some day the ARM64 stuff will be merged from Apple", so it is already having "chilling effects".)
I would have a hard time saying there's "chilling effects" happening.
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-September/06...
For further evidence of this, we can look to Haskell: Haskell currently has been unable to target iOS's ARM64 architecture because of this part of the compiler not being open source. It is precisely these kinds of ripple effects that Stallman is concerned with: he would argue that by supporting LLVM the community set themselves up for a situation where Apple was able to later hoard valuable changes while still getting the benefit of an army of people fixing bugs in their compiler for free.
> Also in "Build Settings", change "Architectures" to "Standard Architectures (armv7, armv7s)" (as opposed to "(including 64-bit)") as Apple hasn't yet merged Arm64 support into the LLVM source that we'd need to fully support 64bit iOS devices. The code will still run wonderfully on the 5S/iPad Air/mini Retina in 32bit mode.
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/CrossCompilin...
Honestly, it is as if you just saw "ARM64", did a Google search, took the first hit, and decided "that's enough research for today"... :(. Your citation is from over a year ago, long before all of this happened, and is not relevant. I specifically stated in my comment that the issue was with relation to the "ARM64" backend as it targets "iOS", not the general "AArch64" backend as it could be used to target other platforms or operating systems. This is a critical distinction when talking about Apple.
At the time of this patch, Tim worked for ARM, not Apple. Tim was hired by Apple sometime during 2013, as far as I understand after he was working on committing these patches. This information is thereby also not relevant :/. (If anything, it is worrisome.)
In the absence of LLVM apple would license/develop a closed source compiler. They would not use a GPLv3 GCC if they had to.
The true equation for the value of an open source paradigm should be: #_advances_open_sourced, and nothing else.
It doesnt matter if 99% of advances stay closed, what matters is if there is enough value repatriated.
Copy middle allows a company to take something open source, invest speculative resources on improving it, and it successfull sell for a portion of the incremental value - both improving the quality and decreasing the cost of software to consumers. Then, if/when a company tries this and fails to find a market, the advances sometimes/often get repatriated as part of the shutdown.
Copy left tries to use anti-ownership ideals to ensure software remains free. This seems like a good idea, until you realize that copy middle effectively harnesses capitalist motives to make free software better.
In my mind: Copy left is, by design, a virus. Copy middle is a symbiotic guest organism. I know when given the choice between a probiotic and the flu virus which I want to ingest into my body. I have the exact same preferences when it comes to what I invest in my company.
To put this into a very simple example: if Apple open sourced every single software component on the iPhone, that would be extremely "open". We would know everything about how the iPhone worked, and we'd have learned a lot as a community about how to build mobile phone operating systems. This would help other people and companies work on mobile phones, and might have positive effects on things entirely unrelated to mobile phones. To the people who care about variables related to "#_advances_open_sourced", this would be a great outcome, and "%_advances_open_sourced" is even 100%: seems great.
But, in such a universe, I will argue that the users of an iPhone are still not "free" because they are unable to take the software running on their iPhone and replace it with modified software based on all of that wonderful open source code. In fact, lest you say "people then shouldn't buy an iPhone", it might be the case that users of any device are not free, because there is absolutely no guarantee in such a universe that any of the numerous devices that are based on this open source software--even if 100% of the software on these devices is itself open source--actually allow users to modify the software running on them (hence, GPL3).
This is the difference between "free" and "open", and in my understanding this is why Stallman makes the points he makes: he doesn't care whether there are more cool and fun toys built out of open components, what he cares about is whether the toys we have restrict our freedom. It might be that a world where we are more free has fewer toys. In my interpretation, Stallman would consider that a "win" for mankind. In his mind, that argument "so don't buy an iPhone" seems to be related to the argument "so don't link against their code", and he wants people to stop: the idea is that if you don't like people restricting freedom, you should actively avoid yourself supporting it.
(So, that's all I really have to say in response. However, if you--or anyone else--finds this kind of stuff interesting, I spent a lot of time a few months ago writing a lot about this subject, and in particular this tradeoff, in a comment thread on Hacker News when FreeBSD deprecated gcc. Of particular highlight, I go into detail on the property that GPL is more a license about binaries and hackability as it applies to end users than about source code and extensibility as it applies to developers, as well as why this causes debates about this subject among a bunch of developers to be problematic, due to the different incentives developers have from end users.)
If I work on a gpl product I give up important characteristics of ownership in that work. I lose certain freedoms to gain others.
I define freedom as the ability to do as I wish. The gpl restricts that, and thus can't be said to be totally free.
The gpl is an interesting and in many ways compelling philosophy, but it ties you to its philosophy - it doesn't allow you the freedom to follow your own.
---
You mention long term value. I think that, like the medicine patent system, copy middle gives us higher long term ecosystem value at the expense of short term value. I should put my assumptions into an economic simulation some time and really model out the question of in which circumstance copy middle vs copy left gives higher long term value.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209724
As for your comments on the short vs. long term issues related to "#_advances_open_sourced", I think that is an interesting discussion to have at another time, as it is off-topic today: Stallman, as I have argued, does not care about attempts to maximize "value" in the way you have defined it, whether in the short or long term; instead, he has defined "value" as "freedom", and I imagine (or at least hope) that a future where mankind is living without all the fancy toys we have, but where the things we have we actually own ourselves, with nothing between us and modifying those things in the way we please would be a "win". All attempts to maximize the thing you care about are, to him, probably nothing more than a distraction. Again: that's not to discredit the things you care about; it is only to say that the goals themselves are mere opinions that people have, and that to understand others requires thinking in their terms.
"I have a right to own slaves" is a bad analogy, it doesn't mirror the kinds of trade offs we're discussing here. Slavery is not a case of balancing rights between two people, it is a case of one person's supposed right negating all rights in the other person. It's not very dissimilar from "I have the right to kill."
It is off-topic because it assumes that other people share your rubric. It is off-topic because it ignores the real question, which is whether that rubric is even the correct rubric to have. It is off-topic because it has nothing to do with whether Stallman should have said the things that he did. Let's say that someone else showed up, and said "we should be trying to optimize for money in Apple's bank account; instead of GPL, which seems extreme, we can strike a better balance that provides more money into Apple's bank account". Do any of us here care about the amount of money in Apple's bank account?
My contention is that caring about how much software in the world is open source, or how much software in the world exists, or what powers mankind has given access to that software, is an interesting and potentially valid rubric; and, it seems to be at least a major component of your rubric. Sadly, this means you are thereby doomed to spend forever arguing over how to best make tradeoffs to help you optimize for that rubric when dealing with people like Stallman. You will bring up that rubric, and they will seem incompetent to you, because they just don't get it: "they are throwing away so much value".
And they, in turn, will look at you as naive, because you are attempting to optimize for something they don't care about and would be perfectly happy to throw away entirely. Trying to argue whether, in the long term, BSD or GPL (for example; feel free to insert any decision that must be made instead) is good or bad for that specific rubric is entirely irrelevant to them, because even if BSD was amazing for that rubric, and even if GPL was miserable for it, at the end of the discussion the GPL advocate will say "well, that was an interesting waste of time: now where were we on trying to get everyone to use GPL?". You won't succeed in convincing them of anything: you are just wasting time.
Now, maybe, on the other side, I'd make some inroads with you by trying to argue that, in the long term, making things "too free for developers" actually comes around to "bite you in the ass" and that you end up in situations where, for example, all major mobile browsers are now effectively closed source in a world where everything is increasingly moving to mobile-only platforms, and that by having invested so strongly in WebCore (LGPL) instead of Gecko (GPL) we caused that reality by allowing WebKit (BSD) to exist... but this is going to be a really long and really painful argument that has nothing to do with Stallman hating on gcc, and it is not one I feel like I should have to spend my time today arguing. I honestly don't even think these arguments really get anywhere, and tend to just make everyone angry.
> "I have a right to own slaves" is a bad analogy, it doesn't mirror the kinds of trade offs we're discussing here. Slavery is not a case of balancing rights between two people, it is a case of one person's supposed right negating all rights in the other person. It's not very dissimilar from "I have the right to kill."
sigh As you seem to only be quoting the things I am saying in these immediate comment threads, without taking into account the expanded context I've now linked you to twice, I am going to have to consider this conversation a waste of time :/. The extent to which that exact analogy matters in the full argument I asked you to read is clearly "not much" (it was there, and is here, just an example of freedoms being relative; in the full argument I went into extreme detail on exactly how the freedoms here are subject), and yet you seem to only be responding to the teaser summary I laid out in this comment. I should not have to repeat that entire thread here: all I asked you to do was to read that discussion and come back, and I do not understand why that is so hard for you to do :(.
Im declining to continue as well, if you're going to throw around text walls full of straw men I see no value in continuing this conversation. Further the idea yield per word is very low in what you've writen here, so no I'm not going to go read your dissertations elsewhere.
Your strawmen so far in this thread: "right to own slaves" "value apple's cash balance as a social good"
Stalmans statement was about the good of gpl vs bsd, alternate rubrics are absolutely on topic.
The GPL can be described in pure terms of personal rights provided to the recipient of the software. It declare that a user has the right to be left alone when they run, modify or share the program. That naturally include not being harassed by legal or technical measures by whoever provided them with a copy, be that version modified or not.
There is no trade offs between different parties. The right to be left alone, or negative rights as its called by philosophers and political scientists[1], has a long history. It is also not a balancing act. It is simply Classical liberalism.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
Bsd gives you all of the rights you mentioned that gpl code does and more.
Copy != program.
If I take Firefox and make it Iceweasel, it is still Firefox but under a few changes. It is still the program that Mozilla developers built, and it is still the result of the hard work they spent.
If the GPL had a "user viewable, editable, compilable" bomb, but not a "free as in beer" clause; then it is plausible that we would see a drastic increase in user-editable paid commercial software.
Userland freedom and anti-capitalism don't have to be at odds.
Having said that, I find Stallman's war rhetoric increasingly disturbing:
> The only code that helps us and not our adversaries is copylefted code. Free software released under a pushover license is available for us to use, but available to our adversaries just as well.
This is the language of war propaganda, and shouldn't have any place in rational discussions.
> If that enables GCC to "win", the victory would be hollow, because it would not be a victory for what really matters: users' freedom.
All while endorsing the Affero GPL, a license that doesn't even allow users full control over their own servers.
Maybe if someone is that convinced of a cause, the ends seem to justify every means. I'm not sure what's going on at the FSF, but it seems that they've lost sight of some of their original principles.
Open source and commercial and "free" software are no more adversaries than vanilla and chocolate ice cream are adversaries.
As Steve jobs pointed out in (I believe) the late 90s - "Microsoft doesn't have to lose for us to win". Software is binary, the culture and mindset around it shouldn't be.
Thanks for mentioning the Affero version, I'd never come across it before. In what manner does this licence affect the users' control?
Quote: If some program on this server is released under the GNU Affero GPL, the server is required to offer the users the corresponding source of that program.
If you do not let other users communicate with the program, you do not need to do anything. For the AGPL to go into effect, you first have to make the active choice in making your computer and program public accessible for others.
May I draw your attention to a quote from the webpage in question:
"If some program on this server is released under the GNU Affero GPL, the server is required to offer the users the corresponding source of that program. That is good, but having this source code does not give them control over the computing done on that server. It also does not tell them what other software may be running on that server, examining or changing their data in other ways."
In essence, the way I understand it: Say you're running your homepage on "GNUpache", a hypothetical AGPL Apache clone. Then you must have a "download source" button somewhere on your homepage. (This button might point to the official distribution if the version you're running is entirely unpatched and only uses standard plugins. If you have any custom plugin, for example to integrate with your in-house authentication server, you must offer the code for that plugin as well.)
You might disagree on whether that violates your freedoms. But note that previously (with the standard GPL, and also standard copyright law), you were not even required to advertise what kind of webserver you're running.
Well, I suppose if you don't want to include a "download source" button on your webpage but you are required to do so, then that violates your freedom of use.
The compatibility of licences seems to be where most of the issues occur.
I've never heard a high-court judge mull this over, have you?
BTW Wow, another self-confessed code-monkey. Nice to meet you drdaeman.
That was quite a surprise for some after they got used to slapping GPLv2 software on a server and making it SaaS.
Note well that this does not force you to implement this feature if it does not already exist.
"If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work."
This formulation was criticized even by some who were otherwise sympathetic to the broader policy goal. AGPLv3, which is the AGPL that people generally understand to be 'the AGPL' today, says:
"[I]f you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software."
Note the absence of any sort of 'nonremovability of features' implementation of the policy.
EDIT:
Just an additional point: The current view of RMS and by extension the FSF is that a mere distributor of a version which the distributor has modified must make an effort to have the distributed version comply with that requirement if it did not do so previously (for example, by ensuring that the web application presents some sort of customary offer for source code, though that might not be best practice). There's still no 'feature nonremovability' requirement though.
This ended (if not resolved) an argument that had developed last year between me and Bradley Kuhn over whether AGPLv3's special requirement imposed any conditions on mere distributors (my view had been that it did not). For context, I was a lawyer for the FSF when the GPLv3 license family was being drafted and among other things worked on the drafting of AGPLv3 (as did RMS and Bradley).
(slight further edit)
This means, effectively, that something very much like what I said still applies; If the program did not originally have a facility for downloading source, and you did not modify it, you do not have to add any such facility.
> The current view of RMS […] is that a mere distributor of a version which the distributor has modified must make an effort to have the distributed version comply with that requirement if it did not do so previously
If this is so, I would like to hear the reasoning behind it; Do you have a link or reference?
We assume that Foo, the original copyright holder of W, did not have to "comply" with AGPLv3 section 13 not ony because there was no AGPLv3 licensor upstream from Foo but also because W wouldn't have triggered section 13 under any reasonable reading, since W was not 'remote-network-interactive' software.
Clearly if Bar publicly deploys Y, Bar must comply with AGPLv3 section 13. The question is whether Bar has to do something like ensure Y presents a download-source link if Bar merely publishes Y for others to download and install themselves.
Bradley's view is that Bar does have such an obligation, for two reasons. One, this is how Bradley reads the text of AGPLv3 section 13 paragraph 1. (I admit that this is one plausible reading of it.) Two, if this weren't the proper interpretation, then there would be a loophole of sorts, or at least a policy frustration, in AGPLv3: If Bar gives Y to Baz, and merely complies with the GPLv3 subset of AGPLv3, then Baz will have the Corresponding Source, but Baz will have no obligation to make that source code available to Baz's users of Baz's deployment of Y. Those users will thus never get the improvements Bar made to W unless they also get a compliantly-distributed copy of Y from Bar.
Bradley was closely involved in the drafting of the original (2002) AGPL and I think his interpretation is influenced by that.
RMS sided with Bradley: he felt that in this scenario Bar had to do something to Y to make sure that when Y was run it would comply with the source code availability requirement of AGPLv3 section 13.
I don't believe this interpretation has been recorded in the FSF's GNU Licenses FAQ yet. I don't have any link or reference other than what I'm reporting right now (this came out of an email discussion).
Note that I do not think RMS would take the view reported above if W had been remote-network-interactive software, though I have not asked this question of RMS. W failing to "self-comply" with AGPLv3 section 13 in that case ought to mean that no downstream distributee ought to be held to have to comply with it (somewhat like (A)GPLv3 5d/GPLv2 2c, which was part of the inspiration for the original AGPL).
My point was that if Bar does not modify the program, then section 13 paragraph 1 does not apply, and Bar is not obliged to insert code to satisfy the condition stated there.
You have corrected my slight misconception of the AGPL though; I originally thought Bar could modify W to create whatever he liked without having to insert a facility to download source code, if none previously existed.
That led to his views that: 1) if any software is used by users, its code should also be available to and modifiable by those same users; and 2) anyone who tries to keep users from getting access to the code of the systems they use (or uses legal means to keep them from modifying it when they do get access to it), is the users' adversary.
If anything the Affero GPL fits the 1980s motivation better than the original GPL does, since Stallman has always had the view that users of multiuser systems, not only the sysops, should also have full source access. A user of a SaaS app is basically the modern-era version of a non-privileged user of a multiuser Unix system. I'm not sure why that use-case wasn't included in the original GPL, come to think of it. My guess is just that it wasn't in practice possible to do what Stallman objected to at a large scale, given technology of the day. If you developed a proprietary app based on GNU software, installed it as sysop, and then didn't want to share the source, your userbase would generally be limited to one site. In theory you could run something more like today's SaaS: a central Unix system where you sold accounts but never distributed the software. In that case Matlab could incorporate GPL'd components without releasing their code by installing Matlab only on in-house servers. They'd sell people shell accounts on mathworks.com, but would never let the software leave the building. In practice this wasn't done at large scale, and instead any widescale usage required distributing the code to sysops at other sites to install local copies (e.g. Matlab licensed its software to departmental and corporate Matlab servers), at which point the GPL would kick in if the software were built on GNU software.
The Affero GPL in a sense formalizes that previous status quo, by saying that the GPL distribution requirements don't apply for in-house usage within one site, but do apply once you're making the software available to users outside the organization (even if "making available" is now via telnet or ssh or vnc or http rather than binary distribution). The law around proprietary software has also been moving in this direction, to consider hosted usage to invoke a distribution-like copyright requirement such as "public performance", even if no binary goes over the wire. For example, if I buy an NES game legally, but then I sell accounts where thousands of people can VNC in to my server and play it on an emulator, that is probably not legit, even though I am technically never distributing the ROM to them (it never leaves my servers). This isn't completely sorted out though.
Stallman isn't exactly known for letting practicality and feasibility compromise his ideals. Given that, as you said, the usecase was widespread when the FSF was founded, I consider it much more likely that he considered this case and didn't include it on purpose.
However, if you or anyone else has a good (older) quote from RMS on whether he considers it evil to connect your free browser to a proprietary HTTP server, I'd be very interested to see it.
The only thing I could find (actually rather recent, 2010's The JavaScript Trap [1]) only argues that a free browser shouldn't run proprietary JavaScript on your own computer, because that would violate your software freedom. It says nothing to suggest that the HTTP download of data from a proprietary server is considered a problem.
When it comes to license choice, he's always been about a specific kind of pragmatism: what will in practice produce more free software? The GPL, LGPL, Affero GPL, etc. are means to that end employed in different situations. He could be empirically wrong with some of his choices (and probably is), but I don't see him as being particularly tied to the mechanism, vs. the outcome.
I actually think there's a decent argument that the existence of the Affero GPL encourages more free software in specific niches. Some companies are willing to release their SaaS apps under the Affero GPL who wouldn't have been willing to release them under the BSD, LGPL, or GPL, because they fear those licenses enable proprietary competitors. For example, Launchpad is AGPL. If the AGPL didn't exist, my guess is that they'd just have stayed proprietary, like GitHub has.
I'd guess the textures and sounds you would transmit are copyrighted anyway?
When a set of powerfull people vow to destroy one of your freedoms, you only have two options. And yes, this is disturbing.
> > The lack of FSF copyright assignment for LLVM is a problem. It may even be a bigger problem than what we think. Then again, it may not. I just don't know. What I do know is that this must absolutely be resolved before we even think of adding LLVM to any branch. Chris said he'd be adding LLVM to the apple branch soon. I hope the FSF assignment is worked out by then. I understand that even code in branches should be under FSF copyright assignment.
> This is a solvable problem, and has been pointed out to Chris repeatedly, by many people, at various venues, for over a year.
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2004-10/msg01146.html
> He keeps hand waving, saying that it's possible.
> Great.
> I say, enough grandstanding: it's not enough to be possible, it needs to be actual. If it is indeed actually possible to release LLVM under the GPL, then he needs to pick a version and GPL it. Then we can get serious.
> Make it so.
> He seems to be operating under the mistaken idea that the GCC community can go ahead and make plans around LLVM being free as defined by the GNU project, without it actually being so.
Another HN thread pointed out a subsequent email in which Mr Raymond realised that the GCC compiler did in fact have a sort of plug-in system.
(People he disagrees with in the open source world, like ESR/OSI, who he considers neutral or incompletely free. He isn't respectful of people like Bill Gates who promote actively non-open software)
Someone writes a revolutionary piece of software, then it is released under ....
0 > a closed source
1 > a bsd style
or
2 > gpl v3
.... licence.
I think the last choice would have a far more profound effect upon the science and business of computing than the two alternatives.
EDIT: Oh, tor is under bsd, how would things be if it were released under gpl v3?
I purposely refrained from giving one because it is a hypothetical situation. If you want a potential example I had a quick scroll through the GPL FAQ:
> "All GNU GPL versions permit such combinations privately; they also permit distribution of such combinations provided the combination is released under the same GNU GPL version. The other license is compatible with the GPL if it permits this too."
Imagine BSD under GPL, since in this universe it is apparently used on Apple OS's.
His argument about not being able to install modified versions of open source apps on ios is either a blatant lie or sheer ignorance.
But that doesn't matter - his opinion is quite obvious as soon as he uses the word "win".
It's apparently too horrendous for stallman to imagine a world where some people support and use commercial software and some support and use open source software and some support and use "free" software, without constantly getting into a pissing match.
Stallman is frankly no better than a religious fundamentalist claiming abortion and condoms are the work of the devil, and not only will they avoid them, they will lobby governments to enact laws banning such items.
This is only true if you are willing and able to pay (and are allowed to pay) Apple $99 to get into their developer program, for a limited number of devices, to get access to a now closed-source fork of LLVM (the AArch64 support is still not merged, and no code from Xcode 5 has seen the light of day now over four months later) that would let you swap in replacement code; and then, even after compiling it, you wouldn't be able to freely redistribute it to others without submitting it to Apple's store review process (which might very well reject it for any number of reasons, including "similar to existing apps", which is actually a documented rejection criteria).
There is also nothing stopping you installing the app onto others devices the same way.
Nope, you can't install to a personal iOS device without the dev cert either.
Unless you've jailbroken the device.
It may be surprising to you, but fighting for a cause is not bad because you are fighting for a cause, but because you are fighting for an idiotic cause. Religious fundamentalists aren't idiots because they are fighting for something, but they are idiots because they are fighting for something that would be detrimental to society (including themselves). You may remember there were people who fought against slavery, they even lobbied government to enact laws banning slavery. If only someone had stopped those fundamentalists!
Also, you might want to familiarize yourself with RMS's position sufficiently to not fall for "commercial vs. free software". RMS never opposed commercial software, in fact he is very much for commercial software. Chances are you don't have a clue what you are actually arguing against. Go, read the FSF's FAQ, so you can at least argue without using any strawmans.
Anyway, fundamentalists are bad because fundamentalists are bad, period. Even if they're fighting for the right thing, they're still doing it for the wrong reasons, and people need to at least acknowledge that before lionizing them too much. I'd much rather get behind someone doing the right thing for the right reasons, or at least maintain a modicum of skepticism about everyone if no such leader exists.
"fundamentalists are bad because fundamentalists are bad, period" - are you serious? That is supposed to be a rational argument? Arguments of the form "x is bad because x is bad, period" are quite typical of ... fundamentalists! And you know why those are bad? Because they don't demonstrate any rational connection to the real effects the promoted values or actions would have on humanity.
And now, would you mind explaining how all of that contradicts what I've been saying? Or does it?
I associate that term with people who adopt a specific point of view on faith, rather than from a long process of observation and reasoning. They don't change that point of view, and at no point engage in any ongoing observation and reasoning to revise their view, once it's been adopted. They also tend to have very simplistic, binary views on the subject matter ("x is evil, y is good, and there are no gray areas between them"), and their views are as much or more about making people feel good about themselves than anything else (they get a rush out of feeling like they know the truth, and we could all be living in a utopia if only everyone would listen to them).
So, based on that definition, yeah, fundamentalists are bad, even when they happen to be fighting for something you might agree with. It's like a broken clock being right twice a day- just because they're right about something at this moment doesn't mean people should emulate them or buy into all of their other beliefs. In fact, doing so would make the world a worse place, not a better one. By all means, fight alongside them if they happen to be doing the right thing, but be wary of them in all other respects, and don't take anything they say at face value. Don't dismiss it out of hand either, just maintain a reasonable amount of skepticism about such people. I include RMS and the FSF in that group.
Now, I can totally see how someone might say that what I wrote above is a fundamentalist criticism of fundamentalism. I get it. It's sort of like people who complain about other people being intolerant of intolerance. It's kind of a tautology, but that's how I feel (for the record, I am also intolerant of intolerance, so guilty as charged).
Now, I never said fundamentalism (by that definition) was good. I only applied exactly what you are saying to what you were saying: People who fight against fundamentalism for the wrong reason are doing the wrong thing. There are good reasons for fighting against fundamentalism, "fundamentalism is bad because it's bad" is not one of them, as that is just dogma, aka blind faith, aka fundamentalism. But I guess you did already understand that - though it's not at all similar to the case of "intolerance of intolerance", except at a very superficial level. There is a contradiction between "advocating for a world without intolerance" and "defending the intolerance of people", which is why that conflict has to be resolved somehow, and it's easy to resolve it in such a way that "intolerance of intolerance" really is a perfectly self-consistent concept that provides real value to humanity (when your goal is to improve people's well-being, there is no contradiction in allowing gay people to be openly gay (tolerance) and also putting people who try to kill gay people in prison ("intolerance")), which is why that "criticism" really doesn't make any sense - it's essentially just being obsessed with a word which has a somewhat ambiguous meaning. It is perfectly possible, though, to provide rational arguments for why fundamentalism is bad, ultimately grounding it in almost universal preferences like avoidance of pain, suffering, sickness, ... - I did provide one rough version of such an argument in my last post. That's why "fundamentalism is bad because it's bad" is bad.
Now, it's obvious that those same rules do apply to the FSF and RMS, but I doubt there are many devout RMS worshippers. And if you were trying to imply that RMS was a fundamentalist - well, I guess I would suggest that you try to understand his position and his arguments, because, you know, he does actually have arguments, and those are not quotes from a holy book, but actually rational statements based on explicitly stated premises. When doing that, you might even see that he understands the gray areas around his position very well, it's just not his primary job to promote the gray areas - but if you don't call Bill Gates a fundamentalist because he doesn't promote Debian, possibly calling RMS a fundamentalist because he doesn't promote proprietary software isn't quite appropriate either? One certainly can disagree with him on things, but claiming that his world view was purely based on dogma says more about you than about him. Now, maybe I am putting in your mouth what stephenr said, in that case take it less personally ;-)
"On the other hand, Stallman's goals (having the best compiler technology be foverer a copylefted one) is perhaps achievable by having the GCC developers abandon GCC, switch to working on a fork of LLVM/Clang relicensed to GPLv3 with continuous merging of Apple's work, and make that fork far superior to Apple's version."
I assume this person means the changes would be licensed as GPLv3 because you cannot just go and relicense someone else's code without the copyright holder's permission.
Calling it "Apple's version" might be a tad bit offensive to the other companies working on LLVM / clang.
>> "by having the GCC developers abandon GCC, switch to working on a fork of LLVM/Clang __relicensed__ to GPLv3"
>> Yeah, not allowed by copyright law. They aren't the authors, so they could only GPL code they wrote.
If even the best developers of the world (allow me to exaggerate a little, it's from my perspective anyways) aren't allowed to work on OSS, then this is really a CUT of Freedom. I would love to see GCC people switch to LLVM GPL.
I see it this ways: GPL is an insurance that guarantees that whatever is made with this code, will benefit this code in a way that everyone can take care of that benefit.
Even though I'm new to this, I don't understand the hate towards Mr. Stallman, he seems to be a fine man and his own strong opinions on a movement he has started. There is nothing wrong with it, he's not beating someone up, just because he's not of the same opinion, he's keeping the premise of his movement alive. That's a good trait, not a bad one, esp. because he keep talking openly about it. He's not wirting private confidential emails to discuss such things, but makes it public, so that everyone can see. it. Imagine someone publicises only one of your emails attached to your own name, it could be thrown out of context and people could start a shitstorm, just because wrong word was used, or because of your look . Takes guts to say your opinion, non-anonymously, when you already have reputation in stack.
The GPL is not what allows users to get what they need from software or technology. It's the market. As long as you have a free market, with able competitors, you don't need the GPL, and the whole discussion of "free software" is a red-herring. As far as mainstream users are concerned, you don't need the source when you have the dollar.
Stallman's initial experience with closed software was not in a free market, so I can see how he's grown up with a colored view. The world has changed, however, and he has not.
Stallman's original problem was essentially, "I had a broken car once and I couldn't get the part I needed to repair it. That sucked, so all manufacturers should provide everyone with all the information needed make any replacement part, or turn my Beetle into a Porsche."
In today's world that problem really doesn't exist anymore. Software is a mass market product, and the software that is produced already conforms to what people want pretty well. Sure, I'll take cheaper parts for my car, and I love getting something for nothing, but on the list of humanity's problems, non-GPL software is very, very low.
On one way, it is clear that pure GPL software is not a way for whole industry to function. Taken to the extreme, 100% GPL software, from what would software developers live from?
Not all use cases can be applied to support, training or selling hardware.
On the other had the other open source licenses, promote the freedom of the software developer, but not the end user.
Which is usually of no importance when the end user is a plain user.
However developers are also end users from the products of others.
I grew up in culture, where we had to pay for every piece of software we used, except if we typed it ourselves from code listinings in magazines.
So in one extreme we have the everything free model, and in the other we have the old model.
Currently we seem to be more or less in the middle.
I just wonder to which direction will the balance change.
Home users, for example.
As usual, from their craft, the software development. GPL-everything scenario doesn't mean there won't be need to develop software anymore.
It is quite usual to be paid to hack upon FLOSS code. Neither it seem too weird to be paid to write new FLOSS projects. A customer needs a solution and has money, an engineer has skills and needs money.
The only downside (or upside, depending on point of view) is that developers won't be able to make $0.99-priced apps unless they really make it in mere minutes of their time. They'll have to raise funding using some form of threshold pledge system.
It tends to be difficult to get people to spend money even when they do get something in return. Many charities and projects run on donations only, and while many of them fail, so do commercial projects where you pay to get "something in return". I don't think the problem has anything to do with pledge systems.
It highly depends on the category and user. Outside crowd funding, no one will pay for the development of a game if there is no return on investment.
Despite having a slight preference for FLOSS software, I also believe that whoever invests the money or time to develop a piece of software should be able to choose how they license it.
In some cases it makes sense to open source some software immediately, e.g. when there is little loss of income. Sometimes it makes sense to sell it first and open source it later (e.g. see Id's engines). Sometimes it does not make sense to make the code freely available (e.g. if it destroys the value of your company).
Does it always lead to the best outcome? Certainly not! But with freedom comes responsibility. And ethical individuals and companies will want to contribute to their community and society in ways that is possible for them.
From people who pay them to develop software that they need? Last time I saw statistics on the subject, developers paid to code for internal use was still more common that developers working on software meant for the public.
But lets disregard that, and only look on the proprietary model. You trade software for money, and then you threaten them with lawsuit and jail if the customer share or modify the work.
Can we have a software industry without the threat of lawsuit hanging above every customers head?
You know, I'm under the impression that nearly all of the current problems would simply go away if copyrights duration was reduced to a sane amount. But one of those problems is that there is a set of incompetent people with way more power than they deserve, and those people won't help fix it.
As for reducing the duration of copyright: I am not sure, binaries without source that you are allowed to disassemble still aren't anywhere near source code, don't you think?
It might be just that GCC is such a flagship project for them, but, really, the level of concern seems unwarranted. You'd think LLVM was the first software ever to use a permissive license or something...
We don't do everything in public purely because of internal constraints of the companies that we work for and those won't go away without significant societal changes (i.e., the necessary changes vastly transcend the developers' own attitudes on the issue: we're talking changes at the levels of entire business models).
[...]
> What about iPhone platform support?
I assume you mean that the platform is locked down?
Well, that's their platform. They make the rules for who gets to compile for it. Now, you may say "well, they shouldn't restrict who gets to compile for their platform!" and that's fine, but it's a different issue, one which goes to the core of Apple's business model and the society that enables it and the individuals that make up that society. Even if LLVM/Clang were to magically become GPL'd tomorrow, the platform would still be locked down.
[...]
It's myopic to think that the software is somehow the key factor here: the assault on freedom in this situation is the incentive to keep it proprietary, and that is a much larger issue. There is a similar assault on freedom from the fact that their hardware designs are proprietary as well, and the incentives are similar.
[...]
In my experience, Stallman's view is extremely myopic because the real impediments to free software are larger societal issues[1]. Within the hacker community these issues don't really exist (Eric Raymond's essays cover this well), and so the default is that code is free software (four freedoms), but the other 99.99% of society is still stuck with archaic principles, and any time that a hacker's paycheck comes from "the rest of society", they are subject to a world where these issues exist.
[1] The GPLv3 "anti-Tivo-ization" wording is a perfect example that shows that confining your view just to software is myopic. Why shouldn't we want the entire device and all its chips to be free also? Why shouldn't the company's internal discussions be done in public? The answer to these questions is the same as the answer to "why does non-free software exist?".
He's been explicitly not willing to consider issues I'm talking about. In fact, he's quite happy to live in a system which enables and produces conditions which enable the existence of proprietary software. He's never been working to change those issues. In fact, the concept of copyleft, the mechanism it relies on, is firmly rooted in the status quo. You say it yourself, it uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce "openness", but the crucial point is that it's an openness with a severely limited scope. It does absolutely zero to change society in any meaningful, fundamental way. The very act of relying on capitalist state legal system to force people to be "open" serves only to further legitimize that very system which makes possible, even desirable, for things like proprietary software to exist. The GPL isn't even a subversive hack of copyright law--the law was meant to enable authors to put almost any kind of conditions on the use and distribution of their works, as they please. It's the purpose of copyright law all along to enable things like the GPL. The fact that it's highly unusual to release works under such conditions is beside the point. Stallman almost autistically only sees his most immediate grievance, the incidental fact that software can be restrictive to its users, but is completely blind to the actual fundamental social causes of the issue. So no, the GPL is not in any meaningful way successful at actually changing society, the whole concept is fundamentally conformant to existing socio-economic conditions.
In parallel, he's very aware of the problem of user adoption, but accepting nonfree software in FOSS environments destroys the purpose. Therefore, the only way to achieve total freedom is to turn to the users. And this is done the following way: (1) make excellent FOSS alternatives, and (2) tell everyone the benefits of FOSS and point them to the excellent free software that was made.
APPLE is one of the few companies that refuses to use GPL because they are staunchly anti copy left. There are many companies out there that feel otherwise.
Before I get too far off the road, the point I am trying to make is that the business models ARE changing back to be more free. They changed in the first place from free to proprietary in the late 70s.
I'm fairly certain that no company chose GPL because the management's first concern was joining FSF's struggle against proprietary software. Businesses can't operate that way. Whether a company adopts GPL or not depends on perceived business benefits of adoption. So the question of this or that company adopting GPL or not doesn't have anything to do with moral reasoning behind GPL and is therefore irrelevant to what we're talking about.
Yes, they're changing, in the same way that a factory may change when it adopts new machinery. Companies who adopt copyleft adopt it because of the "open source" philosophy, not because of the "free software" philosophy. This is actually one of Stallman's talking points (open source vs. free software) I'm very sympathetic to.
Your last comment has been made a gazillion times over the last 20+ years but it's just not that simple. There was no time in which the default business model for software was free. What there was, was a time in which there was no mass-market business model for software, period. There was no such thing as a store you could walk into and buy software prior to the mid-'70s, and a much larger proportion of software developers were scientists, engineers, and hobbyists, who passed around a lot of common code, as they still do today. It's not like there was some golden utopia back in 1973 where the world's #1 spreadsheet application was free software, because such things didn't exist back then.
Hrm? I think a lot of companies are pretty wary of GPLv3. And even GPL in general, really; look at Android. About the only remaining GPL component is the Linux kernel (and that's GPLv2, of course).
Only major corporate adoption of GPLv3 I can think if is some Oracle dual-licensed GPL/commercial stuff.
EDIT: It's worth noting, of course, that Apple does still use GPL stuff, just not GPLv3 stuff.
Copy left tears from you ownership of your incremental work, it makes your work an ideological prisoner of the commons.
Copy left ensures a certain degree of openness, but open does not equal free.
Only copy middle is truly free software.