4 ms·

I think it is actually the opposite of that. > You have a choice between deserving a reward and not getting a material reward, and getting one but not deservin

by ohyes 16y ago

I think it is actually the opposite of that. > You have a choice between deserving a reward and not getting a material reward, and getting one but not deserving it. I think that RMS sees our current society as intrinsically flawed with regard to how it is that we reward people for their good and hard work (and the behavior patterns associated with that work). It is not that he lives in a world where no one has to make any money. He is a tremendous hacker and has analyzed the system. He has come to the conclusion that the system in which we live is flawed. The way that you (generally) make money is by hurting other people. Free software is based on the idea that we should change what behavior we reward. The idea being that proprietary software inhibits freedom of a computer literate (programming literate) person. We should not reward this behavior. 'Making money is evil' is a tremendous oversimplification of the philosophy. If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects. This might be putting the cart before the horse, however. What is really needed is a way to reward people handsomely for working on free software projects. Then it would slowly become a norm to have access to the source code, and society (maybe) follow.

benofsky 16y ago
The fact of the matter though is that it is not financially viable in any way (or ever will be) for all software to be "free" in the sense of RMS "free". How could a company like Google, built fundamentally on trade secrets, ever be developed. No one would invest the kind of money that was required to build Google into what it is today if Microsoft could go to Github and download "google-search". It is pie in the sky stuff, unfortunately.
- mquander 16y ago
  Wait a second. Why do you think the world is better, having Google, than it would be if "google-search" was on Github and hosted by a bunch of people? That sounds worse to me. I assume you think that the existence of Google has led to other good things, but I don't see any reason to believe that the people at Google are doing better or more valuable work there than they would be if Google didn't exist.
  - benofsky 16y ago
    I am not stating my point clearly, sorry. My point is no business could be built around search if all the implementation was "free" (in the FSF sense) because how would any business have an edge which allowed them to be competitive. Perhaps I'm being naive but this is just the way I see it.
    - quadhome 16y ago
      I don't think the software is Google's sole advantage. The best people, an already massive and growing infrastructure, and a proven-successful platform are all things that can't be readily duplicated.
- ohyes 16y ago
  It is not currently financially viable for all software to be free. However, A society in which it is viable for all software to be free is not terribly difficult to imagine. (There are numerous possible scenarios, state funded works, high literacy and citizen programmers, maybe some sort of programming by the job system.) In this situation, monopolies like Google and Microsoft probably wouldn't exist at all. I think search is an excellent example, actually, of something that is required for the proper functioning of the web. It is practically a public good. If we found out Google were biasing its search results, it would be a very big deal (but how do you know it isn't?). If it were open source, we would know. I guess the question then is 'who pays for the hardware to run open source Google,' and that is a good question, to which I do not know the answer, but seeing as anyone can download the software, it seems anyone could.
bad_user 16y ago
> If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects. Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. This is also an oversimplification, but implementing shit without understanding the impact on society historically has led to disaster. Saying that it would be better if the world did X or Y is very shortsighted without having stats to back your claims ... especially without first demonstrating a sustainable economic model that can survive X or Y (like selling shit and receiving money for it). More likely would be that software development would be a true commodity OR software would evolve to make Free Software irrelevant. And it is already happening. Every interesting application that happened in the last 5 to 10 years is a web application. Web applications are services, not products ... with web apps, people aren't having access to the binary of that application and it doesn't even run on their machines anymore (with the possible exception of distributed systems, like Bittorrent ... but you can see how well Chandler worked out and compare it with the Google Apps).
- ohyes 16y ago
  > Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. bad_user, I'm sorry, I am not quite understanding your definition of 'almost every freedom'. There are plenty of freedoms that I enjoy which are not economically driven. Freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, freedom of the press, etc, etc. I mean, are we talking fundamental freedoms? RMS sees the ability to hack your own system as a fundamental freedom. Computer as an extension of your mind/person. It would be like me telling you that you are not allowed think certain thoughts. I don't disagree that there is no data to prove that free software would do this, but then again, how exactly are you going to get economic statistics and test cases without going ahead and trying to do it? I also don't disagree that RMS is taking the wrong approach in not having a sustainable economic model for free software (I think I explicitly stated that, in fact). I see no reason why a web app would not be viable GPL (or massively distributed for that matter). HTML, Javascript and CSS are prime examples of successful open platforms. HTML is so easy to learn because you can take any web page and look at the source. The real secret sauce in something like Facebook is the huge number of users. You have to be on Facebook because all of your friends are on Facebook. Posting some code to the internet wouldn't instantly remove their real advantage. (Similar could be said of something like gmail).
sbov 16y ago
>If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects. I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by 'society' but: The view that society would become computer literate is incredibly naive. People have limited time and want to focus on things they enjoy. See: every other thing in life that is already free. Like your car, your bicycle, your front lawn, your kitchen cabinetry, and what you eat for lunch tomorrow. People want things to work, and they want them to look nice. They generally want no hand in doing so to the point where they are considered literate on the subject. This is why fast/frozen food is popular, and most people take their car to a mechanic to change their brakes. Life is full of too many things to become literate at everything in life. On the whole, computers are no different than any other object in life. Most people just want them to work, just like I just want my car's brakes to slow my car down.

by ohyes 16y ago

benofsky 16y ago

The fact of the matter though is that it is not financially viable in any way (or ever will be) for all software to be "free" in the sense of RMS "free". How could a company like Google, built fundamentally on trade secrets, ever be developed. No one would invest the kind of money that was required to build Google into what it is today if Microsoft could go to Github and download "google-search". It is pie in the sky stuff, unfortunately.

mquander 16y ago
Wait a second. Why do you think the world is better, having Google, than it would be if "google-search" was on Github and hosted by a bunch of people? That sounds worse to me. I assume you think that the existence of Google has led to other good things, but I don't see any reason to believe that the people at Google are doing better or more valuable work there than they would be if Google didn't exist.
- benofsky 16y ago
  I am not stating my point clearly, sorry. My point is no business could be built around search if all the implementation was "free" (in the FSF sense) because how would any business have an edge which allowed them to be competitive. Perhaps I'm being naive but this is just the way I see it.
  - quadhome 16y ago
    I don't think the software is Google's sole advantage. The best people, an already massive and growing infrastructure, and a proven-successful platform are all things that can't be readily duplicated.
ohyes 16y ago
It is not currently financially viable for all software to be free. However, A society in which it is viable for all software to be free is not terribly difficult to imagine. (There are numerous possible scenarios, state funded works, high literacy and citizen programmers, maybe some sort of programming by the job system.) In this situation, monopolies like Google and Microsoft probably wouldn't exist at all. I think search is an excellent example, actually, of something that is required for the proper functioning of the web. It is practically a public good. If we found out Google were biasing its search results, it would be a very big deal (but how do you know it isn't?). If it were open source, we would know. I guess the question then is 'who pays for the hardware to run open source Google,' and that is a good question, to which I do not know the answer, but seeing as anyone can download the software, it seems anyone could.

bad_user 16y ago

> If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects. Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. This is also an oversimplification, but implementing shit without understanding the impact on society historically has led to disaster. Saying that it would be better if the world did X or Y is very shortsighted without having stats to back your claims ... especially without first demonstrating a sustainable economic model that can survive X or Y (like selling shit and receiving money for it). More likely would be that software development would be a true commodity OR software would evolve to make Free Software irrelevant. And it is already happening. Every interesting application that happened in the last 5 to 10 years is a web application. Web applications are services, not products ... with web apps, people aren't having access to the binary of that application and it doesn't even run on their machines anymore (with the possible exception of distributed systems, like Bittorrent ... but you can see how well Chandler worked out and compare it with the Google Apps).

ohyes 16y ago
> Almost every freedom you enjoy came as an economic incentive first. bad_user, I'm sorry, I am not quite understanding your definition of 'almost every freedom'. There are plenty of freedoms that I enjoy which are not economically driven. Freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, right to bear arms, freedom of the press, etc, etc. I mean, are we talking fundamental freedoms? RMS sees the ability to hack your own system as a fundamental freedom. Computer as an extension of your mind/person. It would be like me telling you that you are not allowed think certain thoughts. I don't disagree that there is no data to prove that free software would do this, but then again, how exactly are you going to get economic statistics and test cases without going ahead and trying to do it? I also don't disagree that RMS is taking the wrong approach in not having a sustainable economic model for free software (I think I explicitly stated that, in fact). I see no reason why a web app would not be viable GPL (or massively distributed for that matter). HTML, Javascript and CSS are prime examples of successful open platforms. HTML is so easy to learn because you can take any web page and look at the source. The real secret sauce in something like Facebook is the huge number of users. You have to be on Facebook because all of your friends are on Facebook. Posting some code to the internet wouldn't instantly remove their real advantage. (Similar could be said of something like gmail).

sbov 16y ago

>If everyone adopted the free software maxim of not using proprietary software, it would be inevitable that society would become extremely computer literate, and/or we would develop a way of compensating people for working on free software projects. I guess it depends on what exactly you mean by 'society' but: The view that society would become computer literate is incredibly naive. People have limited time and want to focus on things they enjoy. See: every other thing in life that is already free. Like your car, your bicycle, your front lawn, your kitchen cabinetry, and what you eat for lunch tomorrow. People want things to work, and they want them to look nice. They generally want no hand in doing so to the point where they are considered literate on the subject. This is why fast/frozen food is popular, and most people take their car to a mechanic to change their brakes. Life is full of too many things to become literate at everything in life. On the whole, computers are no different than any other object in life. Most people just want them to work, just like I just want my car's brakes to slow my car down.