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It’s important to remember that for most of the commercial software, you are not technically the owner because licenses will stipulate that you are merely renti

It’s important to remember that for most of the commercial software, you are not technically the owner because licenses will stipulate that you are merely renting it. So screwdriver analogy technically don’t apply. It’s more like renting a car and company can tell you arbitrarily what you can do or don’t with it. Another important thing to realize, if we had a magical replicator which duplicated a screw driver precisely with negligible cost, then screw driver industry will end up with exact same licensing models and there’s will be a version of RMS preaching for free screw drivers. The fundamental issue is not with software or people doing it but the economy. Developing large scale software takes time, capital, risk and lots of people who needs to pay their bills. If one insists that all software must be free then all development needs to occur as free time hobby activity. Licensing and laws evolve to allow for doing things at scale and as dedicated profession and as all evolutions you only approximate the ideal with lots of baggage. The laws of economy requires that participants must play the zero sum game and therefore parts of software deemed as competitive advantage would have to be kept secret or uncopiable by creating law. The solution for scaling and dreams of things being free are incompatible with each other. This is the hard lesson to learn, very much like Gödel’s realization.

lapinot 8y ago
> If one insists that all software must be free then all development needs to occur as free time hobby activity. I don't agree with this[1]. R&D in a competitive environment can probably me modeled by the prisoners dilemma, where full cooperation is the most rewarding play but is not an equilibrium. Free software attempts to solve this by changing the rules and allowing only cooperation, thus ensuring everyone the highest reward (eg medium investment and high-quality IP). This could be seen as beneficial by commercial actors as it doesn't question commercial value per se, only commercial value of intellectual property. The problem i see is not scaling, it's time constraint: if you want something quick, the only way to force it is to make it yourself, eg high investment. If the result contains some IP you have little incentives to make it free. So i would refine your statement as: new and emerging free software must be developed either in free time or slowly. Which is pretty much natural when you think about it: transitioning between "IP has value" to "IP has no value" will be hard and slow. But the more things are free, the more it will be easy to make things free. The only real obstacle to that model are monopolistic actors capable of huge investment (eg make something non-free in a free world), but it's no news that monopolistic actors are bad for the commons and should be broken up for tons of different reasons. [1] Actually since FS can be seen as part of a vision which challenges our current work-based society, it actually could occur all in "free time". But this is to distinguish from hobby activity: the first is productive while the second is not.

lapinot 8y ago

> If one insists that all software must be free then all development needs to occur as free time hobby activity. I don't agree with this[1]. R&D in a competitive environment can probably me modeled by the prisoners dilemma, where full cooperation is the most rewarding play but is not an equilibrium. Free software attempts to solve this by changing the rules and allowing only cooperation, thus ensuring everyone the highest reward (eg medium investment and high-quality IP). This could be seen as beneficial by commercial actors as it doesn't question commercial value per se, only commercial value of intellectual property. The problem i see is not scaling, it's time constraint: if you want something quick, the only way to force it is to make it yourself, eg high investment. If the result contains some IP you have little incentives to make it free. So i would refine your statement as: new and emerging free software must be developed either in free time or slowly. Which is pretty much natural when you think about it: transitioning between "IP has value" to "IP has no value" will be hard and slow. But the more things are free, the more it will be easy to make things free. The only real obstacle to that model are monopolistic actors capable of huge investment (eg make something non-free in a free world), but it's no news that monopolistic actors are bad for the commons and should be broken up for tons of different reasons. [1] Actually since FS can be seen as part of a vision which challenges our current work-based society, it actually could occur all in "free time". But this is to distinguish from hobby activity: the first is productive while the second is not.