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> while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license. I wish free software advoca

> while commercial developers of immoral proprietary software have been required to license the toolkit under a commercial license. I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Now, because the data is not on your machine, you don’t own the data. Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days.

cjfd 6y ago
I would find it a bit hard to argue that the nature of free software has anything to do with this. Why couldn't all of this surveillance and the selling of user data have been based on proprietary software? You could maybe say it would be too expensive but really.... I am sure that if you want a billion licenses of something you could get a volume discount or otherwise write the necessary proprietary software yourself or buy from the least expensive party and so on.... Have we forgotten the economic principle that in an efficient market the price of a good approaches the marginal cost of producing one more instance of that good. The proprietary market may be a bit less efficient but as long as there are multiple parties who can offer the good the principle should work to a certain extent.
bad_user 6y ago
While I agree that proprietary software isn't necessarily immoral, I take objection with your premise. The software used for collecting and selling user data is proprietary, all of it. This is because: 1. if it were developed as open source, in the open, people could inspect what it does 2. profiling user data is most often a company's core competency, the trade secret that they won't give away If not, then please point out to free software packages I can use to collect and profile user data, because I have a business idea I'd like to try and no resources for software development. Oh, do you mean those companies run their proprietary stuff on top of Linux? Well, if not Linux, it would have been Solaris, or Windows. The higher cost wouldn't have been much of a deterrence, in capitalism due to competition the cost does eventually come down.
elcomet 6y ago
I don't see how those two are related. You can sell user data using free or proprietary software. People call it immoral, in part because you can't modify it to tailor it to your needs, which I understand. When you buy a computer, you can repair or modify it. No one has called it immoral because of the usage that was done of it (ie good or evil).
toyg 6y ago
> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. I was very surprised by that sentence, because "immoral commercial software" is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the lack of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don't build it up into a strawman. I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.
- simonh 6y ago
  That particular phrase may not be common, but over the years I've come across plenty of free software proponents who absolutely do believe that proprietary software is immoral.
  - AsyncAwait 6y ago
    This belief is usually based on the imbalance between the developers and users, such that the developer is able to change the software in unexpected ways, backdoor the user machine via rootkit DRM, spy on users and collect telemetry without the users being aware of what exactly is being collected etc. In that sense, the sentiment isn't wrong. This does not mean all proprietary software is like this, but the developer/user power imbalance is present in all proprietary software to a much greater extent than free* software. *Free does not mean non-commercial, it's cool to want to get paid for software, including free software.
    - eps 6y ago
      A more accurate term then would've been "potentially-immoral proprietary software". Though it doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well and its trolling factor is laughable, so I can see why it wasn't employed.
    - simonh 6y ago
      In my experience it's generally based on the Stallman concept of software freedom, in which the freedoms Free/Libre software is intended to respect are seen as rights, and the power that a proprietary software vendor wields over users is fundamentally unjust. This is the basic philosophy on which the Free/Libre software movement was founded, so it's not just a peripheral view. He outlines this pretty clearly here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
dTal 6y ago
Free software is nothing to do with licensing. Free software is software that respects the 4 freedoms: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. Cloud services are not free software, whatever the license. Nonfree software is immoral.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > Cloud services are not free software, whatever the license. That depends on the cloud service in question. The "big three" (AWS, Azure, GCP) certainly are not, but there are a lot of small/niche hosters running Kubernetes, OpenStack and other FOSS cloud software.
  - globular-toast 6y ago
    Do those small/niche hosts allow you to modify the code running on their site? Do they allow you to inspect the source code and acquire any patches they have developed? It's not free software.
    - ketzu 6y ago
      That doesn't seem required for the 4 freedoms listed. Could you elaborate which of those requires the providers to run your modifications on their system?
      - globular-toast 6y ago
        > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. What part of that doesn't make sense? If the program is going to run on someone else's system then you'll need access to that system to be able to modify it to do your computing as you wish.
        6y ago
terminalcommand 6y ago
Free as in beer and free as in freedom debate again :). Propriatery for me means closed source, not free (as in freedom). All the free applications that spy on you do not share their source code, therefore are in nature propriatery. As far as I understand Qt considers to put a 12-month delay before opening up its source code. I think this would be a zero-sum game for Qt in the long term. They will continue to milk their existing commercial userbase, but lose the support of the community.
bsder 6y ago
> Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Erm, you appear to be too young to remember mainframes. The wheel merely turns. > If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. Complaining about frying pans because someone whacked you over the head with one is silly. Just because someone is running their proprietary software on top of open source infrastructure does not make their software any less proprietary.
kick 6y ago
Oracle solely sells proprietary software that users can't own; AWS is proprietary software users can't own; Microsoft's suite is proprietary software users can't own: proprietary software is still causing the most harm, people who defend proprietary software are still acting incredibly stupid about it. Like seriously, "seems how a lot of software engineers* are ultimately paid these data" (by proprietary companies). Google is a proprietary software company, so is Facebook, so is twitter. All companies that relentlessly abuse users. Free software advocates meanwhile have a social network with a few hundred thousand active users, they've got privacy-respecting search engines, and have operating systems that don't spy on you. Proprietary software caused the problems you're ranting about, and your comment reeks of "I work at a company that sells proprietary software and am trying desperately to pin my own sins on people releasing software making the world more free." I'm nowhere near a free software extremist. Many of the people I find admirable release proprietary software. But your comment is ridiculous. Proprietary software is undeniably immoral. * "Engineers" is the wrong term because software engineers don't exist.
- cormacrelf 6y ago
  I'm not saying they're right, but I think the point was that: - GPL code can be used in a program you do not distribute - Not distributing can be done by running it on a server instead of local machines - Run on server almost always means users don't own data It's missing a step, which is that the GPL code in the world was so important that people NEEDED to use it so much that they were willing to change the way they distribute (or don't) their software... that's a pretty tough claim to make out. What's the evidence for that?
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    I don’t understand your bit at the end but I just wanted to mention that the AGPL license was created by the FSF in 2002 to address this network loophole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
    - 6y ago
enriquto 6y ago
> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. > (...) > Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than So, you are also calling proprietary software immoral? Not that there's anything wrong with that! Regarding your argument; of course, there may be some free software that is also immoral due to other reasons than its licensing.
alphaomegacode 6y ago
Your claim that free software enabled "...the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in" just doesn't seem valid. Back when free software was still a new thing on college campuses, there were proprietary software vendors who owned and monetized a heck of a lot. Whether Microsoft's Server CALs for IIS (yes, that was a thing) or Oracle or Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Bell or ATT, there were a lot of vendors monetizing on both the server and the desktop. Yes, software running on my machine might have been my data but there were numerous cases of that very same proprietary software where the data files were inaccessible. In short, you owned the machine and that was fine but you didn't have a license to the data format and that meant you were...well, locked in and monetized by that particular vendor. I'm not really going to speak to the moral judgement you made about free software since free software or proprietary software can both be used for whatever immoral ends.
som33 6y ago
>Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money Except you're wrong, it's the fact we never got property rights and software became licensed to begin with. We should be living in a world where we had rights to source code and program ownership from the beginning. You don't seem to get Microsoft and big software companies benefited from 200 years of big media companies lobbying away the public domain and any rights to own works. Copyright was the back door to get rid of property rights from the public. Software licensing is what lead us to this DRM dystopia, you can't have DRM if you own the bits you buy outright at point of purchase instead of "licensing them". It's the software licensing model for the public where the public has no right to own the software it buys that's at the root of the madness. Not free software advocates. The reality is we desperately needs property rights for consumers, I've watched for 20 years as the PC game industry stole PC games by client-server back ending them to take the files hostage on remote PC's... Software as a service and DRM enabled by lack of property rights for the public is the real enemy of privacy and freedom buddy. We should have had the right to own software like we own our clothes and houses. We can own our cars, houses and repair them, but we can't do that with software. So huge swatches of human history are being kept in corporate vaults behind lock and key. Companies like irdeto are pure scum in trying to game encrypt binaries. Don't get me started on mobile gacha games. The whole software ecosystem is made on bad american IP law where the software buyer has no rights and all the cards are held by big tech companies. Don't blame free software advocates. Blame lack of the public having any ownership rights over the software it buys. We now live in a world where Microsoft can claim they "own" the files on my computer via American IP law magic and I don't really have a right to use my software and computer how I see fit because of bs IP laws written by american corporate lobbyists. So whole swaths of video game and PC software history are being actively destroyed and done knowingly so. Microsoft is planning to lock down the PC and, DRM like steam, origin, uplay, MMO's, client-server software is all about the end of freedom on the PC as an open platform.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
> If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. That doesn't sound right. There's an asymmetry here that you're ignoring. To use FSF-esque terminology: Freedom-respecting software must be Free Software, and any software it relies on must be Free. Surveillance technology can use Free Software, but can just as easily use proprietary solutions. > Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations Agree.
thePunisher 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with selling proprietary software. What really irritates me are companies like Redis who pretend to be open-source and start whining when other people (like Amazon) earn money from using their software. I believe open-source is about altruism. It's not a business model to gain users and thereafter trick them or forcing them to pay.
mr_puzzled 6y ago
Sigh, here we go again. The top comment (rightfully) calling out a poorly thought out/worded sentence (or an incorrect statement) instead of discussing the real issue that the post is about.
amelius 6y ago
> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. Vendor lock-in is immoral, though.
temac 6y ago
There is absolutely nothing Free Software has been an obligatory enabler for SAAS. Actually if you admit the existence of SAAS and regardless of its own issues, it using Free Software is still strictly better than it using only proprietary software. And in regard to owning your own data thanks to proprietary software on your own devices, in practice this is just plainly false now: look at Windows 10 vs most Linux distro.
soraminazuki 6y ago
> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. Makes sense. I don't mind proprietary software as long as it doesn't exploit its users. > If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. Um, what? This is one of the most absurd statements I've seen this week. Whether a software is free or proprietary has absolutely nothing to do with the surveillance business. I fail to understand how you can demonize free software developers for enabling the surveillance economy or whatever when there are many, many proprietary software out there that's specifically developed for the sole purpose of spying on you. You might as well condemn hardware companies for selling computers because that also enables the surveillance economy too.
fithisux 6y ago
> Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days. You imply that immorality cannot be avoided, so let's accept it. According to your reasoning, some people are killers so lets close prisons.

cjfd 6y ago

I would find it a bit hard to argue that the nature of free software has anything to do with this. Why couldn't all of this surveillance and the selling of user data have been based on proprietary software? You could maybe say it would be too expensive but really.... I am sure that if you want a billion licenses of something you could get a volume discount or otherwise write the necessary proprietary software yourself or buy from the least expensive party and so on.... Have we forgotten the economic principle that in an efficient market the price of a good approaches the marginal cost of producing one more instance of that good. The proprietary market may be a bit less efficient but as long as there are multiple parties who can offer the good the principle should work to a certain extent.

bad_user 6y ago

While I agree that proprietary software isn't necessarily immoral, I take objection with your premise. The software used for collecting and selling user data is proprietary, all of it. This is because: 1. if it were developed as open source, in the open, people could inspect what it does 2. profiling user data is most often a company's core competency, the trade secret that they won't give away If not, then please point out to free software packages I can use to collect and profile user data, because I have a business idea I'd like to try and no resources for software development. Oh, do you mean those companies run their proprietary stuff on top of Linux? Well, if not Linux, it would have been Solaris, or Windows. The higher cost wouldn't have been much of a deterrence, in capitalism due to competition the cost does eventually come down.

elcomet 6y ago

I don't see how those two are related. You can sell user data using free or proprietary software. People call it immoral, in part because you can't modify it to tailor it to your needs, which I understand. When you buy a computer, you can repair or modify it. No one has called it immoral because of the usage that was done of it (ie good or evil).

toyg 6y ago

> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. I was very surprised by that sentence, because "immoral commercial software" is absolutely not a common term in FOSS circles, afaik. This is the first time I heard it. Most FOSS developers are employed by commercial companies and have no problem developing commercial software - in fact, most people decry the lack of commercial software on FOSS platforms. Please don't build it up into a strawman. I suspect this formulation has something to do with this particular reporter being from China, where there is still a lingering link between morality and industrial production.

simonh 6y ago
That particular phrase may not be common, but over the years I've come across plenty of free software proponents who absolutely do believe that proprietary software is immoral.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  This belief is usually based on the imbalance between the developers and users, such that the developer is able to change the software in unexpected ways, backdoor the user machine via rootkit DRM, spy on users and collect telemetry without the users being aware of what exactly is being collected etc. In that sense, the sentiment isn't wrong. This does not mean all proprietary software is like this, but the developer/user power imbalance is present in all proprietary software to a much greater extent than free* software. *Free does not mean non-commercial, it's cool to want to get paid for software, including free software.
  - eps 6y ago
    A more accurate term then would've been "potentially-immoral proprietary software". Though it doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well and its trolling factor is laughable, so I can see why it wasn't employed.
  - simonh 6y ago
    In my experience it's generally based on the Stallman concept of software freedom, in which the freedoms Free/Libre software is intended to respect are seen as rights, and the power that a proprietary software vendor wields over users is fundamentally unjust. This is the basic philosophy on which the Free/Libre software movement was founded, so it's not just a peripheral view. He outlines this pretty clearly here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...

dTal 6y ago

Free software is nothing to do with licensing. Free software is software that respects the 4 freedoms: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose. The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. Cloud services are not free software, whatever the license. Nonfree software is immoral.

mschuster91 6y ago
> Cloud services are not free software, whatever the license. That depends on the cloud service in question. The "big three" (AWS, Azure, GCP) certainly are not, but there are a lot of small/niche hosters running Kubernetes, OpenStack and other FOSS cloud software.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  Do those small/niche hosts allow you to modify the code running on their site? Do they allow you to inspect the source code and acquire any patches they have developed? It's not free software.
  - ketzu 6y ago
    That doesn't seem required for the 4 freedoms listed. Could you elaborate which of those requires the providers to run your modifications on their system?
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      > The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. What part of that doesn't make sense? If the program is going to run on someone else's system then you'll need access to that system to be able to modify it to do your computing as you wish.
      - 6y ago

terminalcommand 6y ago

Free as in beer and free as in freedom debate again :). Propriatery for me means closed source, not free (as in freedom). All the free applications that spy on you do not share their source code, therefore are in nature propriatery. As far as I understand Qt considers to put a 12-month delay before opening up its source code. I think this would be a zero-sum game for Qt in the long term. They will continue to milk their existing commercial userbase, but lose the support of the community.

bsder 6y ago

> Back when software ran on your machine, you defacto owned your data because it was on your machine. Erm, you appear to be too young to remember mainframes. The wheel merely turns. > If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. Complaining about frying pans because someone whacked you over the head with one is silly. Just because someone is running their proprietary software on top of open source infrastructure does not make their software any less proprietary.

kick 6y ago

Oracle solely sells proprietary software that users can't own; AWS is proprietary software users can't own; Microsoft's suite is proprietary software users can't own: proprietary software is still causing the most harm, people who defend proprietary software are still acting incredibly stupid about it. Like seriously, "seems how a lot of software engineers* are ultimately paid these data" (by proprietary companies). Google is a proprietary software company, so is Facebook, so is twitter. All companies that relentlessly abuse users. Free software advocates meanwhile have a social network with a few hundred thousand active users, they've got privacy-respecting search engines, and have operating systems that don't spy on you. Proprietary software caused the problems you're ranting about, and your comment reeks of "I work at a company that sells proprietary software and am trying desperately to pin my own sins on people releasing software making the world more free." I'm nowhere near a free software extremist. Many of the people I find admirable release proprietary software. But your comment is ridiculous. Proprietary software is undeniably immoral. * "Engineers" is the wrong term because software engineers don't exist.

cormacrelf 6y ago
I'm not saying they're right, but I think the point was that: - GPL code can be used in a program you do not distribute - Not distributing can be done by running it on a server instead of local machines - Run on server almost always means users don't own data It's missing a step, which is that the GPL code in the world was so important that people NEEDED to use it so much that they were willing to change the way they distribute (or don't) their software... that's a pretty tough claim to make out. What's the evidence for that?
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  I don’t understand your bit at the end but I just wanted to mention that the AGPL license was created by the FSF in 2002 to address this network loophole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License
  - 6y ago

enriquto 6y ago

> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. > (...) > Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than So, you are also calling proprietary software immoral? Not that there's anything wrong with that! Regarding your argument; of course, there may be some free software that is also immoral due to other reasons than its licensing.

alphaomegacode 6y ago

Your claim that free software enabled "...the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in" just doesn't seem valid. Back when free software was still a new thing on college campuses, there were proprietary software vendors who owned and monetized a heck of a lot. Whether Microsoft's Server CALs for IIS (yes, that was a thing) or Oracle or Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Bell or ATT, there were a lot of vendors monetizing on both the server and the desktop. Yes, software running on my machine might have been my data but there were numerous cases of that very same proprietary software where the data files were inaccessible. In short, you owned the machine and that was fine but you didn't have a license to the data format and that meant you were...well, locked in and monetized by that particular vendor. I'm not really going to speak to the moral judgement you made about free software since free software or proprietary software can both be used for whatever immoral ends.

som33 6y ago

>Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money Except you're wrong, it's the fact we never got property rights and software became licensed to begin with. We should be living in a world where we had rights to source code and program ownership from the beginning. You don't seem to get Microsoft and big software companies benefited from 200 years of big media companies lobbying away the public domain and any rights to own works. Copyright was the back door to get rid of property rights from the public. Software licensing is what lead us to this DRM dystopia, you can't have DRM if you own the bits you buy outright at point of purchase instead of "licensing them". It's the software licensing model for the public where the public has no right to own the software it buys that's at the root of the madness. Not free software advocates. The reality is we desperately needs property rights for consumers, I've watched for 20 years as the PC game industry stole PC games by client-server back ending them to take the files hostage on remote PC's... Software as a service and DRM enabled by lack of property rights for the public is the real enemy of privacy and freedom buddy. We should have had the right to own software like we own our clothes and houses. We can own our cars, houses and repair them, but we can't do that with software. So huge swatches of human history are being kept in corporate vaults behind lock and key. Companies like irdeto are pure scum in trying to game encrypt binaries. Don't get me started on mobile gacha games. The whole software ecosystem is made on bad american IP law where the software buyer has no rights and all the cards are held by big tech companies. Don't blame free software advocates. Blame lack of the public having any ownership rights over the software it buys. We now live in a world where Microsoft can claim they "own" the files on my computer via American IP law magic and I don't really have a right to use my software and computer how I see fit because of bs IP laws written by american corporate lobbyists. So whole swaths of video game and PC software history are being actively destroyed and done knowingly so. Microsoft is planning to lock down the PC and, DRM like steam, origin, uplay, MMO's, client-server software is all about the end of freedom on the PC as an open platform.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

> If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. That doesn't sound right. There's an asymmetry here that you're ignoring. To use FSF-esque terminology: Freedom-respecting software must be Free Software, and any software it relies on must be Free. Surveillance technology can use Free Software, but can just as easily use proprietary solutions. > Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations Agree.

thePunisher 6y ago

There's nothing wrong with selling proprietary software. What really irritates me are companies like Redis who pretend to be open-source and start whining when other people (like Amazon) earn money from using their software. I believe open-source is about altruism. It's not a business model to gain users and thereafter trick them or forcing them to pay.

mr_puzzled 6y ago

Sigh, here we go again. The top comment (rightfully) calling out a poorly thought out/worded sentence (or an incorrect statement) instead of discussing the real issue that the post is about.

amelius 6y ago

> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. Vendor lock-in is immoral, though.

temac 6y ago

There is absolutely nothing Free Software has been an obligatory enabler for SAAS. Actually if you admit the existence of SAAS and regardless of its own issues, it using Free Software is still strictly better than it using only proprietary software. And in regard to owning your own data thanks to proprietary software on your own devices, in practice this is just plainly false now: look at Windows 10 vs most Linux distro.

soraminazuki 6y ago

> I wish free software advocates would stop calling proprietary software immoral. Makes sense. I don't mind proprietary software as long as it doesn't exploit its users. > If anything, free software underlies and has enables the locked in, sever based, surveillance monetizing world we live in. Um, what? This is one of the most absurd statements I've seen this week. Whether a software is free or proprietary has absolutely nothing to do with the surveillance business. I fail to understand how you can demonize free software developers for enabling the surveillance economy or whatever when there are many, many proprietary software out there that's specifically developed for the sole purpose of spying on you. You might as well condemn hardware companies for selling computers because that also enables the surveillance economy too.

fithisux 6y ago

> Selling proprietary software for money is a lot less immoral than using free software to sell user data for money, or using scale to run roughshod over regulations which seems how a lot of software engineers are ultimately paid these days. You imply that immorality cannot be avoided, so let's accept it. According to your reasoning, some people are killers so lets close prisons.