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Why Software Should Be Free (2002)
- tus88 6y agoSpeech or beer?
- jonathanstrange 6y agoFree as in 4 freedoms.
- schemy 6y agoFreedom zero should be only for people.
- mulmen 6y ago> Footnotes > The word “free” in “free software” refers to freedom, not to price; the price paid for a copy of a free program may be zero, or small, or (rarely) quite large.
- roschdal 6y agoIf software should be free, then who pays for the development of software? Is Stallman a communist who wants some people to work for free in "free software gulags"?
- emilsedgh 6y agoLast I checked Red Hat was a for profit company not a commune. Point being, Free Software doesn't talk about price. Most people who develop FOSS software do it as part of their dayjobs.
- schemy 6y ago> Last I checked Red Hat was a for profit company not a commune. Last I checked Red Hat was bought by IBM and everyone with half a brain was bailing out.
- yrNasbg 6y agoSponsorship by the early stage RedHat even the early stage Google is fine. Once those companies have evolved according to the Gervais principle, their presence can become stifling. Working on "open" source in such a deteriorated company is worse than working on closed source. You get the worst of both worlds: Pressure from anyone on the planet who can open a GitHub issue, pressure from the management to "grow the team" (translation: increase the hiring pool and drive down wages) and corporate bullshit of people celebrating "open" source without ever having done anything for it.
- kiidev 6y agoFootnote 1 of the article: The word “free” in “free software” refers to freedom, not to price; the price paid for a copy of a free program may be zero, or small, or (rarely) quite large.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- finolex1 6y agoWhile I'm not sure I fully agree with his arguments, it is funny that he has a section in his article titled "Why don't you move to Russia"
- oneil 6y agoRMS is a brilliant mind and someone I have had the luxury of meeting. Every now and then I like to look at his rider list and have a little chuckle: https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt https://github.com/ddol/rre-rms/blob/master/rider.txt I came across a site that just rotated pictures of him, using his laptop in some strange places: https://rms.sexy https://rms.sexy
- kgraves 6y agoAs much as I respect his ideas, god he is cringeworthy.
- oneil 6y agoHe can be; his 'free software song' certainly makes me cringe.. Edit (added link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw
- dvfjsdhgfv 6y agoMan, times have a'changed... I remember back in the late 90s at one of (GNU/)Linux shows (was it in Paris?) RMS arrived and started singing this song, many people joined in marching, it was a very happy and positive event. Of course everybode knew it's a kind of joke, just like the whole St. iGNUcius thing, but at the same time the general idea of sharing the code with others as opposed to hiding it seemed quite serious and meaningful. And so it continues to this day.
- enriquto 6y agoI actually like this song, and the several covers people has performed of it.
- b3kart 6y agoNot being afraid of coming across as cringeworthy might contribute to producing the original ideas that you respect.
- TruthSHIFT 6y agoWhen was this written?
- richardwhiuk 6y agoCopyright at the bottom suggest originally 1991: > Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2017, 2018, 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
- ryder9 6y agopedophile says what
- bioneuralnet 6y agoIsn't Stallman a major creep? Can we stop taking shitty people seriously?
- gsich 6y agoSeperate the text from the author. Just because you don't like the author doesn't mean that everything produced is automatically shit.
- scandox 6y agoBeing a creep (whether that is so or not) does not eject someone from the human race, nor does it invalidate expertise in a specific domain.
- waheoo 6y agoYou mean like people who throw unsubstantiated claims around on the internet? Sounds good to me.
- crocko 6y agoStallman has said some very stupid things when it comes to child abuse. I don't believe he is a sexual predator but a old odd looking guy making those sorts of comments will put people on guard.
- anxmklq 6y agoHis looks were 100% approved and encouraged by the left in 1970. Most leftists looked like that. Sorry that the new, rich pseudo-left with their stock options and identity politics no longer approves of that look. So much for diversity.
- crocko 6y agoI tend rock a similar look to Stallman and the sad reality is that people don't look at you favourably either way. I frequently get odd looks by people when out for a walk and I get stopped quite a lot by the police (I am White and live in the UK). Simply putting on a clean shirt, some proper shoes and having a shave does wonders in this regard. That is the reality of it unfortunately. EDITED for clarity.
- crocko 6y ago> The feeling of attachment is one that programmers can cultivate when it suits them; it is not inevitable. Consider, for example, how willingly the same programmers usually sign over all rights to a large corporation for a salary; the emotional attachment mysteriously vanishes. It is because they are getting paid they willingly hand over the rights. Also a lot of full time employees do take personal ownership of their code maybe not in a legal sense but they feel it is their responsibility. This is why I cannot stand Stallman. There are plenty of good arguments for open source software. However completely ignoring the fact that when you are a full time employee you are promised pay and some benefits by the employer is as far as I am concerned completely disingenuous. His whole premise is faulty.
- cogburnd02 6y agoWell, compare/contrast the emotional attachment a programmer has for code with the emotional attachment a parent has for their child. No amount of money would make the emotional attachment of a parent to their child go away; I think this is his point.
- crocko 6y agoYes let’s compare looking after your a new life in the world with source code like they are they in anyway equivalent. This is exactly my problem with characters like Stallman and why people should actually read the more robust arguments against GNU/Free software movements sad the more robust arguments gives you a reality check against a lot of Stallman’s nonsense.
- cycloptic 6y agoIt's not equivalent, that was the point. Any responsibility one might feel towards their employer's code goes away immediately when they find a new job somewhere else for better pay. If you follow that, this whole line of reasoning really doesn't have anything to do with FOSS versus proprietary. You can observe the same effects happening at tons of Linux companies too, i.e. employees who don't care one way or another about the OS or the license and are just there to put in their time and collect a paycheck.
- idid 6y agoWhile I resonate fully with the ideals encompassed by free software, I find that the "logistics" of supporting them "in real life" are a completely different story, that has little to do with the ethos behind them. This comes as a singular, personal data point, or course. There's wider context behind my trials and tribulations, but, succinctly put, starting a for profit company around my 5 year-ish old OSS project was the only way I managed to find to safeguard its continued existence and development. This road involves a lot of uneasy compromises that don't fit in the original discourse around free software. Perhaps, what I'm lacking, is a "how to get there" guide - the ideals are clear, the way to achieve them is not so much so.
- wiz21c 6y agoI'd say it's the other way around. If you work for free software, then money is secondary, will happen only if your software has so much value that you can set your own conditions. Else, you accept to work for money and then, well, you know that road...
- idid 6y agoAgreed. That's definitely not the scale we operate at (digitally latent, partially marginal by hn standards industry). Nevertheless, this restricts free software to only "critical" need infrastructure that has high value from the start (rather than being allowed to develop it), doesn't it?
- mark_l_watson 6y agoI agree with supporting the ideals, but hitting a barrier in features and usability. For my wife and I, our Apple Watches, AirPods, iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks are a net (I use this word purposely) that holds our digital life together and make working (she is my editor, and even in retirement I write every day for a few hours) and our digital lives easy and pleasant. On the other hand, I love Linux, have a zillion GitHub repos with open source projects I do, etc. I dream of a world in which I could use open hardware and free software, but how would something like an Apple Watch ever be open hardware and software?
- anoplus 6y ago> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just as they have learned to support public radio and television stations. The crowd funding culture is evolving. In recent years I follow and donate to a couple of public initiatives in my country from free media, environment, and other public services. People are excited to donate and be members in projects that solve real problem, conduct transparency and communicate with the members. Its all about trust.
- api 6y agoThat works at a small scale. When things get big, people start behaving badly... or alternately you could say that when things get big their surface area becomes sufficient so as to encompass a lot of bad behavior. The problem is that not all software tasks are small. There are many valuable problems and applications that are too difficult for a single individual or a very small group to address. As soon as you get more than one person involved you start to need the infrastructure of a business, and that's expensive. You quickly outgrow what voluntarist community scale systems can handle.
- number6 6y agoOn the other hand there is Mastodon, there is KDE, there is the Linux Kernel. All varying in their level of infrastructure but all are communitys of volunteers. Most programming languages work this way too
- api 6y agoAll these things are used by nerds and have little chance of breaking into the mainstream. They're too labor intensive to use and deploy and impose too much cognitive load. 10% of the work is making it work. The user experience necessary for mass adoption is the other 90%, and it's mostly work that is not fun and that people must therefore be paid to do. If the goal is just to have a for-nerds-by-nerds ecosystem that's fine, though ultimately I think without mass market penetration it's likely that the hardware ecosystem will eventually close. We are seeing the encroachment of locked boot loaders everywhere. Eventually it may be hard to get a fast modern chip that can run the open stuff if the open stuff does not have sufficient mass in the economy to demand it. That and I for one think privacy and freedom for everyone is a worthy goal. For-nerds-by-nerds is elitist.
- api 6y agoEdit: I rewrote this to add a lot of substance. This was written in 1991. The world was very very different then. The Internet was small. Hardware was commodity. Most of the power in the industry belonged to proprietary software vendors like Microsoft and there was a danger they would totally monopolize the future. Things have changed quite radically. Today hardware has been effectively de-commoditized, on one hand by the escalating difficulty of building a high quality machine and on the other hand by vertically integrated cloud vendors whose hardware becomes "special" by virtue of its location at a highly connected secure data center. The Internet is also huge, and it has made network effects powerful and has created a new form of closed called "SaaS." Today software is commoditized, hardware is proprietary, and SaaS is where the power is centered. Everything depends on the cloud. Much of the software that powers the cloud is open source, but that doesn't matter. Having source or being able to run your own copy is irrelevant if the value is in the centralized network location of the runtime and the fact that the cloud has all the data. RMS's strategy for freedom is obsolete. If software is totally free and un-owned, all the power belongs to the owners of physical capital and SaaS systems that leverage that capital to create network effects around centralized instances of software. SaaS is more closed than commercial software ever was. I can still run a 1980s proprietary application in a VM on my own system, but I cannot run 2008's Facebook or Google. SaaS operators have total visibility into everything we do and the power to rescind capabilities at any time. It's a pure panopticon. Today we need open and liberated runtimes more than we need open and liberate source. Those of us who care about privacy and freedom need to change strategies to cope with a changing world, but the problem is that RMS's views and the views of others in the 1990s FOSS movement have been dogmatized and transformed into a religion. It's not a religion. It's a strategy, and one that was largely successful at checking the power of Microsoft and other commercial software vendors. The trouble is that it's a strategy that also undermines the economic sustainability of software, thus handing all the economic power and muscle to those who control other aspects of the stack. Those other aspects of the stack now rule us by virtue of the golden rule: "he who has the gold rules." The FOSS movement is fighting the last war. What we need is a new model that hopefully can retain the openness of free software but that recapitalizes the software layer and allows the center of gravity to shift more toward the physical and economic edge of the network. I was hoping for a while that cryptocurrency would furnish this, but it was taken over and destroyed by scammers. Some are exploring "source available" licenses like the BSL, but that feels like a stopgap to me. There has to be something that preserves the freedom of open source at the individual level while restoring revenue streams to software and limiting the ability of the for-profit cloud to exploit FOSS to create its silos.
- umvi 6y agoWhat's disturbing to me is that this idea is under attack by people who believe we are morally responsible for the users of our software. Meaning, software should not be free for everyone, only free for people that won't use it immorally.
- hi41 6y agoWhy did rms choose to remain poor when he could have earned a lot of money. That must’ve been a difficult choice. Programmers who are a lot less talented than he is earn a lot more money. I also noticed that other open source programmers also were poor. There was an article on hn about the programmer who maintains ssl.
- neilv 6y agoMy impression was two things: (1) he had a mission; (2) he had strict and unusual ethical rules for himself, which precluded most other work. RMS wasn't the only one with ethics that was a barrier to getting rich, however. One odd thing was that, at the start of the dotcom boom, I had the impression (perhaps mistaken) that the programmers with the most experience with Internet and such were also disproportionately more inclined to see themselves as bringing some altruistic vision to everyone, and nurturing it. Things like privacy violation would not fly, I don't think. The privacy violations were snuck in, initially, and the original visionaries either weren't in a position to stop it, somehow didn't realize it was happening, or simply took the money.
- crocko 6y agoThe problem is that the programmers in the dotcom boom did have an altruistic motive that is why they can justify the privacy violations. They simply see themselves as the good guys and thus it is okay when they do the wrong things as long as it is for the greater good.
- neilv 6y agoI'm sure there were some people like that. But the impression was really that it was an orgy of anyone who could program at all acting the role of some rock star genius visionary, while most people were hopping companies to whatever seemed to have the best IPO prospects at any moment.
- wackro 6y agoWhy does everything have to be about money? This view is really prevalent on HN and it's actually really tiring to read week after week. It boils down to this: some people prioritise other endeavours. And if your response to that is 'but they could be doing the same thing AND getting paid £££' then I guess they just don't care as much as you might do.
- gjvnq 6y agoI think most software should be at least semi-free. You can read the source code and distribute changes but you can't redistribute the software (code and binaries) without approval from the author (i.e. paying them). Basically I want people to be free and able to fix and improve what they paid for.
- andrepd 6y agoOf course. Long gone are the days you could tinker with your machines and appliances, fix your problems, replace oartd, hack together improvements, or simply take it apart to show your kid how it works. Okay maybe not long gone but certainly on the way out. Appliances and computers and even cars are getting ever more encumbered in terms of being able to fiddle with them, both physically but above all in terms of software.
- Proven 6y ago> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just as they have learned to support public radio and television stations. Taxation much?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 6y agoIt works when everybody is singing love songs in rainbow coloured clothing, but at the end of the day there are bills to pay and only a few lucky ones get to live from donations and they surely aren't arriving at the bank with donation extracts for a credit renewal.
- pgcj_poster 6y ago> I am not saying that a toll road is worse than no road at all. That would be true if the toll were so great that hardly anyone used the road—but this is an unlikely policy for a toll collector. With "toll road" as a metaphor for "proprietary software," it seems like the current situation requires an even more radical stance than Stallman could have envisioned back then, because software companies today aren't content with merely operating in a socially suboptimal way. Instead, many now have a net negative impact on society: through spying, engineered addiction, echo chambers, etc. For instance, I think society would be better off if Facebook simply ceased to exist, even if it wasn't replaced by some type of privacy-protecting alternative and everyone just had to go back to email and personal home pages.
- rimliu 6y agoYou are confusing social media with software companies.
- jokethrowaway 6y ago> Eventually the users will learn to support developers without coercion, just as they have learned to support public radio and television stations. It's funny because users freely buy software from developers without coercion and they're coerced by the government to pay for public radio and television under threat of imprisonment.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoThis fails because we only have one formal kind of payment - money - and in a monetised economy, nothing compares with it. Money solves one problem - how to get people to do things that may be useful to others which they wouldn't otherwise do - but causes much worse problems in return. The most obvious is money is such a riotously inefficient way to decide what is and isn't genuinely useful, especially collectively. OSS doesn't really solve the usefulness problem. It's good at producing software that's appealing to people who like using and tinkering with OSS software - but no one else really cares unless it's handed to them inside a product which has been assembled to be useful. And even then it's about the product, not about a largely imaginary "freedom" which is inaccessible to most users because it specialised skills, advanced knowledge, and plenty of free time. This doesn't make it useless, it just gives it a different domain to operate in. There's some overlap, but there are many potentially useful projects that don't happen because they don't appear inside either the commercial or the OSS circles.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoI need a goat and have chickens for trade. What's your exchange rate?
- rolph 6y agofreewheelin' franklin says .... "Dope will get you through times of no money, better than money will get you through times of no dope." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Furry_Freak_Broth... generally - things and stuff get you through times of no money better than money gets you through times of no things and no stuff. money is really a roundabout way of convincing someone to give you things and stuff, and offering shiny things and stuff is a way to get money. in the end money is for making landlords and bankers happy, its the things and stuff that help to mantle over the hard problems of real life.
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoYou seem to be dismissing FOSS, despite that it has taken over the world when it comes to servers and smartphones. > OSS doesn't really solve the usefulness problem. Most Linux kernel devs are paid professionals, making improvements that have value to their employer, and making the improvements available to all (a triumph of copyleft). It's not just hobbyists tinkering in ways they find interesting. Hasn't been that way for decades. > It's good at producing software that's appealing to people who like using and tinkering with OSS software - but no one else really cares unless it's handed to them inside a product which has been assembled to be useful. I have the choice of several different FOSS browsers, text-editors, C++ compilers. FOSS is quite capable of producing a 'finished product' that just works. > even then it's about the product, not about a largely imaginary "freedom" which is inaccessible to most users because it specialised skills, advanced knowledge, and plenty of free time It's not just developers who are affected by issues like tracking, intrusive telemetry, and even just unskippable ads in DVDs. It's true that developers are more aware of these issues.
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- onyva 6y agoMaybe forward to PG who seems to be veering into Peter Thiel territory lately. Might remind him why startups are even a thing he can brag about to AOC.
- brownbat 6y agoWell... (1) If you believe prices trend towards marginal cost, and, (2) the cost of acquiring a new user trends lower for more useful products, then it follows that... (3) capping the price of software would generally improve its overall quality. (Don't worry, I'm mostly joking. Still...)
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoIt's a GNU/FSF article about software freedom, it's not about pricing.
- brownbat 6y agoThe libre/gratis distinction is important, sure. But when rms argued against "programs as property" here, there were certain implications about pricing models that came along for the ride, whether that was his primary intention or not. My argument is really a (somewhat tongue in cheek) rebuttal to people who think libre software, which incidentally tends to be gratis, can never be high quality or sustainable.
- neilobremski 6y agoThe systems I work on tend to be comprised of free software but "business logic" is private. I don't know if this would please the GNU founders but a lot certainly runs on open source and I can't imagine this changing anytime soon. It helps everyone to see the foundation and plumbing but then there's diminishing returns as you move into particulars of opinionated design. For my part, one of the biggest wins has been freely available and HIGH quality development tools and languages. I still have PTSD from C++ compilers licensing. I'm still hoping that Office tools will get there. And as for the possibility of "less software developers" ... unlikely! Again, there will be (and are) fewer low-level power-programmers but many many more high-level business coders. You don't want your guru working on that stubborn input field validation but you DO need SOMEONE to do it
- throwaway50978 6y agoRichard Stallman is a genius, he didn't deserve to be cancelled from his position at the FSF.
- samblr 6y agoCould you expand on cancellation part a bit. Why was it done?
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- throwaway50978 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_from_MIT_and_FSF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Resignation_f...