11 ms·

When free software isn't practically superior (2015)

83 points by henning 6y ago

josteink 6y ago
I know my GPL from my BSD. I know FSF’s stand on “free” vs “open” software. That part is crystal clear to me. This piece confuses me though. It constantly seems to intermix and conflate “open source software” with “proprietary software”. Is that intentional? Do they really mean that? That “open source” software is in no way better than a closed-source, proprietary equivalent? That closed source and permissively licensed software is equivalent? They can’t possibly mean that, can they? Is it perhaps only badly written, and I’m reading too much into this?
- the_af 6y ago
  The article doesn't conflate open source with proprietary software. It elaborates on why Stallman wrote, so many years ago, that Open Source is misguided, or at least, that it doesn't share the same goals as Free Software. Here's the gist of it: - Open Source presents itself as a technically better alternative to proprietary software. Also, it often claims to be developed in a more collaborative way, "all bugs are shallow when there are many eyeballs", etc. If you want a specific name, someone who used to vocally make this kind of claims was Open Source's advocate Eric Raymond. - There is then the onus of proving this assertion. Is it true that Open Source is, as a norm, technically better than proprietary software as some of its more vocal advocates claim? Is it true that its development is more collaborative? - The article states that no, as any user can plainly see, Open Source is not always technically better than proprietary software. Open Source is often more difficult to use, or unpolished, or has a worse UI, and critically, many open source projects are maintained by a single person, so it's not really always developed more collaboratively. - The article states that this is not a problem for Free Software, because Free Software doesn't claim to be always technically better than proprietary software. It's not even its goal. Free Software claims to protect user's freedoms, even at the cost of being less polished or lacking some features.
  - warkdarrior 6y ago
    That's a generous interpretation of the article. This line in the article shows the author's purposefully distorted view: > For open source, poor-quality software is a problem to be explained away or a reason to eschew the software altogether. For free software, it is a problem to be worked through. I cannot think of an OSS project that tried to "explain away" the quality issues they have (as in "It's poor quality because it is open source"), as opposed to working on them ("Yes, this is a bug. We'll fix some time in the future.").
    - worik 6y ago
      I can When a Ubuntu update completely replaced the Desktop with buggy unity, with out warning or option, the response of Ubuntu developers was "it's open sauce software, you get it for free, stop complaining"
      - ziml77 6y ago
        It's also common to see "It's open source, fix it yourself."
      - merb 6y ago
        actually the first release was flawed, but I still liked unity. it's sad that it was so tangled to ubuntu.
        worik 6y ago
        You miss the point, mostly. The update made a major change in the way the user interface worked. With the new user interface I found I could not easily access my programmes without spending a non trivial amount of time learning it, and there was no way back to the old interface, options fro running both etcetera. Ubunti was tremendously stable for a long time at that point, and I upgraded without hesitation. Not since! As you say the interface was buggy. Dreadfully buggy. It leaked memory badly, was clunky and slow. When I complained on my local Linux users mailing list (as did another member who had the same experience) the Ubuntu developers I knew personally took it as a personal affront. Since I had not paid for it, how dare I complain. They have a point. I do not use Ubuntu any more.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  The fsf considers open source to basically be a marketing tactic for companies to sell services around free software. They don't like that the open source movement is focused on practical reasons to use free/opensource when freedom should be the main reason to use it. Especially in light of the fact that many times it is impractical to choose free/opensource software over proprietary software. Free software focuses on principals over pragmatism They are using free and opensource as interchangeable terms for the same code, but used by people with different goals. I think at the time of this article, there was no license that was one and not the other. Bruce Perens has openly stated that the GPL was the example for the open source definition.
- deleted 6y ago
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- fsflover 6y ago
  They don't mean that open source is the same as proprietary, but: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.....
- Shared404 6y ago
  > Is it perhaps only badly written I did not find it to be badly written. > I’m reading too much into this? I would think so. My interpretation was that "Open Source" advocates must win the argument that Open Source will always turn out higher quality software, while "Free Software" advocates have an inherent advantage in that the software is explicitly designed to protect freedoms and therefore starts out ahead of proprietary software, even if it's less featureful. Whether I agree with this argument, I'm unsure.
- deleted 6y ago
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- mrob 6y ago
  Free Software prioritizes Freedom[0]. Both permissive and copyleft licenses can support this goal. Free Software developers use a permissive license when they judge that best supports their goal of maximizing Freedom (e.g. Ogg Vorbis using a permissive license to encourage people to switch from patent-encumbered MP3). Open Source Software prioritizes quality. Open Source Software developers do not care about Freedom except as a means to that end. However, almost all Open Source Software is also Free Software, so despite this difference they end up supporting Freedom as a byproduct. Proprietary software development also prioritizes quality, but the important difference is that proprietary software actively opposes Freedom. The article is discussing priorities, so it's natural for it to compare two methodologies with the same priority, but the two are not conflated. Open Source Software still (usually) provides Freedom, while proprietary software never does, and Freedom still matters even when the developers don't care about it. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
- phkahler 6y ago
  When the OSI first started approving open source licenses, it seemed like rain. Like every company wanted to create their own license with the intent to get free development work that they could then wrap up in closed commercial products. They were often incompatible with other licenses as well for that reason. To ensure code is maximally reusable IMHO all we need are MIT, BSD and GPL, LGPL. And two of those are not really different in my mind. I understand AGPL too, but not MPL or Apache licenses. But if they are needed then that really should be all of them. Any others have some kind of non-free agenda.
CarVac 6y ago
This is why it's important for single devs to be in a community with peers working on different solutions in the same problem space, for cross-pollination of ideas. One such example is the pixls.us community for photography-related free software. All kinds of devs from projects like RawTherapee, darktable, PhotoFlow, Filmulator, rawproc, G'MIC, and more, plus users, are all in the https://discuss.pixls.us/ https://discuss.pixls.us/ forums and we can all learn from one another and collaborate in ways other than directly contributing code.
- MH15 6y ago
  Do you know of any other communities similar to pixls.us but for other specializations? That's such a powerful idea!
  - CarVac 6y ago
    No, but here's an interview with the founder about how it came to be: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/interview-with-pat-david-at-libre-graphics-meeting-2019 http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/interview-with-pat-... Hopefully others can learn from him and forge their own collaborative communities.
auggierose 6y ago
The free software / open source / proprietary software discussion is an important one. For someone new to it, this article is certainly interesting. For me the question is how to solve this in the context of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs We'll see there that freedom is pretty much high up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs (it's in the esteem part). Which means, it is very important, but only if your other needs are already met. Can I live from making free software? How well can I live from making free software? These are the really interesting questions in my opinion. Can I be free by making free software?
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  For anyone new to it I recommend watching revolution OS, it's about 20 years old at this point, and just ignore the part at the end about the stocks, but it has some good interviews with stallman, linus, and others. Including the great line of stallman accepting the linus torvalds award on behalf of the fsf. "It's like giving the han solo award to the rebel fleet"
- oska 6y ago
  You're focusing on developers, which is a minute fraction of the population. And even developers mostly use software written by other people. The point of Free Software is to respect the freedom of users of the software.
  - auggierose 6y ago
    To be honest, I couldn't care less about people who advocate the freedom of software without caring about the freedom of the people who create it. Also, as a developer, if I don't like the terms of some software, I have an additional choice to just not using it: just make what I need myself.
dang 6y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054275
Ericson2314 6y ago
Sure "Open source" is a bad term. "Free software" is also a bad term as that heavily connotes strains of American individualism which isn't really the appropriate ideological basis either. We need a new discourse of the "forkable commons" and how it transcends old individualism-vs-collectivism battles.
Barrin92 6y ago
Entomologist E.O Wilson said about communism, "great idea, wrong species". It's basically how I feel about 'free software'. There's a very straight forward reason why, as the author points out, free software projects are run by lone developers and lack resources. Because free software, by its own stated mission goal, basically has no good way to reap the rewards for the benefits it brings to the public. It's a great idea in the wrong economic system.
- skavi 6y ago
  wrong culture maybe, but their have definitely been successful communal societies. And there have definitely been successful free software projects.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    I spent a year in a kibbutz, I am definitely aware that there's success on the margins. But it very much has to exist in the crevasses of the system. The 'free software' movement is explicitly ethical for that reason, it is hard to justify it on economic grounds, and free software is undersupplied for that reason.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Feudalism seemed like an immovable foundation of the world until it wasn't. The problem with free software is the need for private competition to restrict people to make money. In a cooperative vs a competitive economy, this idea would come to the forefront. For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
      - jcranmer 6y ago
        > Feudalism seemed like an immovable foundation of the world until it wasn't. When I see a statement like this, I must immediately ask: what do you consider to be feudalism, and when do you think it existed?
na85 6y ago
I don't understand how the content of the article relates to the title. I was expecting a treatise on the trade offs of developing free software and instead it seemed mostly like a rant that boils down to "open source bad". What about when free software is actually inferior? The reason the year of Linux on the desktop never comes is that Windows and MacOS provide an experience that for the majority of users is overwhelmingly better than Linux. The response from the FSF crowd seems to mostly be "deal with it because freedom" which is fine, I guess, but I have better things to do with my time than battle my operating system to recognize my external monitor correctly.
- matthias509 6y ago
  Exactly, I use my free will to exchange money for an experience with less hassle and thus get back time which I can spend on other pursuits.
- 1_player 6y ago
  The reason why desktop Linux is so bad has not very much to do with it being free software, but instead it's more of a political problem which many open source proponents still haven't understood. Everyone seems to point to Linux as the best model of open source community that managed to outgrow and outpace any commercial offering. Why is that? The secret sauce for any project, open source or not, that can grow as fast as successfully as Linux is the presence of a BDFL at the top. The one that sets the vision, that pushes back again anything that would impact negatively from that vision and, yikes, might reject patches people have spent their free time on. Blender and Godot are other fully open source project that are competing with commercial offerings, and all have either a BDFL or a very close-knit governance model at the top, that is not afraid to take the next step and find sources of funding for its own full time developers. All of which is opposite to the governance model of the two biggest UI projects in the Linux desktop world, GNOME and KDE. It's a loose bunch of passionate people that work on whatever tickles the fancy right now, and if they get bored they'll just rewrite a core library or app, backward compatibility be damned, we're just volunteer we don't owe you anything. We'd have Linux on the desktop in 2020 if any of those projects had some Torvalds-like figure ranting on a mailing list about why the user is always right, shame on you on redesigning the menubar yet again breaking any UI convention for no real purpose, and no, Canonical/Red Hat/whoever, we will not accept this patch that undermines the goals of this project. So it's really got nothing to do with open source, it's just an organisational problem. Well, that, and the fact that the vast majority of Linux users seems to be incredibly stingy and reluctant to support and pay for these volunteers' time.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I stopped trying to debate open vs. closed software in a business setting long ago. There is a time and place for both, and rational actors will evaluate the tradeoffs given their circumstances. When people start believing that open source software is inherently superior in every situation, or that ideological purity is the most important consideration, they aren't making decisions in the best interest of the company. Engineers are especially prone to overestimating the downside risks of using closed source software (A long list of what-ifs such as "What if the vendor goes out of business without warning?") and underestimating the downsides of using open source alternatives (Notably, the inability to pick up the phone and have another company's engineers deal with the problem, per your contract). The situation is compounded by engineers who genuinely enjoy tinkering with open source software on the company's dime and, frankly, would prefer to be paid to do so rather than purchase a more efficient closed-source solution. Of course, there are some situations where open-source software is practically superior to alternatives. I don't claim to suggest otherwise. However, the endless debates about ideological purity and avoiding hypothetical edge cases with 3rd party vendors frequently cloud decision making abilities in a business context. For personal and open source projects, I'm all-in on free software alternatives. For business purposes, I'll evaluate the available options and try to make the best business decision for the company.
- aplummer 6y ago
  This is why I like the open source + enterprise contract if you like model so much.
  - alexilliamson 6y ago
    What's your favorite such example?
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - Arnt 6y ago
      I know at least four quite different examples. But they share one trait: They're quiet, softspoken, avoid controversy on internet forums. I won't name any of them. One uses low pricing, is likable, and provides a fine list of enterprise features. The HN crowd will realise that these features are really different ways of describing a very small amount of code. But if you want to spend your employer's money and don't care to spoil that by telling your managers too much, the list is fine. Engineers who like the likable make money be spent. One writes per-customer code on top of largely the same body of code, and charges very high prices, largely because they clearly know how to get stuff done using that code. They have the references to prove it, and they wrote the code, and the customers accept that they invoice customers for improvements to the free base too. One uses a technique I don't understand at all. It's different from the other three, and it works. I mention it to say that the other three aren't an exhaustive list. The fourth targets nontechnical customers and sell SaaS, I don't know the price level. You can git-clone the code and selfhost if you want, they'll be friendly but not helpful. If you make a PR on github they'll at least look at it.
jfax 6y ago
This was the article that sold me on the Free software / open source distinction years ago. Everything started to make so much more sense afterwards.
eznzt 6y ago
Hahaha, seemingly the FSF had a goal of getting 500 new members during 2020 and two weeks away of 2021 they only got 222.
scubbo 6y ago
The title is quite timely for me (though I acknowledge that the message of the article doesn't quite match it). I have spent hundreds of hours, over the course of ~3 years, tweaking and tuning an NFS server on a RPi4 (1Gb RAM, 4x1.5GHz processor) to stream my media to various devices on Kodi on home network - with passable-at-best performance, but usually lots of pixellation, lag, buffering, audio mismatch, etc. Last night I finally gave up on trying to do it the FOSS way, set up a Samba share on a 6-year-old mid-range PC (8Gb RAM, 3.5GHz processor), and got flawless playback on each of my troublesome media entities with less than ten minutes of effort. On a whim, I also tried setting up Plex (a semi-paid service), and got similarly smooth and flawless service. My idealistic 13-year-old self would be horrified to hear me say "I regret all that time I spent messing around with Linux, when I could have just used a Microsoft product, or a different paid product, that Just Work". (And yes, I'm kind-of intentionally invoking Cunningham's Law, here, in the hopes that someone can suggest a way of tweaking a RPi4 to be an effective media server - I'd much rather use that than have my PC always-on, but if that's what it takes to get decent playback, I will)
- billyjobob 6y ago
  Is Samba not FOSS? Also the PC can probably run entirely free software while the Pi will require non-free binary blobs due to its proprietary Broadcom hardware design, so I would say the PC is preferable from a freedom perspective.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    Indeed it is https://www.samba.org/ https://www.samba.org/ Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good performance on a full-fledged PC.
    - scubbo 6y ago
      > Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good performance on a full-fledged PC Is 1Gb RAM and 4x1.5GHz not considered sufficient specs to stream video? That is a genuine question, I'm not up-to-date on hardware specs nowadays - but it _seems_ like it should be sufficient to me. Obviously "more is better", but I'm surprised to hear that this is considered insufficient.
linspace 6y ago
Although I agree more with the idea of free SW than with open source I cannot help finding here a resemblance of the obsession of all religions with heresies. And the smaller the community the more ridiculous it looks. In particular attacking open source by downplaying the importance of collaboration, by giving quite absurd numbers IMO, it's attacking one of the things that I find transcend technical merit, like the freedom that is at the core of the free SW movement.
jancsika 6y ago
There's an alternate history where Stallman did the Aikido move of accepting the descriptor of "open source" to simply describe a subset of the free software philosophy. After all, in his initial announcement to create Gnu, he didn't say, "Of course it might turn out to perform worse, and it won't have near as many features, nor attract many other developers, or have a sane review process, or be secure... but that doesn't matter because it's all in the interest of freedom and that's the model people should follow." No, as with the OSI, he set out with some bold claims, then inspired people to help by incrementally making those claims be true. Anyway, I fail to see how anything bad would have happened from him making this clever play. What would have been wrong with going to open source conferences, and eventually reaching a larger audience with his prescient warnings about mass surveillance, DRM, and whatnot?
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software other than that since anybody can take Open Source and add whatever restrictions they want to its licensing, it can all be considered Free (or proprietary for that matter - I can take it, obfuscate it and throw DRM on it, then sell it as my product.) OSI people tend to be as hostile, if not more, towards Free Software as people who write proprietary software, who simply think of it as a competitor that they rarely have to worry about (because their customers don't use it.) Open Source competes with Free Software for contributors, although it offers them nothing but the glory of helping multibillion-dollar corporations for free. At least Free Software gives you the ideological reward of contributing to the commons in an inalienable way.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - kelnos 6y ago
    > Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software I don't see how this is a true statement. Open Source is clearly a subset of Free Software. Free Software is, largely, Open Source software that also respects user freedom. Unless you are making the claim that the "respects user freedom" part of Free Software is so huge as to make up 90% (or some other large percentage) of the importance of "Free Software"... but I don't really agree with that claim. > since anybody can take Open Source and add whatever restrictions they want to its licensing Well, no, not really. Copyleft licenses are free software licenses, but are also generally Open Source licenses. You can't add restrictions to copyleft licenses (in most cases). And while it's true that you can fork and add restrictions to your modifications when the original work is licensed under many of the weaker open-source licenses, that does not make the original work further encumbered. Someone can come along and take the original work, keep the license, and make modifications under that same license.
optimalsolver 6y ago
Are we the Judean People's front, or the People's Front of Judea?
shadowofneptune 6y ago
As an learning project, I recently typeset Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay in LaTeX. I was surprised to find that as I got more familiar with the text that I disagreed with it quite a bit. Raymond was the coiner of "open source," and he's pretty positive throughout the essay that open-source software is superior to proprietary software technically. As this article points out, that relies a lot on there being enough people working on a project. Raymond also discourages the use of the term "free software" in another essay. Eric S Raymond concludes "Cathedral" with the statement that proprietary software is on its way out due to paid developers not being able to compete with the man-hours invested by volunteers. It's a very whiggish attitude that hasn't been borne out. He's still saying stuff like this, such as that Windows will inevitably become a layer on top of the Linux kernal. It was nice to see this article come along to HN when I was already thinking about this. I do think it's important that free software be used on principle, even if it's not better or set to wipe out its proprietary equivalent.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... Raymond's contribution to popularizing the phrase shouldn't be understated. Neither, for that matter, should O'Reilly's or that of others. But it doesn't seem the coinage was ESR's.
  - shadowofneptune 6y ago
    Thanks for the link, it's a cool story.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  I don’t know if he is wrong. .NETcore on Linux, vscode, and WSL seem to be pointing in that direction
higerordermap 6y ago
I am tired with Free software ideology which imposes a semi-arbitrary definition of freedom and fails to serve the interests of FOSS developers themselves. There are 2 type of FOSS software out there. Corporate sponsored, generally pieces of infrastructure / development tooling, liberally licensed and rightly so. Indie software, done mostly by volunteers on free time, there should be a creative commons like source-available NonCommerical license for it. Stallman's ideology of free for everyone doesn't make sense in the era of big tech. This is why I don't dislike commons clause or open core - we aren't entitled to anything, and definitions of FOSS are arbitrary and outdated at this point. At least these raise the standards of living for developers, while still allowing us to view / modify sources.
bergstromm466 6y ago
Wendy: "I recently [wrote] an article on the failures of the free software movement for Logic Magazine, in a piece called Freedom Isn’t Free [2]. I agree that free software is useful as a political rallying point. As it is now, though, it doesn’t present a challenge to capital. If we want to reclaim the radical roots of the free software movement, there needs to be a larger political project mobilising around what free software originally meant and extending that to challenge the dominance of the tech giants. It’s not easy, but there is value in the ideas behind free software. I first came across the movement when I was really young and I loved it - like, “yeah, intellectual property sucks!” The challenge is getting people who feel that way to to understand why intellectual property exists in the first place - how capitalism works, and why it needs intellectual property. From there, you have a bridge to a more radical politics." Jason: "I see free software as one of the reasons we should unionise. I recently gave a talk at a Ruby conference on the Lucas Plan, which was well-received - everyone liked the idea of producing socially useful things. But then I shot myself in the foot by saying that the MIT license needs to die, which didn’t go over well. If you use a license like that to release software, you have no control over how your software is used. You can have all the moral codes you want, but then it’s being used 10 companies down the line by someone you don’t like. I don’t think the solution is draconian control over software, as free software ideology is embedded in the industry. The solution is organising." [1] [1] https://newsocialist.org.uk/tech-workers-inquiry-at-twt/ https://newsocialist.org.uk/tech-workers-inquiry-at-twt/ [2] https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/ https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/

83 points by henning 6y ago

I know my GPL from my BSD. I know FSF’s stand on “free” vs “open” software. That part is crystal clear to me. This piece confuses me though. It constantly seems to intermix and conflate “open source software” with “proprietary software”. Is that intentional? Do they really mean that? That “open source” software is in no way better than a closed-source, proprietary equivalent? That closed source and permissively licensed software is equivalent? They can’t possibly mean that, can they? Is it perhaps only badly written, and I’m reading too much into this?

the_af 6y ago
The article doesn't conflate open source with proprietary software. It elaborates on why Stallman wrote, so many years ago, that Open Source is misguided, or at least, that it doesn't share the same goals as Free Software. Here's the gist of it: - Open Source presents itself as a technically better alternative to proprietary software. Also, it often claims to be developed in a more collaborative way, "all bugs are shallow when there are many eyeballs", etc. If you want a specific name, someone who used to vocally make this kind of claims was Open Source's advocate Eric Raymond. - There is then the onus of proving this assertion. Is it true that Open Source is, as a norm, technically better than proprietary software as some of its more vocal advocates claim? Is it true that its development is more collaborative? - The article states that no, as any user can plainly see, Open Source is not always technically better than proprietary software. Open Source is often more difficult to use, or unpolished, or has a worse UI, and critically, many open source projects are maintained by a single person, so it's not really always developed more collaboratively. - The article states that this is not a problem for Free Software, because Free Software doesn't claim to be always technically better than proprietary software. It's not even its goal. Free Software claims to protect user's freedoms, even at the cost of being less polished or lacking some features.
- warkdarrior 6y ago
  That's a generous interpretation of the article. This line in the article shows the author's purposefully distorted view: > For open source, poor-quality software is a problem to be explained away or a reason to eschew the software altogether. For free software, it is a problem to be worked through. I cannot think of an OSS project that tried to "explain away" the quality issues they have (as in "It's poor quality because it is open source"), as opposed to working on them ("Yes, this is a bug. We'll fix some time in the future.").
  - worik 6y ago
    I can When a Ubuntu update completely replaced the Desktop with buggy unity, with out warning or option, the response of Ubuntu developers was "it's open sauce software, you get it for free, stop complaining"
    - ziml77 6y ago
      It's also common to see "It's open source, fix it yourself."
    - merb 6y ago
      actually the first release was flawed, but I still liked unity. it's sad that it was so tangled to ubuntu.
      - worik 6y ago
        You miss the point, mostly. The update made a major change in the way the user interface worked. With the new user interface I found I could not easily access my programmes without spending a non trivial amount of time learning it, and there was no way back to the old interface, options fro running both etcetera. Ubunti was tremendously stable for a long time at that point, and I upgraded without hesitation. Not since! As you say the interface was buggy. Dreadfully buggy. It leaked memory badly, was clunky and slow. When I complained on my local Linux users mailing list (as did another member who had the same experience) the Ubuntu developers I knew personally took it as a personal affront. Since I had not paid for it, how dare I complain. They have a point. I do not use Ubuntu any more.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
The fsf considers open source to basically be a marketing tactic for companies to sell services around free software. They don't like that the open source movement is focused on practical reasons to use free/opensource when freedom should be the main reason to use it. Especially in light of the fact that many times it is impractical to choose free/opensource software over proprietary software. Free software focuses on principals over pragmatism They are using free and opensource as interchangeable terms for the same code, but used by people with different goals. I think at the time of this article, there was no license that was one and not the other. Bruce Perens has openly stated that the GPL was the example for the open source definition.
deleted 6y ago
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fsflover 6y ago
They don't mean that open source is the same as proprietary, but: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.....
Shared404 6y ago
> Is it perhaps only badly written I did not find it to be badly written. > I’m reading too much into this? I would think so. My interpretation was that "Open Source" advocates must win the argument that Open Source will always turn out higher quality software, while "Free Software" advocates have an inherent advantage in that the software is explicitly designed to protect freedoms and therefore starts out ahead of proprietary software, even if it's less featureful. Whether I agree with this argument, I'm unsure.
deleted 6y ago
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mrob 6y ago
Free Software prioritizes Freedom[0]. Both permissive and copyleft licenses can support this goal. Free Software developers use a permissive license when they judge that best supports their goal of maximizing Freedom (e.g. Ogg Vorbis using a permissive license to encourage people to switch from patent-encumbered MP3). Open Source Software prioritizes quality. Open Source Software developers do not care about Freedom except as a means to that end. However, almost all Open Source Software is also Free Software, so despite this difference they end up supporting Freedom as a byproduct. Proprietary software development also prioritizes quality, but the important difference is that proprietary software actively opposes Freedom. The article is discussing priorities, so it's natural for it to compare two methodologies with the same priority, but the two are not conflated. Open Source Software still (usually) provides Freedom, while proprietary software never does, and Freedom still matters even when the developers don't care about it. [0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
phkahler 6y ago
When the OSI first started approving open source licenses, it seemed like rain. Like every company wanted to create their own license with the intent to get free development work that they could then wrap up in closed commercial products. They were often incompatible with other licenses as well for that reason. To ensure code is maximally reusable IMHO all we need are MIT, BSD and GPL, LGPL. And two of those are not really different in my mind. I understand AGPL too, but not MPL or Apache licenses. But if they are needed then that really should be all of them. Any others have some kind of non-free agenda.

CarVac 6y ago

This is why it's important for single devs to be in a community with peers working on different solutions in the same problem space, for cross-pollination of ideas. One such example is the pixls.us community for photography-related free software. All kinds of devs from projects like RawTherapee, darktable, PhotoFlow, Filmulator, rawproc, G'MIC, and more, plus users, are all in the https://discuss.pixls.us/ https://discuss.pixls.us/ forums and we can all learn from one another and collaborate in ways other than directly contributing code.

MH15 6y ago
Do you know of any other communities similar to pixls.us but for other specializations? That's such a powerful idea!
- CarVac 6y ago
  No, but here's an interview with the founder about how it came to be: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/interview-with-pat-david-at-libre-graphics-meeting-2019 http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/interview-with-pat-... Hopefully others can learn from him and forge their own collaborative communities.

auggierose 6y ago

The free software / open source / proprietary software discussion is an important one. For someone new to it, this article is certainly interesting. For me the question is how to solve this in the context of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs We'll see there that freedom is pretty much high up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs (it's in the esteem part). Which means, it is very important, but only if your other needs are already met. Can I live from making free software? How well can I live from making free software? These are the really interesting questions in my opinion. Can I be free by making free software?

dec0dedab0de 6y ago
For anyone new to it I recommend watching revolution OS, it's about 20 years old at this point, and just ignore the part at the end about the stocks, but it has some good interviews with stallman, linus, and others. Including the great line of stallman accepting the linus torvalds award on behalf of the fsf. "It's like giving the han solo award to the rebel fleet"
oska 6y ago
You're focusing on developers, which is a minute fraction of the population. And even developers mostly use software written by other people. The point of Free Software is to respect the freedom of users of the software.
- auggierose 6y ago
  To be honest, I couldn't care less about people who advocate the freedom of software without caring about the freedom of the people who create it. Also, as a developer, if I don't like the terms of some software, I have an additional choice to just not using it: just make what I need myself.

dang 6y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13054275

Ericson2314 6y ago

Sure "Open source" is a bad term. "Free software" is also a bad term as that heavily connotes strains of American individualism which isn't really the appropriate ideological basis either. We need a new discourse of the "forkable commons" and how it transcends old individualism-vs-collectivism battles.

Barrin92 6y ago

Entomologist E.O Wilson said about communism, "great idea, wrong species". It's basically how I feel about 'free software'. There's a very straight forward reason why, as the author points out, free software projects are run by lone developers and lack resources. Because free software, by its own stated mission goal, basically has no good way to reap the rewards for the benefits it brings to the public. It's a great idea in the wrong economic system.

skavi 6y ago
wrong culture maybe, but their have definitely been successful communal societies. And there have definitely been successful free software projects.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  I spent a year in a kibbutz, I am definitely aware that there's success on the margins. But it very much has to exist in the crevasses of the system. The 'free software' movement is explicitly ethical for that reason, it is hard to justify it on economic grounds, and free software is undersupplied for that reason.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Feudalism seemed like an immovable foundation of the world until it wasn't. The problem with free software is the need for private competition to restrict people to make money. In a cooperative vs a competitive economy, this idea would come to the forefront. For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
    - jcranmer 6y ago
      > Feudalism seemed like an immovable foundation of the world until it wasn't. When I see a statement like this, I must immediately ask: what do you consider to be feudalism, and when do you think it existed?

na85 6y ago

I don't understand how the content of the article relates to the title. I was expecting a treatise on the trade offs of developing free software and instead it seemed mostly like a rant that boils down to "open source bad". What about when free software is actually inferior? The reason the year of Linux on the desktop never comes is that Windows and MacOS provide an experience that for the majority of users is overwhelmingly better than Linux. The response from the FSF crowd seems to mostly be "deal with it because freedom" which is fine, I guess, but I have better things to do with my time than battle my operating system to recognize my external monitor correctly.

matthias509 6y ago
Exactly, I use my free will to exchange money for an experience with less hassle and thus get back time which I can spend on other pursuits.
1_player 6y ago
The reason why desktop Linux is so bad has not very much to do with it being free software, but instead it's more of a political problem which many open source proponents still haven't understood. Everyone seems to point to Linux as the best model of open source community that managed to outgrow and outpace any commercial offering. Why is that? The secret sauce for any project, open source or not, that can grow as fast as successfully as Linux is the presence of a BDFL at the top. The one that sets the vision, that pushes back again anything that would impact negatively from that vision and, yikes, might reject patches people have spent their free time on. Blender and Godot are other fully open source project that are competing with commercial offerings, and all have either a BDFL or a very close-knit governance model at the top, that is not afraid to take the next step and find sources of funding for its own full time developers. All of which is opposite to the governance model of the two biggest UI projects in the Linux desktop world, GNOME and KDE. It's a loose bunch of passionate people that work on whatever tickles the fancy right now, and if they get bored they'll just rewrite a core library or app, backward compatibility be damned, we're just volunteer we don't owe you anything. We'd have Linux on the desktop in 2020 if any of those projects had some Torvalds-like figure ranting on a mailing list about why the user is always right, shame on you on redesigning the menubar yet again breaking any UI convention for no real purpose, and no, Canonical/Red Hat/whoever, we will not accept this patch that undermines the goals of this project. So it's really got nothing to do with open source, it's just an organisational problem. Well, that, and the fact that the vast majority of Linux users seems to be incredibly stingy and reluctant to support and pay for these volunteers' time.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

I stopped trying to debate open vs. closed software in a business setting long ago. There is a time and place for both, and rational actors will evaluate the tradeoffs given their circumstances. When people start believing that open source software is inherently superior in every situation, or that ideological purity is the most important consideration, they aren't making decisions in the best interest of the company. Engineers are especially prone to overestimating the downside risks of using closed source software (A long list of what-ifs such as "What if the vendor goes out of business without warning?") and underestimating the downsides of using open source alternatives (Notably, the inability to pick up the phone and have another company's engineers deal with the problem, per your contract). The situation is compounded by engineers who genuinely enjoy tinkering with open source software on the company's dime and, frankly, would prefer to be paid to do so rather than purchase a more efficient closed-source solution. Of course, there are some situations where open-source software is practically superior to alternatives. I don't claim to suggest otherwise. However, the endless debates about ideological purity and avoiding hypothetical edge cases with 3rd party vendors frequently cloud decision making abilities in a business context. For personal and open source projects, I'm all-in on free software alternatives. For business purposes, I'll evaluate the available options and try to make the best business decision for the company.

aplummer 6y ago
This is why I like the open source + enterprise contract if you like model so much.
- alexilliamson 6y ago
  What's your favorite such example?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Arnt 6y ago
    I know at least four quite different examples. But they share one trait: They're quiet, softspoken, avoid controversy on internet forums. I won't name any of them. One uses low pricing, is likable, and provides a fine list of enterprise features. The HN crowd will realise that these features are really different ways of describing a very small amount of code. But if you want to spend your employer's money and don't care to spoil that by telling your managers too much, the list is fine. Engineers who like the likable make money be spent. One writes per-customer code on top of largely the same body of code, and charges very high prices, largely because they clearly know how to get stuff done using that code. They have the references to prove it, and they wrote the code, and the customers accept that they invoice customers for improvements to the free base too. One uses a technique I don't understand at all. It's different from the other three, and it works. I mention it to say that the other three aren't an exhaustive list. The fourth targets nontechnical customers and sell SaaS, I don't know the price level. You can git-clone the code and selfhost if you want, they'll be friendly but not helpful. If you make a PR on github they'll at least look at it.

jfax 6y ago

This was the article that sold me on the Free software / open source distinction years ago. Everything started to make so much more sense afterwards.

eznzt 6y ago

Hahaha, seemingly the FSF had a goal of getting 500 new members during 2020 and two weeks away of 2021 they only got 222.

scubbo 6y ago

The title is quite timely for me (though I acknowledge that the message of the article doesn't quite match it). I have spent hundreds of hours, over the course of ~3 years, tweaking and tuning an NFS server on a RPi4 (1Gb RAM, 4x1.5GHz processor) to stream my media to various devices on Kodi on home network - with passable-at-best performance, but usually lots of pixellation, lag, buffering, audio mismatch, etc. Last night I finally gave up on trying to do it the FOSS way, set up a Samba share on a 6-year-old mid-range PC (8Gb RAM, 3.5GHz processor), and got flawless playback on each of my troublesome media entities with less than ten minutes of effort. On a whim, I also tried setting up Plex (a semi-paid service), and got similarly smooth and flawless service. My idealistic 13-year-old self would be horrified to hear me say "I regret all that time I spent messing around with Linux, when I could have just used a Microsoft product, or a different paid product, that Just Work". (And yes, I'm kind-of intentionally invoking Cunningham's Law, here, in the hopes that someone can suggest a way of tweaking a RPi4 to be an effective media server - I'd much rather use that than have my PC always-on, but if that's what it takes to get decent playback, I will)

billyjobob 6y ago
Is Samba not FOSS? Also the PC can probably run entirely free software while the Pi will require non-free binary blobs due to its proprietary Broadcom hardware design, so I would say the PC is preferable from a freedom perspective.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Indeed it is https://www.samba.org/ https://www.samba.org/ Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good performance on a full-fledged PC.
  - scubbo 6y ago
    > Also, comparing flawed performance on a RPi, vs good performance on a full-fledged PC Is 1Gb RAM and 4x1.5GHz not considered sufficient specs to stream video? That is a genuine question, I'm not up-to-date on hardware specs nowadays - but it _seems_ like it should be sufficient to me. Obviously "more is better", but I'm surprised to hear that this is considered insufficient.

linspace 6y ago

Although I agree more with the idea of free SW than with open source I cannot help finding here a resemblance of the obsession of all religions with heresies. And the smaller the community the more ridiculous it looks. In particular attacking open source by downplaying the importance of collaboration, by giving quite absurd numbers IMO, it's attacking one of the things that I find transcend technical merit, like the freedom that is at the core of the free SW movement.

jancsika 6y ago

There's an alternate history where Stallman did the Aikido move of accepting the descriptor of "open source" to simply describe a subset of the free software philosophy. After all, in his initial announcement to create Gnu, he didn't say, "Of course it might turn out to perform worse, and it won't have near as many features, nor attract many other developers, or have a sane review process, or be secure... but that doesn't matter because it's all in the interest of freedom and that's the model people should follow." No, as with the OSI, he set out with some bold claims, then inspired people to help by incrementally making those claims be true. Anyway, I fail to see how anything bad would have happened from him making this clever play. What would have been wrong with going to open source conferences, and eventually reaching a larger audience with his prescient warnings about mass surveillance, DRM, and whatnot?

pessimizer 6y ago
Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software other than that since anybody can take Open Source and add whatever restrictions they want to its licensing, it can all be considered Free (or proprietary for that matter - I can take it, obfuscate it and throw DRM on it, then sell it as my product.) OSI people tend to be as hostile, if not more, towards Free Software as people who write proprietary software, who simply think of it as a competitor that they rarely have to worry about (because their customers don't use it.) Open Source competes with Free Software for contributors, although it offers them nothing but the glory of helping multibillion-dollar corporations for free. At least Free Software gives you the ideological reward of contributing to the commons in an inalienable way.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- kelnos 6y ago
  > Open Source has nothing to do with Free Software I don't see how this is a true statement. Open Source is clearly a subset of Free Software. Free Software is, largely, Open Source software that also respects user freedom. Unless you are making the claim that the "respects user freedom" part of Free Software is so huge as to make up 90% (or some other large percentage) of the importance of "Free Software"... but I don't really agree with that claim. > since anybody can take Open Source and add whatever restrictions they want to its licensing Well, no, not really. Copyleft licenses are free software licenses, but are also generally Open Source licenses. You can't add restrictions to copyleft licenses (in most cases). And while it's true that you can fork and add restrictions to your modifications when the original work is licensed under many of the weaker open-source licenses, that does not make the original work further encumbered. Someone can come along and take the original work, keep the license, and make modifications under that same license.

optimalsolver 6y ago

Are we the Judean People's front, or the People's Front of Judea?

shadowofneptune 6y ago

As an learning project, I recently typeset Eric S. Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" essay in LaTeX. I was surprised to find that as I got more familiar with the text that I disagreed with it quite a bit. Raymond was the coiner of "open source," and he's pretty positive throughout the essay that open-source software is superior to proprietary software technically. As this article points out, that relies a lot on there being enough people working on a project. Raymond also discourages the use of the term "free software" in another essay. Eric S Raymond concludes "Cathedral" with the statement that proprietary software is on its way out due to paid developers not being able to compete with the man-hours invested by volunteers. It's a very whiggish attitude that hasn't been borne out. He's still saying stuff like this, such as that Windows will inevitably become a layer on top of the Linux kernal. It was nice to see this article come along to HN when I was already thinking about this. I do think it's important that free software be used on principle, even if it's not better or set to wipe out its proprietary equivalent.

kemitchell 6y ago
https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source-software https://opensource.com/article/18/2/coining-term-open-source... Raymond's contribution to popularizing the phrase shouldn't be understated. Neither, for that matter, should O'Reilly's or that of others. But it doesn't seem the coinage was ESR's.
- shadowofneptune 6y ago
  Thanks for the link, it's a cool story.
wombatpm 6y ago
I don’t know if he is wrong. .NETcore on Linux, vscode, and WSL seem to be pointing in that direction

higerordermap 6y ago

I am tired with Free software ideology which imposes a semi-arbitrary definition of freedom and fails to serve the interests of FOSS developers themselves. There are 2 type of FOSS software out there. Corporate sponsored, generally pieces of infrastructure / development tooling, liberally licensed and rightly so. Indie software, done mostly by volunteers on free time, there should be a creative commons like source-available NonCommerical license for it. Stallman's ideology of free for everyone doesn't make sense in the era of big tech. This is why I don't dislike commons clause or open core - we aren't entitled to anything, and definitions of FOSS are arbitrary and outdated at this point. At least these raise the standards of living for developers, while still allowing us to view / modify sources.

bergstromm466 6y ago

Wendy: "I recently [wrote] an article on the failures of the free software movement for Logic Magazine, in a piece called Freedom Isn’t Free [2]. I agree that free software is useful as a political rallying point. As it is now, though, it doesn’t present a challenge to capital. If we want to reclaim the radical roots of the free software movement, there needs to be a larger political project mobilising around what free software originally meant and extending that to challenge the dominance of the tech giants. It’s not easy, but there is value in the ideas behind free software. I first came across the movement when I was really young and I loved it - like, “yeah, intellectual property sucks!” The challenge is getting people who feel that way to to understand why intellectual property exists in the first place - how capitalism works, and why it needs intellectual property. From there, you have a bridge to a more radical politics." Jason: "I see free software as one of the reasons we should unionise. I recently gave a talk at a Ruby conference on the Lucas Plan, which was well-received - everyone liked the idea of producing socially useful things. But then I shot myself in the foot by saying that the MIT license needs to die, which didn’t go over well. If you use a license like that to release software, you have no control over how your software is used. You can have all the moral codes you want, but then it’s being used 10 companies down the line by someone you don’t like. I don’t think the solution is draconian control over software, as free software ideology is embedded in the industry. The solution is organising." [1] [1] https://newsocialist.org.uk/tech-workers-inquiry-at-twt/ https://newsocialist.org.uk/tech-workers-inquiry-at-twt/ [2] https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/ https://logicmag.io/failure/freedom-isnt-free/