5 ms·

Does anybody who had time to read the whole thing have a concise summary? From the parts I skimmed it sounds like the author is annoyed by the politics of the F

by dcow 6y ago

Does anybody who had time to read the whole thing have a concise summary? From the parts I skimmed it sounds like the author is annoyed by the politics of the FSF. I've heard this argument many times before and in my experience it usually comes from people who only have a superficial understanding of how the GPL actually works. Often this happens as a result of learning what the little they do know from their corporate legal team not from actual software engineers writing free software. "The GPL is politics and inherently incompatible with venture _capitalism_." The GPL puts users first. Good capitalism does that too. On top of that, the only time I hear people actually complain about free software is if they're trying to incorporate it into their product and don't have the authority to make the business/product call to not worry about the secrecy of their source code (or don't want to). Essentially, they don't respect the license/ethos and just want to use other software for free not with user freedom in mind. Here's why you use free software: 1. You are building a product where user freedom is important. 2. You don't want a large company to take your software and use their vast resources to pump out improvements and usurp your position in the market (AGPL). 3. You want to mutually benefit from others using your software in a more tangible way than "can I have money look I have github stars". 4. You want to assert your patent position and ensure that nobody can ever lock you out of your product by patenting a derivative work. Here's when free software is annoying: 1. If you're trying to make money off commodity software (or talent). 2. If your lawyers aren't familiar with how the world writes software and insist that everything your engineers output is a trade secret and will bolster your software portfolio in the event of acquisition (don't work for these companies). I've also commonly heard the myth that using the GPL slashes your company's value. In the instances where that's happened, the people who let it happen got taken, or they didn't do their diligence and let the GPL slip into their product when their whole strategy was keeping their source secret and then look like fools and direct their anger at the GPL. Another thing people don't often realize is that as the original copyright holder, you have permission to dual license your work as you see fit. If you're say an enterprise company and trying to woo a big client and they just can't stomach the GPL, then you can choose to license it to them under terms they're willing to work with, if that makes sense for your business. Honestly I think this puts the company that owns the software in a pretty powerful position "oh you like our product but want special treatment, well that's going to cost some $$$". If Free Software is dead you'd think the linux kernel would be dead, Signal would be dead, etc.

kmeisthax 6y ago
If I could boil down the author's thesis into something reasonably edited, it's... 1. The FSF has an overly narrow view of user freedoms that doesn't actually protect users freedoms [because they assume all users are developers]. Users want warranties, not source code that they aren't able to inspect. Even if they were, fixing that source is effectively forking the program into an unsupportable version, hence why proprietary licensing started [to save users from themselves]. Ergo, source availability is not a reasonable way to protect users. (Insert hamfisted metaphor about assault weapons and QAnon.) 2. The FSF has no legislative adjenda to mitigate or eliminate the harms of proprietary software. Their sole strategy is based in litigation: locking software into copyleft licenses that mandate source code publication as a condition of redistribution. The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today.
- dcow 6y ago
  > The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today. I think this is the one thing I do agree with. If there's something I think the FSF got wrong it's their staunch aversion to software patents. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to patent trolls, and I do agree that from a liberal intellectual property stance it's hard to rationalize patenting something that's not a physical invention and that software patents are in some regards akin to patenting the fastest route from your house to the grocery store. I concede we have had some pretty bogus software patents like "an object oriented operating system", but I think that as society matures in its understanding of software it will only get better, not worse, and sniffing out bogus software patents and there will only become more and more prior art. I also think that any serious company needs to patent their inventions. Once you do that the invention becomes public domain and you have the rights to license it in any style you see fit, just as you do with copyright, or, copyright still applies and you have the power to lay claim to all forms of your invention, not just your reference implementation. I think the FSF's focus on copyright is a result of Stallman stumbling into the discovery that he could hack the copyright system and he just ran with that. And of course it is much harder to patent something because it has to be novel and copyleft has that nice.. viral effect. The reality is that most people aren't doing novel things with software, they're just doing things with software. The FSF gets more exposure if it can apply in the later case. I don't understand why we need to tear down the FSF to incorporate approaches that include freedom-focused patenting into the software licensing discussion. It's also not a new talking point. The GPL covers mutual patent assignment and I believe the FSF has advocated for people to donate patents to different software projects etc. There is a very real issue with patents and free software and there has been litigation in the past between patent holders and open source software projects that have implemented software off of a patented specification. The FSF doesn't exist in a vacuum.

by dcow 6y ago

kmeisthax 6y ago

If I could boil down the author's thesis into something reasonably edited, it's... 1. The FSF has an overly narrow view of user freedoms that doesn't actually protect users freedoms [because they assume all users are developers]. Users want warranties, not source code that they aren't able to inspect. Even if they were, fixing that source is effectively forking the program into an unsupportable version, hence why proprietary licensing started [to save users from themselves]. Ergo, source availability is not a reasonable way to protect users. (Insert hamfisted metaphor about assault weapons and QAnon.) 2. The FSF has no legislative adjenda to mitigate or eliminate the harms of proprietary software. Their sole strategy is based in litigation: locking software into copyleft licenses that mandate source code publication as a condition of redistribution. The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today.

dcow 6y ago
> The FSF could have advocated for moving software out of copyright and into patents, where source code disclosure could be mandated as a condition of patent grants and we'd be flooded with public domain software today. I think this is the one thing I do agree with. If there's something I think the FSF got wrong it's their staunch aversion to software patents. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to patent trolls, and I do agree that from a liberal intellectual property stance it's hard to rationalize patenting something that's not a physical invention and that software patents are in some regards akin to patenting the fastest route from your house to the grocery store. I concede we have had some pretty bogus software patents like "an object oriented operating system", but I think that as society matures in its understanding of software it will only get better, not worse, and sniffing out bogus software patents and there will only become more and more prior art. I also think that any serious company needs to patent their inventions. Once you do that the invention becomes public domain and you have the rights to license it in any style you see fit, just as you do with copyright, or, copyright still applies and you have the power to lay claim to all forms of your invention, not just your reference implementation. I think the FSF's focus on copyright is a result of Stallman stumbling into the discovery that he could hack the copyright system and he just ran with that. And of course it is much harder to patent something because it has to be novel and copyleft has that nice.. viral effect. The reality is that most people aren't doing novel things with software, they're just doing things with software. The FSF gets more exposure if it can apply in the later case. I don't understand why we need to tear down the FSF to incorporate approaches that include freedom-focused patenting into the software licensing discussion. It's also not a new talking point. The GPL covers mutual patent assignment and I believe the FSF has advocated for people to donate patents to different software projects etc. There is a very real issue with patents and free software and there has been litigation in the past between patent holders and open source software projects that have implemented software off of a patented specification. The FSF doesn't exist in a vacuum.