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That seems like splitting hairs for ideological gain. You might as well describe freedom of movement as power to take someone else's job in another town, or fr

That seems like splitting hairs for ideological gain. You might as well describe freedom of movement as power to take someone else's job in another town, or freedom of speech as power to manipulate masses, or freedom to do an abortion as power over the unborn child. Which way the issues are framed says more about the author than the issue. Software has leverage (one developer, many users at low marginal cost) built-in, but that doesn't make developing non-(A)GPL or even proprietory software a projection of developer's power. Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power. At the same time, copyleft doesn't come free (ha), as developers who need to earn a living will choose to work on problems where they can actually extract some profit to compensate for their effort. Not everyone is keen to work for free, or work as much / as hard for free as they would if they could make a living off it. So yes you might get free-er software, but less of it.

crazypython 5y ago
> freedom of movement as power to take someone else's job in another town Freedom of movement is the power to exchange goods and services with anyone. > freedom of speech as power to manipulate masses Freedom of speech is only a freedom if it is accompanied by a potential hearer's freedom to block speech. Modern platforms do not let you choose what or who you want to hear. Freedom of speech without freedom to choose your censor is anarchy. > Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power. You are ignoring the freedom to modify/fork, plus the requirement of free documentation.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Quite a quantum leap there from proprietary licenses to "modern platforms". You're free not to use Facebook, Twitter, et al, you know. There are other, open, platforms. And other closed ones that are decent. Use any of them if you want more control over what you read. Don't fucking shame people for earning money writing good software. Most of us aren't building evil monopolies.
chx 5y ago
> or freedom to do an abortion as power over the unborn child. this is nonsensical propaganda. There's no such thing as "an unborn child". Next you will subscribe to Roko's basilisk. Or what about criminalizing going a month without attempting to procreate, after all, an egg has the potential to become a child. Sure, smaller chance than a fertilized egg but hey are we going to draw the criminal lines based on probabilities? Nope, we just refuse this framing -- it masquerades as "think of the children" but as all those laws, it's actually harmful as the right framing here is about the control of the bodies of women. We now push back at every possible occurrence of this and other nonsensical Republican bllsht. The time for debate ended on January 6. It was not me who ended it. Now it's just pushing back and out.
moron4hire 5y ago
> That seems like splitting hairs for ideological gain. Such is the way of the FSF.
Seirdy 5y ago
Laws exist ideally to limit freedoms whose exercise comes with externalities that end up reducing the freedom for others. These range from freedoms to cause harm to others (steal, assault, enslave), to freedoms to sell food without disclosing ingredients, to freedoms to run a business without transparently reporting financial information. The idea of greater freedoms depending on lesser restrictions is not novel. > Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power. Copyleft/FLOSS alone is a necessary but insufficient measure; I wrote about other measures in a blog post [0]. [0]: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication... TLDR: open platforms/standards-driven and implementation-neutral development, implementation diversity, and simplicity are also necessary. Once all that is accomplished, you have a platform that prevents abuse of power: anyone can use any implementation they want, and implementations are simple enough for community members to fork and maintain. All of this prevents vendors from exerting power over users. > At the same time, copyleft doesn't come free (ha), as developers who need to earn a living will choose to work on problems where they can actually extract some profit to compensate for their effort. Not everyone is keen to work for free, or work as much / as hard for free as they would if they could make a living off it. So yes you might get free-er software, but less of it. From the article I linked: > The key to making money with FLOSS is to make software a commoditized complement of other, more profitable services. [1] [1]: https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement > Examples of such services include selling support, customization, consulting, training, managed hosting, hardware, and certifications. Plenty of companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are some names that come to mind. > Managed hosting isn't a basket worth all your eggs if giants like AWS can do the same at a lower price. Being the developer can give an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; it doesn't offer as obvious an advantage when it comes to hosting. In other words, developers should be paid for service rather than copies of software. AGPL makes it hard to sell copies of software, but doesn't stop you from offering any number of services. This makes sense, since labor is a scarce resource while copies of software require artificially-imposed scarcity to directly bring revenue.
- 5y ago

crazypython 5y ago

> freedom of movement as power to take someone else's job in another town Freedom of movement is the power to exchange goods and services with anyone. > freedom of speech as power to manipulate masses Freedom of speech is only a freedom if it is accompanied by a potential hearer's freedom to block speech. Modern platforms do not let you choose what or who you want to hear. Freedom of speech without freedom to choose your censor is anarchy. > Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power. You are ignoring the freedom to modify/fork, plus the requirement of free documentation.

clusterfish 5y ago
Quite a quantum leap there from proprietary licenses to "modern platforms". You're free not to use Facebook, Twitter, et al, you know. There are other, open, platforms. And other closed ones that are decent. Use any of them if you want more control over what you read. Don't fucking shame people for earning money writing good software. Most of us aren't building evil monopolies.

chx 5y ago

> or freedom to do an abortion as power over the unborn child. this is nonsensical propaganda. There's no such thing as "an unborn child". Next you will subscribe to Roko's basilisk. Or what about criminalizing going a month without attempting to procreate, after all, an egg has the potential to become a child. Sure, smaller chance than a fertilized egg but hey are we going to draw the criminal lines based on probabilities? Nope, we just refuse this framing -- it masquerades as "think of the children" but as all those laws, it's actually harmful as the right framing here is about the control of the bodies of women. We now push back at every possible occurrence of this and other nonsensical Republican bllsht. The time for debate ended on January 6. It was not me who ended it. Now it's just pushing back and out.

moron4hire 5y ago

> That seems like splitting hairs for ideological gain. Such is the way of the FSF.

Seirdy 5y ago

Laws exist ideally to limit freedoms whose exercise comes with externalities that end up reducing the freedom for others. These range from freedoms to cause harm to others (steal, assault, enslave), to freedoms to sell food without disclosing ingredients, to freedoms to run a business without transparently reporting financial information. The idea of greater freedoms depending on lesser restrictions is not novel. > Lack of competition is what lets developer's exert power over users, and while copyleft licenses help with that, they're neither required nor sufficient to prevent abuse of power. Copyleft/FLOSS alone is a necessary but insufficient measure; I wrote about other measures in a blog post [0]. [0]: https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication-of-users.html https://seirdy.one/2021/01/27/whatsapp-and-the-domestication... TLDR: open platforms/standards-driven and implementation-neutral development, implementation diversity, and simplicity are also necessary. Once all that is accomplished, you have a platform that prevents abuse of power: anyone can use any implementation they want, and implementations are simple enough for community members to fork and maintain. All of this prevents vendors from exerting power over users. > At the same time, copyleft doesn't come free (ha), as developers who need to earn a living will choose to work on problems where they can actually extract some profit to compensate for their effort. Not everyone is keen to work for free, or work as much / as hard for free as they would if they could make a living off it. So yes you might get free-er software, but less of it. From the article I linked: > The key to making money with FLOSS is to make software a commoditized complement of other, more profitable services. [1] [1]: https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement > Examples of such services include selling support, customization, consulting, training, managed hosting, hardware, and certifications. Plenty of companies use this approach instead of building proprietary software: Red Hat, Collabora, System76, Purism, Canonical, SUSE, Hashicorp, Databricks, and Gradle are some names that come to mind. > Managed hosting isn't a basket worth all your eggs if giants like AWS can do the same at a lower price. Being the developer can give an edge in areas like customization, support, and training; it doesn't offer as obvious an advantage when it comes to hosting. In other words, developers should be paid for service rather than copies of software. AGPL makes it hard to sell copies of software, but doesn't stop you from offering any number of services. This makes sense, since labor is a scarce resource while copies of software require artificially-imposed scarcity to directly bring revenue.

5y ago