3 ms·

This general argument pioneered by ESR against RMS is something that you hear a lot: the idea that open source software is just better. (And it is that too!)

• Aethaeryn 14y ago
  > it's too hard to say whether the free software movement would have evolved without RMS. Hypothetical speculation of how history would have turned out if certain details were changed a little bit are hard to argue because they're hypothetical and thus a realm of opinion. There does not exist an actual alternate universe in which a given event never happened that we can just observe to see how things worked out differently. I think that where we're heading in software is inevitable. Yes, RMS contributed to it early on and yes, things might have taken off more slowly without the FSF and GNU, but in 100 years, I think we'll have won no matter what. This is an opinion. There's no empirical way to evaluate it. I think the nature of easy copying via the Internet has created a sort of inevitable force, like gravity, and that fighting it is ultimately futile. Am I right? We'll see how things are in 2112. ----- > Surely there is a place for the GPL for some projects, and RMS isn't forcing anyone to GPL their software. If you think that proprietary software is evil instead of just bad, then yes, the GPL is good for some things because it is "freedom-preserving". I could easily imagine an alternate reality in which Mac OS X used a BSD-licensed Linux kernel. It could also be argued, for the sake of argument, that the GPL is ultimately a bad thing. It requires copyleft, sharing with the same license, and about half of FOSS has been "infected".[1] Very few projects do the copyright assignment that the FSF does. If there is a currently unseen issue with the GPL, it would be very hard to get every single contributor who owns copyright to switch every major project from the GPL. If you say "GPL v2 or later" or "GPL v3 or later" in your software's license, you are dependent on one organization for your "upgrade path" of licenses. An advantage that the permissive licenses have is that there isn't one major permissive license: there are lots of them. It's a more diverse ecosystem, without one point of possible future failure and without any dependency on one organization. > RMS just wants people to understand that if they license their software restrictively they're not doing the hacker community any great service, even if they claim otherwise. Those companies are not doing themselves a great service, either. The big proprietary software companies will realize this eventually, or like the big media companies who are so resistant to change, they'll go out of business in the long run. Reinventing the wheel is expensive, time consuming, and there's no guarantee you'll get the best programmers on board. You'll also get stuck into other vendors' lock-ins unless you're a very big company like Microsoft, so you'll lose more than you'll gain by going with closed source, non-free software. ----- > You make it seem like it's radical to stand on the side of ethical behavior. Maybe it is. It's not radical to focus on doing ethical behavior (or maybe it is, but it's not the radical thing I'm talking about). I do admire him for his courageous ability to take an ethical stand against all odds. I just don't think it's the most productive way to achieve to his goals. If you want all software to be free, then you need to convince companies making software to make it free. If you can't do that, then you need to make your own company and put those older companies out of business. There's only so many things that an organization or individual not making any money can do. In the world as it is, money matters. Maybe that's not how things should work, and maybe all software should be made by the FSF, but very radical structural changes are probably never going to happen. People went with "open source" not because they hate freedom or rms, but because they needed to "sell" the concept to companies like IBM. ----- [1] http://osrc.blackducksoftware.com/data/licenses/ http://osrc.blackducksoftware.com/data/licenses/
  • zach95 14y ago
    Instead of responding to things that might be factually inaccurate, let me just save time and reframe the debate between ESR and RMS. ESR thinks that open source makes good business sense since open source is better than closed source. Computing is something that extends our ability to get things done, but isn't an end in itself. We need to be pragmatic about what businesses want, and how the business world works in order to perform our role of helping people do business. RMS doesn't care so much about what the business world wants or the fact that open-source is indeed better. He sees hacking and computing as one of the greatest achievments of mankind. Because it's a great achievement of mankind (like writing, or alphabets, or language itself) he thinks that it should be made available to everyone, and never closed off. In other words, for the people who live in it, spending their lives working on it and in it, software is culture. It's not just an application that you use like a word processor. And in the hacker culture, there needs to be a free flow of ideas like there is in the scientific community. This is reflected in the different licenses. The GPL "restricts" people from trying to close off one of the greatest achievements of human kind for the sake of some people who want to earn some more money off of it. The BSD-style licenses consider themselves more practical in that they allow for better commercial exploitation by eventually imposing restrictions. This is why Apple is so heavily involved in converting FreeBSD away from GPL code Currently I think it's about 50% GPL and OpenBSD is more like 60%. They plan to replace the GPL code with BSD licensed code so they don't have to contribute to the project eventually. Clearly some code isn't the equivalent of Shakespearean drama, and it won't matter that humanity is deprived of it. Microsoft word comes to mind. But for the really amazing software, the software that involves the cutting edge free flowing of ideas, and I would argue that the linux kernel falls into this category, GPL gives it the ability to serve as a lasting monument to human ingenuity, as well as a way of transmitting culture. It's no coincidence that the linux kernel powers nearly all web servers, smartphones and supercomputers.