7 ms·

If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own produ

by phugoid 18y ago

If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open project will maintain dominance. So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will naturally prevail anyway. But what about the advantage Microsoft gained from basically grabbing a BSD-licensed TCP stack for WinNT? Apparently they recoded most of that stuff since then, but it was probably a great help at the time. All you need to defeat esr's argument is one or two cases where it was proven wrong. In my opinion, the GPL is not just a legal document but a cultural artifact. When you see a GPL notice, you can feel warm fuzzy feelings of sharing certain beliefs with the authors about freedom and sharing. You can feel the peace that comes with source code. To paraphrase you, why should I invest my own free time in a project that could be subverted from bringing freedom to its users? Market- and mind-share are not everyone's measure of success. And I'm not prepared to have you redefine software freedom in the name of RMS today, alright? :)

shader 18y ago
I don't think that the project can be 'subverted' from bringing freedom to users. A fork of it might be made "un-free", as in your Microsoft example. But Microsoft did a lot of their own work, and the original project is still around - completely free.
- neilk 18y ago
  That's a good point, but I think RMS' insight was that software exists in an ecosystem. No program is an island. Let's say I develop a very useful system under a free software model. Work that undercuts the monopoly of the unfree software producers, who fight you tooth and nail for years. They lose, but then they do the standard countermove -- taking the work and doing an Embrace & Extend. They provide a system which is subtly incompatible to all their users, which aims to capture all the benefits of your new idea while wresting control of its future development. This is the situation that RMS was fighting in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't just Microsoft; most users of any computing platform were in thrall to one dominant company or the other, be it Sun or IBM or what have you, who pulled similar tricks. Linus Torvalds has said over and over that GPLing Linux was the smartest move he ever made. It created a situation where rival companies could trust each other, since each contribution would always go towards growing the Linux ecosystem for everyone. No one company would ever capture all the benefits for themselves. This has worked so well that Linus continues to use GPL for his newer projects like git. Personally, I trust Linus more than ESR when it comes to understanding software. Linus is a true pragmatist with real experience running major software projects that are disruptive to the existing order. ESR portrays himself as both a great programmer and a pragmatist, but the evidence is largely confined to his own writings. I leave it up to others to decide if fetchmail is on the same level as git or emacs. And if you look at his other writings, he's explicitly political. He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens. (As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name.) I say this not to imply he has some evil agenda - he's trying to describe the world how he sees it, and he regards appeals to "responsibility" as an Atlas-Shruggy tyranny of the mediocre. However, much like Ayn Rand, he overstates the case when he alludes to his own work as being definitive, or even academically significant. I don't know of any empirical studies that back up his political ideas, and in this excerpt at least he is not citing any.
  - anamax 18y ago
    > He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens. That's not true. He merely believes that they have a different set of responsibilities than you'd like. > As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name. CPSR have a politics-laden definition of "Social Responsibility" which he doesn't agree with. Is their meaning sacred or is one allowed to criticize and even ridicule?
    - neilk 18y ago
      Well, here's the speech in question. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html It may not be the last word ESR has to say on rights and responsibilities, but I think I accurately conveyed his views. I'm not even arguing that they are wrong, although I think they are. My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. He sees that as a road to tyranny or stagnation, consistent with Ayn Rand and her intellectual descendants. The GPL is about building a web of such responsibilities, explicitly to force closed-source firms to abandon their tactics and become part of a community. I get the sense that ESR finds such tactics distasteful because of his political beliefs. Which is fine! He's not alone in that. The problem is that he's still claiming the GPL has held us all back by alluding to economic studies, which I'm not sure even exist. The GPL seems to have done really well by every empirical measure I know of, and it shows no signs of strangling capitalism or anything.
      - anamax 18y ago
        > My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. Whether or not your point is unclear or incorrect, it's pretty much irrelevant to whether ESR is correct about GPL. Reminder: good people aren't necessarily correct on a given point and bad people aren't necessarily wrong on a given point. In fact, good/bad is pretty much uncorrelated with correct/wrong.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  "and the original project is still around - completely free" Also more or less irrelevant when compared to its competition. As much as I respect the BSD stack and folks - they rock - the BSD operating systems are a market flop.
  - gamache 18y ago
    Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Ultrix, SunOS -- flops, all.
    - rbanffy 18y ago
      All but FreeBSD are proprietary (I doubt OpenSolaris commands a meaningful market-share for now) and the combined market share of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD is dwarfed by Linux's, which is dwarfed by OSX's. OSX has some parts that are BSD-free, parts that are GPL-free, other parts that are open-source and the rest is the most heavily guarded proprietary stuff in this industry. The fact it is hugely more successful than the combined presence of its competitors bears testimony to the fact that basing your OS on the work of others without giving much back is a winning strategy while contributing to products that can be used in such way is pretty dumb from a business point of view. Markets are pretty good at identifying opportunities and the fact there is no Red Hat on the BSD space should suffice as evidence ESR is wrong in this one.
      - aardvark 18y ago
        I'd say OSX's (and Red Hat's) success bears testimony to the fact that good marketing, not good technology, is the deciding factor in market success.
        rbanffy 18y ago
        I think that the first is a closed, proprietary product based mainly on BSD-style code and the other are services centered around the evolution of a free GPL-like product that remains free speaks for itself.
1gor 18y ago
Microsoft has not became dominant because they got a freebee or two from BSD. This is exactly the point - try imagine some evil company today grabbing Apache code-base and starting a commercial branch of it. So what? They will fail against Apache proper, as ESR points out. Let me try to argue not from ideological (closed source being immoral etc.) but from the economic point of view. We are talking about commoditization of software here. There are two types of software - one that contains competitive advantage for the business, and one that is a commodity. And software has a tendency to migrate from the first bucket to the second very fast. And by the way, 'commodity' is not a bad word. Software may be very smart and complicated, but it would not be unique in what it does. For example, if you have written the first social network software -- you have something unique and you'd be mad to open source it straight away (or you'd be very passionate about software freedom, like RMS :) . But when there appear tens of social network apps floating around, you should act like ning and give away your software for free. Why? This seems to be the rational choice for commodity software. To become king of commodities you have to compete on price. 'Free' is the ultimate winner price. And MIT license is the ultimate free license (less restrictions than GPL). When your free application grabs large enough slice of market share (mind share) it will start paying for itself in many ways. It 'develops and tests itself', it provides free marketing for you etc. And you are free to build another unique value-adding application on top of this commodity layer. So, for example, 37signals are very happy with RoR being free and under MIT license. They are using it for their in-house proprietary webapps, while it is being developed and tested now to the large extend by the community. I am sure 37signals would be ecstatic if Microsoft decided to 'grab' Ruby on Rails and integrate it into their next OS.
- stcredzero 18y ago
  Startups and enterprises that use RoR are themselves an important potential market for 37signals. Likewise, enterprise shops using Eclipse are a big potential market for IBM's consulting business as well as their hardware.
rbanffy 18y ago
"why should I invest my own free time in a project that could be subverted from bringing freedom to its users?" More important, why should I invest company resources on software that could be used to compete against me by a better funded competitor?
- rjurney 18y ago
  Why should you invest company resource on FOSS that could be used against you? According to Joel, because the project complements your commercial product: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
  - rbanffy 18y ago
    While the strategy to commoditize your product's complements is clever, doing so can be dangerous if you use a license that allows your competitors to take your work and run against you. When doing so, one should be careful to use licenses that can't be turned against _you_. All MIT/BSD licenses can. All *GPLs, MPLs can't. The choice is clear. From the projects he mentioned: IBM (Linux): GPL Netscape/Mozilla (Mozilla/Gecko): MPL Transmeta (Linux): GPL Sun/HP (Gnome): GPL There is a pattern to be seen: GPL licenses create vigorous diverse communities around them more easily than BSD-styled licenses.
CWuestefeld 18y ago
Those arguing against the points in the OP seem to be following a goal of making Free software successful at the expense of commercial software. That strikes me as wrong (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of ethics). We want Free software to succeed. If it succeeds at the same time that other commercial endeavors succeed, then that makes the software ecosystem richer, and gives us a broader set of tools and ideas to employ.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  There is no such dichotomy between free-as-in-speech and commercial software. Red Hat pretty much sell free-as-in-speech software and make a healthy amount of money from support contracts attached to it.
cabalamat 18y ago
> If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open project will maintain dominance. So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will naturally prevail anyway. That's my understanding of ESR's argument too. One counterexample is Apple's OS X. Another counterexample, in a different way, is mySQL which offers both GPL and proprietary licences; if MySQL used the BSD license, their business model wouldn't work. I think it's good that there are different open source licenses. People writing open source software can then choose a license that's appropriate for what they want to achieve with the software. It would be stupid if there were only BSD-style licenses, or only copyleft licenses.
hs 18y ago
"When you see a GPL notice, you can feel warm fuzzy feelings of sharing certain beliefs with the authors about freedom and sharing." this reminds me of this email conversation: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/... especially: "I had to put CLISP under GPL because libreadline.a was something I wanted to use and I didn't want to write myself. libgmp.a is similar in this respect, and it may therefore help putting some new packages under GPL. Building libgmp.a was just too hard work. Other people shouldn't get it for free."

by phugoid 18y ago

shader 18y ago

I don't think that the project can be 'subverted' from bringing freedom to users. A fork of it might be made "un-free", as in your Microsoft example. But Microsoft did a lot of their own work, and the original project is still around - completely free.

neilk 18y ago
That's a good point, but I think RMS' insight was that software exists in an ecosystem. No program is an island. Let's say I develop a very useful system under a free software model. Work that undercuts the monopoly of the unfree software producers, who fight you tooth and nail for years. They lose, but then they do the standard countermove -- taking the work and doing an Embrace & Extend. They provide a system which is subtly incompatible to all their users, which aims to capture all the benefits of your new idea while wresting control of its future development. This is the situation that RMS was fighting in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't just Microsoft; most users of any computing platform were in thrall to one dominant company or the other, be it Sun or IBM or what have you, who pulled similar tricks. Linus Torvalds has said over and over that GPLing Linux was the smartest move he ever made. It created a situation where rival companies could trust each other, since each contribution would always go towards growing the Linux ecosystem for everyone. No one company would ever capture all the benefits for themselves. This has worked so well that Linus continues to use GPL for his newer projects like git. Personally, I trust Linus more than ESR when it comes to understanding software. Linus is a true pragmatist with real experience running major software projects that are disruptive to the existing order. ESR portrays himself as both a great programmer and a pragmatist, but the evidence is largely confined to his own writings. I leave it up to others to decide if fetchmail is on the same level as git or emacs. And if you look at his other writings, he's explicitly political. He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens. (As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name.) I say this not to imply he has some evil agenda - he's trying to describe the world how he sees it, and he regards appeals to "responsibility" as an Atlas-Shruggy tyranny of the mediocre. However, much like Ayn Rand, he overstates the case when he alludes to his own work as being definitive, or even academically significant. I don't know of any empirical studies that back up his political ideas, and in this excerpt at least he is not citing any.
- anamax 18y ago
  > He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens. That's not true. He merely believes that they have a different set of responsibilities than you'd like. > As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name. CPSR have a politics-laden definition of "Social Responsibility" which he doesn't agree with. Is their meaning sacred or is one allowed to criticize and even ridicule?
  - neilk 18y ago
    Well, here's the speech in question. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cpsr-speech.html It may not be the last word ESR has to say on rights and responsibilities, but I think I accurately conveyed his views. I'm not even arguing that they are wrong, although I think they are. My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. He sees that as a road to tyranny or stagnation, consistent with Ayn Rand and her intellectual descendants. The GPL is about building a web of such responsibilities, explicitly to force closed-source firms to abandon their tactics and become part of a community. I get the sense that ESR finds such tactics distasteful because of his political beliefs. Which is fine! He's not alone in that. The problem is that he's still claiming the GPL has held us all back by alluding to economic studies, which I'm not sure even exist. The GPL seems to have done really well by every empirical measure I know of, and it shows no signs of strangling capitalism or anything.
    - anamax 18y ago
      > My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. Whether or not your point is unclear or incorrect, it's pretty much irrelevant to whether ESR is correct about GPL. Reminder: good people aren't necessarily correct on a given point and bad people aren't necessarily wrong on a given point. In fact, good/bad is pretty much uncorrelated with correct/wrong.
rbanffy 18y ago
"and the original project is still around - completely free" Also more or less irrelevant when compared to its competition. As much as I respect the BSD stack and folks - they rock - the BSD operating systems are a market flop.
- gamache 18y ago
  Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Ultrix, SunOS -- flops, all.
  - rbanffy 18y ago
    All but FreeBSD are proprietary (I doubt OpenSolaris commands a meaningful market-share for now) and the combined market share of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD is dwarfed by Linux's, which is dwarfed by OSX's. OSX has some parts that are BSD-free, parts that are GPL-free, other parts that are open-source and the rest is the most heavily guarded proprietary stuff in this industry. The fact it is hugely more successful than the combined presence of its competitors bears testimony to the fact that basing your OS on the work of others without giving much back is a winning strategy while contributing to products that can be used in such way is pretty dumb from a business point of view. Markets are pretty good at identifying opportunities and the fact there is no Red Hat on the BSD space should suffice as evidence ESR is wrong in this one.
    - aardvark 18y ago
      I'd say OSX's (and Red Hat's) success bears testimony to the fact that good marketing, not good technology, is the deciding factor in market success.
      - rbanffy 18y ago
        I think that the first is a closed, proprietary product based mainly on BSD-style code and the other are services centered around the evolution of a free GPL-like product that remains free speaks for itself.

1gor 18y ago

Microsoft has not became dominant because they got a freebee or two from BSD. This is exactly the point - try imagine some evil company today grabbing Apache code-base and starting a commercial branch of it. So what? They will fail against Apache proper, as ESR points out. Let me try to argue not from ideological (closed source being immoral etc.) but from the economic point of view. We are talking about commoditization of software here. There are two types of software - one that contains competitive advantage for the business, and one that is a commodity. And software has a tendency to migrate from the first bucket to the second very fast. And by the way, 'commodity' is not a bad word. Software may be very smart and complicated, but it would not be unique in what it does. For example, if you have written the first social network software -- you have something unique and you'd be mad to open source it straight away (or you'd be very passionate about software freedom, like RMS :) . But when there appear tens of social network apps floating around, you should act like ning and give away your software for free. Why? This seems to be the rational choice for commodity software. To become king of commodities you have to compete on price. 'Free' is the ultimate winner price. And MIT license is the ultimate free license (less restrictions than GPL). When your free application grabs large enough slice of market share (mind share) it will start paying for itself in many ways. It 'develops and tests itself', it provides free marketing for you etc. And you are free to build another unique value-adding application on top of this commodity layer. So, for example, 37signals are very happy with RoR being free and under MIT license. They are using it for their in-house proprietary webapps, while it is being developed and tested now to the large extend by the community. I am sure 37signals would be ecstatic if Microsoft decided to 'grab' Ruby on Rails and integrate it into their next OS.

stcredzero 18y ago
Startups and enterprises that use RoR are themselves an important potential market for 37signals. Likewise, enterprise shops using Eclipse are a big potential market for IBM's consulting business as well as their hardware.

rbanffy 18y ago

"why should I invest my own free time in a project that could be subverted from bringing freedom to its users?" More important, why should I invest company resources on software that could be used to compete against me by a better funded competitor?

rjurney 18y ago
Why should you invest company resource on FOSS that could be used against you? According to Joel, because the project complements your commercial product: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
- rbanffy 18y ago
  While the strategy to commoditize your product's complements is clever, doing so can be dangerous if you use a license that allows your competitors to take your work and run against you. When doing so, one should be careful to use licenses that can't be turned against _you_. All MIT/BSD licenses can. All *GPLs, MPLs can't. The choice is clear. From the projects he mentioned: IBM (Linux): GPL Netscape/Mozilla (Mozilla/Gecko): MPL Transmeta (Linux): GPL Sun/HP (Gnome): GPL There is a pattern to be seen: GPL licenses create vigorous diverse communities around them more easily than BSD-styled licenses.

CWuestefeld 18y ago

Those arguing against the points in the OP seem to be following a goal of making Free software successful at the expense of commercial software. That strikes me as wrong (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of ethics). We want Free software to succeed. If it succeeds at the same time that other commercial endeavors succeed, then that makes the software ecosystem richer, and gives us a broader set of tools and ideas to employ.

rbanffy 18y ago
There is no such dichotomy between free-as-in-speech and commercial software. Red Hat pretty much sell free-as-in-speech software and make a healthy amount of money from support contracts attached to it.

cabalamat 18y ago

> If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open project will maintain dominance. So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will naturally prevail anyway. That's my understanding of ESR's argument too. One counterexample is Apple's OS X. Another counterexample, in a different way, is mySQL which offers both GPL and proprietary licences; if MySQL used the BSD license, their business model wouldn't work. I think it's good that there are different open source licenses. People writing open source software can then choose a license that's appropriate for what they want to achieve with the software. It would be stupid if there were only BSD-style licenses, or only copyleft licenses.

hs 18y ago

"When you see a GPL notice, you can feel warm fuzzy feelings of sharing certain beliefs with the authors about freedom and sharing." this reminds me of this email conversation: http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL http://clisp.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/clisp/clisp/doc/... especially: "I had to put CLISP under GPL because libreadline.a was something I wanted to use and I didn't want to write myself. libgmp.a is similar in this respect, and it may therefore help putting some new packages under GPL. Building libgmp.a was just too hard work. Other people shouldn't get it for free."