20 ms·

Why Doesn't Anyone Give a Crap About Freedom Zero? (2008)

117 points by prajjwal 13y ago

icebraining 13y ago
I hope the irony of asking about the Free Software "Freedom Zero" and then only talking about Open Source was not lost on Atwood. People don't care about Freedom Zero for the same reason why Open Source took over Free Software. Because the vast majority developers and businesses embrace it only for their only self-interest, by reducing development time and costs. They don't give a single fuck about user freedom, as it's well shown by the number of companies who release open source backend tools but keep their customer-facing applications proprietary. In fact, this is no secret: the whole point of creating Open Source as an alternative to Free Software was to keep the code sharing parts while shedding the ethical positions of the GNU philosophy, such as Freedom Zero, which were unpleasant to the money makers in the industry.
- widdershins 13y ago
  By the same token 99.9% of consumers don't care about the legalities and 'freedoms' that Atwood talks about - only what they can do with their computers and the ease with which they can do it.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    "what they can do with their computers" is the whole point of freedom zero.
    - msbarnett 13y ago
      No, "what a hypothetical user could do, potentially, given unlimited skill in the computing domain" is the whole point of freedom zero. All everyday users give a shit about is what they actually can do easily, given their shallow understanding of computing devices, to get the shit they need doing done. This rarely taxes or even approaches the limit of commercial, closed software, so they perforce give zero shits about hypothetical freedoms that for all intents and purposes do not exist for them given their time and skill constraints.
      - betterunix 13y ago
        You think the average computer user rarely approaches the limits imposed by proprietary software? You must have never met someone who: * Wanted to rip a video DVD * Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another * Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in * Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0. You seem to think Freedom 0 is about technical competence; yet weak technical skills are what proprietary software vendors take advantage of when they impose these sorts of restrictions.
        TeMPOraL 13y ago
        > These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0. Those problems can not be separated out and analyzed independently like this. > Wanted to rip a video DVD > Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another Without those two limitations you wouldn't have either DVDs and iPods, as the economics of these technologies wouldn't made sense for companies which created them. > Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in This sound like an accidental technical limitation. > Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television This is, again, the limit that allows you to have those movies in the first place. I'm all for the open source and Freedom 0, but please don't forget that it's not about Freedom 0 being violated or not. It's about it being violated or not having anything at all.
        betterunix 13y ago
        First, to clarify, the remote desktop limitation was never accidental. It was a deliberate obstruction built into Windows XP that was meant to stop people from using the OS as a multiuser server. It is no different from Maltab contacting a license server to determine if there are too many people using the program at a time (as was the case at my undergrad university) or a parking garage refusing to release anyone's car because a license expired. The Windows Server version supported multiple simultaneous remote desktop sessions (with an artificial limit imposed by the software, that depended on the license; Windows XP Home/Professional simply had this limit hard-coded). I think you are lacking citations needed to prove your point that we would not have movie and music players if they were not deliberately restricted. There were digital music players prior to the iPod that were not so restricted. CDs never had any restrictions built in; what makes you think DVDs would never have happened without the restrictions? I know for a fact that you are wrong about HDCP, because the same cable receiver had HD component outputs that had no HDCP requirements. To put it another way, if people demanded Freedom 0, they would have it -- and there would still have been DVDs and iPods. The MPAA is not going to give up a multi-billion dollar market. They obviously want to restrict how people use their computers, because it increases their advantage in the market, but that market would not disappear if they did not have that increased advantage (if they only had all their other advantages). The same is true of the software market, the music industry, etc. It is not a choice between Freedom 0 and "some kind of empty void;" it is choice between Freedom 0, and not having Freedom 0, with everything else remaining largely the same.
  - alexakarpov 13y ago
    This should not be news, though, right? Consumers can only be trusted to be concerned for their own best interests. More than that -- only about their own immediate and simple best interests (i.e. we consumers will totally vote for a destructive political initiative, if it promises short-term gain for us personally, while crippling the economy for decades). So, any advocacy of free software ideology which is aimed at the 'masses' and the 'people' is doomed to fail. It has to be aimed at the minority of more responsible and educated agents - who, in turn, can (and should!) care about these more distant and noble and sophisticated goals, while not being angry or judgmental toward the 'consumer', who isn't championing such lofty goals. You have to walk alone, and should expect isolation and hardship, essentially. Wasn't it always the case?
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Though many users do complain about things such as overbearing DRM and other restrictions , which can be a symptom of non free software.
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    I just hope that some day some popular software developer would become bored with everything to the extent that he would really consider fucking their users with EULA as hard as possible.
- rmc 13y ago
  In the days of iPhones and App Stores, Open Source is almost exactly the same as Free Software.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    No; the software is almost the same, since almost all Open Source licenses are also Free Software, and vice versa. But the philosophy and goals of the projects are very different.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  Different people and organizations have widely varying reasons for wanting to share source code. Some of these reasons are selfish, and some are completely altruistic. Many are both selfish and altruistic- one could easily argue that the FSF falls into that category, not that there's anything wrong with that. The whole point of creating Open Source was to acknowledge that. The GNU philosophy is very, very, very specific in its means and goals and presents a very specific worldview, and plenty of people (maybe even the majority?) who are interested sharing code don't agree with much of it. You state that Open Source was created "to keep the code sharing parts while shedding the ethical positions of the GNU philosophy", and many of the people who were instrumental in creating the concept would agree with you. But the reason the concept has stuck around has nothing to do with that. It's just a very, very useful concept. It's very handy to have some way to refer to software for which source code is available, redistributable, and reuseable, and not instantly imply all of the metric ton of legal or philosophical baggage associated with FSF-approved projects. Someone who doesn't agree with the ethical portions of the GNU philosophy isn't unethical, they just have a different point of view. Yet, that's what you imply in your phrasing. Tons of people who contribute greatly to Open Source (or even Free Software!) consider certain elements of the GNU philosophy to be unethical. This whole "with us or against us" attitude is what turns off so many people to the FSF and RMS in the first place. It's like PETA saying that you are either 100% on board with them and everything they do, or you are in favor of murdering puppies, and there's no middle ground or room for more nuanced perspectives or alternative philosophies. I'm not arguing against the GNU philosophy; I agree with much of it and strongly disagree with some other parts of it. As always, I'm just strongly in favor of a world where people think for themselves, come to their own conclusions, cooperate with others when they have overlapping goals, and don't go out of their way to continually villainize people who aren't 100% on board with every single line item in one guy's personal doctrine.
Roboprog 13y ago
I don't quite understand Jeff's point in the article. Is Windows really that much more open than OSX? I got my (first) Next^H^H^H^H Mac about a year ago. I don't want to stop running Linux yet, but the Mac works much better than any Windows machine I have ever been forced to endure. While the Mac might not have open hardware, it at least lets me load a wide variety of open software onto it: Libre Office, Groovy, Go-lang, Ruby, etc. (Windows does also, but the BSD personality on the Mac makes the experience more frictionless) I do care about freedom, but the platform which often simply does not work well enough to be playable is no freedom at all. I should probably add that my first programming job was back in '85 working on (dead language) under MS-DOS, so I have a long history of abuse at the hands of Microsoft. I'll agree that the Apple II, and also the C64, were nice little machines to tinker with, though.
- venomsnake 13y ago
  You cannot control or change the OS according to Jeff. Which means that you are as free as the OS allows you and not as free as the hardware allows you. I do agree that OS that allows you to run self signed code and unsigned code and have root access is almost on the top of the freedom ladder.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    You have exactly as much technical control over Mac OS X as you do over Windows. You can execute arbitrary code and modify any system file you wish, even the kernel. I'm not clear why people don't know this. Do non-Mac users really think OS X has to be "jailbroken" like an iPhone?
    - venomsnake 13y ago
      But can you change the OS without bootcamp? Arbitrary bootloaders etc?
      - nknighthb 13y ago
        What? Yes. Of course. Again, I don't get this. Where is the idea that Macs are locked down coming from? Who told you this is a problem? Edit: By the way, in 1996, Apple released MkLinux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux This was even before they stopped using non-standard components in their computers. How anyone could ever have thought Apple was blocking installation of alternative operating systems is beyond me.
cwp 13y ago
Because nobody can exercise it anyway. Freedom 0 is really just a corollary of freedom 1, "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish." If you can't change a program, you can't run it for any purpose, you can only run it for the purpose intended by the original author. Freedom 1 is pretty hard to exercise too. For any given bit of technology, there are very few people outside of the original authors that are capable of changing it in meaningful and useful ways, and even they will need to put in a lot of effort do so. It may be apocryphal, but the Apple II discussed in the article is said to be the last computer designed entirely by one person. Modern computers are just too complex for any one person to entirely understand. We can only answer questions, fix bugs and add features in a narrow speciality. In order to use a computer system we have to rely on other people to handle issues outside our areas of competence. Those people might be part of communities that help each other for free, or might work for companies that provide support to their customers. So freedom 0 is a bit like the freedom to go to the moon. Having it is better than not, but most people don't benefit from it.
- rmc 13y ago
  Not totally true. If I, as a programmer, can excercise Freedom 1 to write a new programme, then I can give it to you, and you can excersice Freedom 0 to run it on your device. If the Overlords™ don't want that type of programme to run on your device, there's nothing they can do about it.
  - ctdonath 13y ago
    Xcode is free. Write/download source code, click Run. Where isn't Freedom 0?
- betterunix 13y ago
  It is worth keeping mind that Freedom 0 can be denied to a greater extent than just preventing you from modifying the software. I first understood this when I was an undergrad, and my EE professors assigned us homework involving Matlab. The school had a license that allowed 50 concurrent users, and the software enforced that, which was a big problem when 80 students had homework to do. Yes, the freedom to modify the software would have allowed anyone to circumvent this restriction, but the inability to modify the software does not imply that such a restriction must exist. All of the four freedoms complement each other. In a world without Freedom 0, you might be denied the freedom to modify your software, because you might not be able to run the software needed to modify other software (e.g. imagine a simple world where all software is distributed as Python source, but where your text editor is designed to not be able to edit such source, and where your OS is designed to not run any other text editors -- modifying your software suddenly becomes much harder).
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- keithpeter 13y ago
  "After I install Ubuntu, how come I can't immediately tell it about my schedule for the coming week?" Personally, I install KOrganizer. I take your point, there is a need for a fully functioning productivity desktop oriented GNU/Linux. As Shuttleworth has said, Ubuntu may not be that distribution as the goals are different.
- flogic 13y ago
  Freedom is a multi-axis thing. While it's freedom to be allowed to use the software for anything. There is also the freedom of not having to fight with your computer and go to the park instead. Sometimes those freedoms coincide. Often for regular uses, they conflict.
dylangs1030 13y ago
I love this post intellectually, but I believe it has a fairly simple answer - convenience and design. @patio11 also discussed these on his blog[1], which I'll get into: Most people (users/customers) don't give a crap about freedom zero because most people aren't hackers. Most people want things to "just work." Most people don't want to tinker and screw around hunched in front of a lit screen for a few hours just to set up their drivers in a specific way. On the other side, most employees don't care about perpetuating freedom zero or that philosophy because it's not as rewarding. I mean, yeah, it feels good to have open source projects and contribute to the community. But let's be honest, it doesn't pay the bills as well as working at, say, Microsoft does. Proprietary software attracts the more highly skilled engineers (usually - obviously some people are possessed of such personal conviction in software freedom that they will give up high salaries for their hacker community, but this is not the norm). Here's a few examples to illustrate my point: My mother is barely computer literate. If I presented her with Banshee instead of iTunes, she'd freak out. It would either gray out, become non-responsive, and subsequently close on her while syncing, or she wouldn't have all the features that a coordinated group of engineers in a multinational company built and designed for mass production. As a programmer, I'm the same way. I want things to just work. Just because I know how to do things most other people don't using a computer doesn't automatically mean I'm invested in the free software movement. I dual-boot linux on my Mac, but I only use it for technical reasons. I don't honestly believe it's applicable or relevant to most people's uses of a computer. It doesn't "just work" a lot of the time - enough for it to be annoying. There's a "feel good" euphoria that occurs in an intellectually superior sort of way when you install linux, but it quickly drops off when it's a hassle just to get YouTube videos to play properly. Secondly, and just as importantly - design. Do rhythmbox or banshee have as sexy a design as iTunes? Could they, with the resources they have? No, and no. Sure, they have accomplished something impressive, and in some respects, they have higher utility than iTunes. But overall, it's not an attractive interface. As Dave Wiskus would say, it isn't relevant and it doesn't match - a program needs to look like it belongs in the system it's designed under in order for it to be liked by a user many times. This doesn't just mean that software has to look like Windows or Mac, but that it has to understand the user and take out cumbersome decisions while preserving features in a way that is similarly intuitive to the system it resides in - that's very hard. It's also why UI and UX designers are as well paid as programmers. We see this with apps all the time. When an app doesn't look like it matches the sleekness of iPhone's design i.e. it's clunky or looks "themed" with no custom overhead, it has a verifiable impact on the marketability of the app. The same applies to software. patio11's Bingo Card Creator competes with open source by being better because he has higher motivation. It's easier to obtain proprietary software (read: not cheaper, easier) because there's no hierarchy of betas and alphas and complicated names. There's a simple "download" or "install" button. The design has full teams of people behind it, knowing which hundred things to take out for which one thing to keep. Open source can't afford that. This is why freedom zero isn't popular. I love free software, and I have a good advantage over "normal" (non-technical) users in utilizing it, but it's just not practical if you desire convenience and utility. [1]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-compete-with-open-source-software/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-comp...
chipotle_coyote 13y ago
Variants of this come up from time to time, and that alone rather undercuts the question in the article title -- if no one gave a crap about "Freedom Zero," then people wouldn't keep asking the question. My biggest problem with Atwood's specific argument is that claiming that Macs are "dongles" for OS X is that it's essentially an argument that platform incompatibilities violate Freedom Zero, which is, with all respect to Atwood, a little nutty. I owned a TRS-80 in the late 1980s, and I'm pretty sure that my inability to run Apple II software on it could not be accurately blamed on hardware-based copy protection. The Mac is not a dongle for OS X any more than OS X is a dongle for Cocoa software. Or are we seriously going to argue that it's harmful for consumers if we can't run all applications on all platforms, and that the differentiation should only be a matter of aesthetics? (Which, all platforms followed Freedom Zero, would be easily changeable anyway, right?) The thing I'd really like to see more focus on is data freedom. Maybe what I'm using to read ebooks, play music, watch videos, create word processing documents and spreadsheets, write code, and edit photos in is open source, maybe it isn't -- but switching to something else to do those things in shouldn't require me to lose fidelity/functionality in a conversion process, let alone require me to either re-buy something due to DRM (or crack the DRM). Yes, if I had the freedom and the ability to modify every application on every platform, I would theoretically have complete data freedom -- but I should be able to have that even if I'm using 100% closed source software.
- dylangs1030 13y ago
  This is again a case of apathy. How many users care about DRM and the integrity of their data, let alone its freedom and exportability? Most users are not power users (else the term would be redundant). Most people who use computer that I know simply log on, surf the web, check email, etc. In fact, most users spend almost all of their time on a web browser, to the point that different systems seem pretty much the same. Most users cannot quantify the difference between Mac OS X or Windows beyond the hardware differences, and even that's just a momentary thought. They don't care about data because it's not relevant to their lifestyles. Corollary to this point is the fact that many hackers attribute malice and spite to companies that don't allow data freedom. But honestly, it's not profitable for most companies to serve that small subset of users in the mass market because their voices aren't loud enough. They have more profitable things to worry about - their users couldn't explain what RAID is or DRM to save their lives. So they don't invest in you - the customers who want these features (or lack) because it's not relevant to mass producing machines for everyone. This goes hand in hand with perpetuating the ubiquity or proprietary software.
theltrj 13y ago
The whole argument is a non sequitur. The products and companies the author is hoping people defer too, are not prevalent in mainstream society yet. Ubuntu and Arch Linux do not have stores in the mall. Sparkfun is not making arduino based mp3 players and phones down by the food court. I think this highlights an interesting point, but we aren't there yet as a culture, globally.
mwfunk 13y ago
Plenty of people care about Freedom Zero. Millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. That's great; that's their prerogative. Jeff seems to be really saying "why doesn't everyone care about Freedom Zero?", and that's a very different and much more interesting question. Unfortunately for him (but not for humanity as a whole), the answer is that everyone has their own Freedom Zero that they care about, and one of them might be, "I want to use the hardware and software that I want to use, that works for me, rather than be restricted to what Jeff Atwood personally approves of and claims to do so for moral and ethical reasons that I don't necessarily agree with." I'm not saying he's wrong. It's just much more interesting to live in a world where tons of different philosophies perpetually collide and mutate and influence each other, rather than one in which we've collectively decided that there's one and only one way to do something, and there's no room for debate or people just doing whatever the heck they want to do provided they don't hurt anyone else.
rossjudson 13y ago
I've always been interested in maintaining the ability to perform general computation. To me, that's being able to run any program I construct on my hardware. I don't demand that the program be able to interact with other systems, but I do demand that I be able to execute the instructions I want. That generalizes freedom 0 to the set of programs the user constructs. If a general-purpose program has to pass an authentication protocol before it's allowed to run, the surrounding environment is an attack on the construction of free speech by more efficient means. Or something like that.
rmrfrmrf 13y ago
There's always been this sort of philosophical disconnect in the programming world. "We love Windows and Linux because they don't lock down their environments like Apple does!" "We love Android because its ecosystem isn't locked down like iOS's!" Yet, on the other hand: "We hate products that are designed by committee!" "We love Rails because it forces convention over configuration!"
- icebraining 13y ago
  It's almost like there are different people with different opinions.
  - rmrfrmrf 13y ago
    Don't be ridiculous!

117 points by prajjwal 13y ago

I hope the irony of asking about the Free Software "Freedom Zero" and then only talking about Open Source was not lost on Atwood. People don't care about Freedom Zero for the same reason why Open Source took over Free Software. Because the vast majority developers and businesses embrace it only for their only self-interest, by reducing development time and costs. They don't give a single fuck about user freedom, as it's well shown by the number of companies who release open source backend tools but keep their customer-facing applications proprietary. In fact, this is no secret: the whole point of creating Open Source as an alternative to Free Software was to keep the code sharing parts while shedding the ethical positions of the GNU philosophy, such as Freedom Zero, which were unpleasant to the money makers in the industry.

widdershins 13y ago
By the same token 99.9% of consumers don't care about the legalities and 'freedoms' that Atwood talks about - only what they can do with their computers and the ease with which they can do it.
- icebraining 13y ago
  "what they can do with their computers" is the whole point of freedom zero.
  - msbarnett 13y ago
    No, "what a hypothetical user could do, potentially, given unlimited skill in the computing domain" is the whole point of freedom zero. All everyday users give a shit about is what they actually can do easily, given their shallow understanding of computing devices, to get the shit they need doing done. This rarely taxes or even approaches the limit of commercial, closed software, so they perforce give zero shits about hypothetical freedoms that for all intents and purposes do not exist for them given their time and skill constraints.
    - betterunix 13y ago
      You think the average computer user rarely approaches the limits imposed by proprietary software? You must have never met someone who: * Wanted to rip a video DVD * Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another * Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in * Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0. You seem to think Freedom 0 is about technical competence; yet weak technical skills are what proprietary software vendors take advantage of when they impose these sorts of restrictions.
      - TeMPOraL 13y ago
        > These are all software problems, all imposed by artificial restrictions, and all violations of Freedom 0. Those problems can not be separated out and analyzed independently like this. > Wanted to rip a video DVD > Wanted to copy songs from one iPod to another Without those two limitations you wouldn't have either DVDs and iPods, as the economics of these technologies wouldn't made sense for companies which created them. > Wanted to use Remote Desktop while another user is logged in This sound like an accidental technical limitation. > Tried to deal with HDCP problems between a cable receiver and television This is, again, the limit that allows you to have those movies in the first place. I'm all for the open source and Freedom 0, but please don't forget that it's not about Freedom 0 being violated or not. It's about it being violated or not having anything at all.
        betterunix 13y ago
        First, to clarify, the remote desktop limitation was never accidental. It was a deliberate obstruction built into Windows XP that was meant to stop people from using the OS as a multiuser server. It is no different from Maltab contacting a license server to determine if there are too many people using the program at a time (as was the case at my undergrad university) or a parking garage refusing to release anyone's car because a license expired. The Windows Server version supported multiple simultaneous remote desktop sessions (with an artificial limit imposed by the software, that depended on the license; Windows XP Home/Professional simply had this limit hard-coded). I think you are lacking citations needed to prove your point that we would not have movie and music players if they were not deliberately restricted. There were digital music players prior to the iPod that were not so restricted. CDs never had any restrictions built in; what makes you think DVDs would never have happened without the restrictions? I know for a fact that you are wrong about HDCP, because the same cable receiver had HD component outputs that had no HDCP requirements. To put it another way, if people demanded Freedom 0, they would have it -- and there would still have been DVDs and iPods. The MPAA is not going to give up a multi-billion dollar market. They obviously want to restrict how people use their computers, because it increases their advantage in the market, but that market would not disappear if they did not have that increased advantage (if they only had all their other advantages). The same is true of the software market, the music industry, etc. It is not a choice between Freedom 0 and "some kind of empty void;" it is choice between Freedom 0, and not having Freedom 0, with everything else remaining largely the same.
- alexakarpov 13y ago
  This should not be news, though, right? Consumers can only be trusted to be concerned for their own best interests. More than that -- only about their own immediate and simple best interests (i.e. we consumers will totally vote for a destructive political initiative, if it promises short-term gain for us personally, while crippling the economy for decades). So, any advocacy of free software ideology which is aimed at the 'masses' and the 'people' is doomed to fail. It has to be aimed at the minority of more responsible and educated agents - who, in turn, can (and should!) care about these more distant and noble and sophisticated goals, while not being angry or judgmental toward the 'consumer', who isn't championing such lofty goals. You have to walk alone, and should expect isolation and hardship, essentially. Wasn't it always the case?
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Though many users do complain about things such as overbearing DRM and other restrictions , which can be a symptom of non free software.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  I just hope that some day some popular software developer would become bored with everything to the extent that he would really consider fucking their users with EULA as hard as possible.
rmc 13y ago
In the days of iPhones and App Stores, Open Source is almost exactly the same as Free Software.
- icebraining 13y ago
  No; the software is almost the same, since almost all Open Source licenses are also Free Software, and vice versa. But the philosophy and goals of the projects are very different.
mwfunk 13y ago
Different people and organizations have widely varying reasons for wanting to share source code. Some of these reasons are selfish, and some are completely altruistic. Many are both selfish and altruistic- one could easily argue that the FSF falls into that category, not that there's anything wrong with that. The whole point of creating Open Source was to acknowledge that. The GNU philosophy is very, very, very specific in its means and goals and presents a very specific worldview, and plenty of people (maybe even the majority?) who are interested sharing code don't agree with much of it. You state that Open Source was created "to keep the code sharing parts while shedding the ethical positions of the GNU philosophy", and many of the people who were instrumental in creating the concept would agree with you. But the reason the concept has stuck around has nothing to do with that. It's just a very, very useful concept. It's very handy to have some way to refer to software for which source code is available, redistributable, and reuseable, and not instantly imply all of the metric ton of legal or philosophical baggage associated with FSF-approved projects. Someone who doesn't agree with the ethical portions of the GNU philosophy isn't unethical, they just have a different point of view. Yet, that's what you imply in your phrasing. Tons of people who contribute greatly to Open Source (or even Free Software!) consider certain elements of the GNU philosophy to be unethical. This whole "with us or against us" attitude is what turns off so many people to the FSF and RMS in the first place. It's like PETA saying that you are either 100% on board with them and everything they do, or you are in favor of murdering puppies, and there's no middle ground or room for more nuanced perspectives or alternative philosophies. I'm not arguing against the GNU philosophy; I agree with much of it and strongly disagree with some other parts of it. As always, I'm just strongly in favor of a world where people think for themselves, come to their own conclusions, cooperate with others when they have overlapping goals, and don't go out of their way to continually villainize people who aren't 100% on board with every single line item in one guy's personal doctrine.

Roboprog 13y ago

I don't quite understand Jeff's point in the article. Is Windows really that much more open than OSX? I got my (first) Next^H^H^H^H Mac about a year ago. I don't want to stop running Linux yet, but the Mac works much better than any Windows machine I have ever been forced to endure. While the Mac might not have open hardware, it at least lets me load a wide variety of open software onto it: Libre Office, Groovy, Go-lang, Ruby, etc. (Windows does also, but the BSD personality on the Mac makes the experience more frictionless) I do care about freedom, but the platform which often simply does not work well enough to be playable is no freedom at all. I should probably add that my first programming job was back in '85 working on (dead language) under MS-DOS, so I have a long history of abuse at the hands of Microsoft. I'll agree that the Apple II, and also the C64, were nice little machines to tinker with, though.

venomsnake 13y ago
You cannot control or change the OS according to Jeff. Which means that you are as free as the OS allows you and not as free as the hardware allows you. I do agree that OS that allows you to run self signed code and unsigned code and have root access is almost on the top of the freedom ladder.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  You have exactly as much technical control over Mac OS X as you do over Windows. You can execute arbitrary code and modify any system file you wish, even the kernel. I'm not clear why people don't know this. Do non-Mac users really think OS X has to be "jailbroken" like an iPhone?
  - venomsnake 13y ago
    But can you change the OS without bootcamp? Arbitrary bootloaders etc?
    - nknighthb 13y ago
      What? Yes. Of course. Again, I don't get this. Where is the idea that Macs are locked down coming from? Who told you this is a problem? Edit: By the way, in 1996, Apple released MkLinux. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux This was even before they stopped using non-standard components in their computers. How anyone could ever have thought Apple was blocking installation of alternative operating systems is beyond me.

cwp 13y ago

Because nobody can exercise it anyway. Freedom 0 is really just a corollary of freedom 1, "The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish." If you can't change a program, you can't run it for any purpose, you can only run it for the purpose intended by the original author. Freedom 1 is pretty hard to exercise too. For any given bit of technology, there are very few people outside of the original authors that are capable of changing it in meaningful and useful ways, and even they will need to put in a lot of effort do so. It may be apocryphal, but the Apple II discussed in the article is said to be the last computer designed entirely by one person. Modern computers are just too complex for any one person to entirely understand. We can only answer questions, fix bugs and add features in a narrow speciality. In order to use a computer system we have to rely on other people to handle issues outside our areas of competence. Those people might be part of communities that help each other for free, or might work for companies that provide support to their customers. So freedom 0 is a bit like the freedom to go to the moon. Having it is better than not, but most people don't benefit from it.

rmc 13y ago
Not totally true. If I, as a programmer, can excercise Freedom 1 to write a new programme, then I can give it to you, and you can excersice Freedom 0 to run it on your device. If the Overlords™ don't want that type of programme to run on your device, there's nothing they can do about it.
- ctdonath 13y ago
  Xcode is free. Write/download source code, click Run. Where isn't Freedom 0?
betterunix 13y ago
It is worth keeping mind that Freedom 0 can be denied to a greater extent than just preventing you from modifying the software. I first understood this when I was an undergrad, and my EE professors assigned us homework involving Matlab. The school had a license that allowed 50 concurrent users, and the software enforced that, which was a big problem when 80 students had homework to do. Yes, the freedom to modify the software would have allowed anyone to circumvent this restriction, but the inability to modify the software does not imply that such a restriction must exist. All of the four freedoms complement each other. In a world without Freedom 0, you might be denied the freedom to modify your software, because you might not be able to run the software needed to modify other software (e.g. imagine a simple world where all software is distributed as Python source, but where your text editor is designed to not be able to edit such source, and where your OS is designed to not run any other text editors -- modifying your software suddenly becomes much harder).

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

keithpeter 13y ago
"After I install Ubuntu, how come I can't immediately tell it about my schedule for the coming week?" Personally, I install KOrganizer. I take your point, there is a need for a fully functioning productivity desktop oriented GNU/Linux. As Shuttleworth has said, Ubuntu may not be that distribution as the goals are different.
flogic 13y ago
Freedom is a multi-axis thing. While it's freedom to be allowed to use the software for anything. There is also the freedom of not having to fight with your computer and go to the park instead. Sometimes those freedoms coincide. Often for regular uses, they conflict.

dylangs1030 13y ago

I love this post intellectually, but I believe it has a fairly simple answer - convenience and design. @patio11 also discussed these on his blog[1], which I'll get into: Most people (users/customers) don't give a crap about freedom zero because most people aren't hackers. Most people want things to "just work." Most people don't want to tinker and screw around hunched in front of a lit screen for a few hours just to set up their drivers in a specific way. On the other side, most employees don't care about perpetuating freedom zero or that philosophy because it's not as rewarding. I mean, yeah, it feels good to have open source projects and contribute to the community. But let's be honest, it doesn't pay the bills as well as working at, say, Microsoft does. Proprietary software attracts the more highly skilled engineers (usually - obviously some people are possessed of such personal conviction in software freedom that they will give up high salaries for their hacker community, but this is not the norm). Here's a few examples to illustrate my point: My mother is barely computer literate. If I presented her with Banshee instead of iTunes, she'd freak out. It would either gray out, become non-responsive, and subsequently close on her while syncing, or she wouldn't have all the features that a coordinated group of engineers in a multinational company built and designed for mass production. As a programmer, I'm the same way. I want things to just work. Just because I know how to do things most other people don't using a computer doesn't automatically mean I'm invested in the free software movement. I dual-boot linux on my Mac, but I only use it for technical reasons. I don't honestly believe it's applicable or relevant to most people's uses of a computer. It doesn't "just work" a lot of the time - enough for it to be annoying. There's a "feel good" euphoria that occurs in an intellectually superior sort of way when you install linux, but it quickly drops off when it's a hassle just to get YouTube videos to play properly. Secondly, and just as importantly - design. Do rhythmbox or banshee have as sexy a design as iTunes? Could they, with the resources they have? No, and no. Sure, they have accomplished something impressive, and in some respects, they have higher utility than iTunes. But overall, it's not an attractive interface. As Dave Wiskus would say, it isn't relevant and it doesn't match - a program needs to look like it belongs in the system it's designed under in order for it to be liked by a user many times. This doesn't just mean that software has to look like Windows or Mac, but that it has to understand the user and take out cumbersome decisions while preserving features in a way that is similarly intuitive to the system it resides in - that's very hard. It's also why UI and UX designers are as well paid as programmers. We see this with apps all the time. When an app doesn't look like it matches the sleekness of iPhone's design i.e. it's clunky or looks "themed" with no custom overhead, it has a verifiable impact on the marketability of the app. The same applies to software. patio11's Bingo Card Creator competes with open source by being better because he has higher motivation. It's easier to obtain proprietary software (read: not cheaper, easier) because there's no hierarchy of betas and alphas and complicated names. There's a simple "download" or "install" button. The design has full teams of people behind it, knowing which hundred things to take out for which one thing to keep. Open source can't afford that. This is why freedom zero isn't popular. I love free software, and I have a good advantage over "normal" (non-technical) users in utilizing it, but it's just not practical if you desire convenience and utility. [1]: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-compete-with-open-source-software/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/03/07/how-to-successfully-comp...

chipotle_coyote 13y ago

Variants of this come up from time to time, and that alone rather undercuts the question in the article title -- if no one gave a crap about "Freedom Zero," then people wouldn't keep asking the question. My biggest problem with Atwood's specific argument is that claiming that Macs are "dongles" for OS X is that it's essentially an argument that platform incompatibilities violate Freedom Zero, which is, with all respect to Atwood, a little nutty. I owned a TRS-80 in the late 1980s, and I'm pretty sure that my inability to run Apple II software on it could not be accurately blamed on hardware-based copy protection. The Mac is not a dongle for OS X any more than OS X is a dongle for Cocoa software. Or are we seriously going to argue that it's harmful for consumers if we can't run all applications on all platforms, and that the differentiation should only be a matter of aesthetics? (Which, all platforms followed Freedom Zero, would be easily changeable anyway, right?) The thing I'd really like to see more focus on is data freedom. Maybe what I'm using to read ebooks, play music, watch videos, create word processing documents and spreadsheets, write code, and edit photos in is open source, maybe it isn't -- but switching to something else to do those things in shouldn't require me to lose fidelity/functionality in a conversion process, let alone require me to either re-buy something due to DRM (or crack the DRM). Yes, if I had the freedom and the ability to modify every application on every platform, I would theoretically have complete data freedom -- but I should be able to have that even if I'm using 100% closed source software.

dylangs1030 13y ago
This is again a case of apathy. How many users care about DRM and the integrity of their data, let alone its freedom and exportability? Most users are not power users (else the term would be redundant). Most people who use computer that I know simply log on, surf the web, check email, etc. In fact, most users spend almost all of their time on a web browser, to the point that different systems seem pretty much the same. Most users cannot quantify the difference between Mac OS X or Windows beyond the hardware differences, and even that's just a momentary thought. They don't care about data because it's not relevant to their lifestyles. Corollary to this point is the fact that many hackers attribute malice and spite to companies that don't allow data freedom. But honestly, it's not profitable for most companies to serve that small subset of users in the mass market because their voices aren't loud enough. They have more profitable things to worry about - their users couldn't explain what RAID is or DRM to save their lives. So they don't invest in you - the customers who want these features (or lack) because it's not relevant to mass producing machines for everyone. This goes hand in hand with perpetuating the ubiquity or proprietary software.

theltrj 13y ago

The whole argument is a non sequitur. The products and companies the author is hoping people defer too, are not prevalent in mainstream society yet. Ubuntu and Arch Linux do not have stores in the mall. Sparkfun is not making arduino based mp3 players and phones down by the food court. I think this highlights an interesting point, but we aren't there yet as a culture, globally.

mwfunk 13y ago

Plenty of people care about Freedom Zero. Millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions. That's great; that's their prerogative. Jeff seems to be really saying "why doesn't everyone care about Freedom Zero?", and that's a very different and much more interesting question. Unfortunately for him (but not for humanity as a whole), the answer is that everyone has their own Freedom Zero that they care about, and one of them might be, "I want to use the hardware and software that I want to use, that works for me, rather than be restricted to what Jeff Atwood personally approves of and claims to do so for moral and ethical reasons that I don't necessarily agree with." I'm not saying he's wrong. It's just much more interesting to live in a world where tons of different philosophies perpetually collide and mutate and influence each other, rather than one in which we've collectively decided that there's one and only one way to do something, and there's no room for debate or people just doing whatever the heck they want to do provided they don't hurt anyone else.

rossjudson 13y ago

I've always been interested in maintaining the ability to perform general computation. To me, that's being able to run any program I construct on my hardware. I don't demand that the program be able to interact with other systems, but I do demand that I be able to execute the instructions I want. That generalizes freedom 0 to the set of programs the user constructs. If a general-purpose program has to pass an authentication protocol before it's allowed to run, the surrounding environment is an attack on the construction of free speech by more efficient means. Or something like that.

rmrfrmrf 13y ago

There's always been this sort of philosophical disconnect in the programming world. "We love Windows and Linux because they don't lock down their environments like Apple does!" "We love Android because its ecosystem isn't locked down like iOS's!" Yet, on the other hand: "We hate products that are designed by committee!" "We love Rails because it forces convention over configuration!"

icebraining 13y ago
It's almost like there are different people with different opinions.
- rmrfrmrf 13y ago
  Don't be ridiculous!