5 ms·

Well the GPL technique is used elsewhere, in far more places that OIF... For instance, there are laws constraining doctors from releasing sensitive medical inf

by mpyne 13y ago

Well the GPL technique is used elsewhere, in far more places that OIF... For instance, there are laws constraining doctors from releasing sensitive medical information about persons for the greater good of society at large (since people should therefore not have to worry about their doctor leaking news of their embarrassing disease they are being treated for). Something as simple as everyone paying taxes to provide for things such as air quality testing so we don't end up like Beijing are another example, along with mandating carbon controls so that we can at least try to arrest runaway greenhouse effect that would cause global warming down the road. Sometimes long-term freedom does require constraint on permissible action. Sometimes it doesn't. But it's not sporting to compare someone who tries the former route to invading a country IMHO, even if you personally feel the latter is better.

dfc 13y ago
> Sometimes long-term freedom does require constraint on permissible action. mpyne nailed it. If anyone is looking for further discussion of this concept check out "Social Contract Theory."[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ Sidebar: It doesn't hurt that you get to say cheeky things like "Before the GPL life was nasty, brutish and short."
- cperciva 13y ago
  Before the GPL life was nasty, brutish and short. ... never mind that GNU was around for 6 years, and BSD was around for 12 years before the GPL was published.
  - dfc 13y ago
    I am not trying to be difficult; but I do not understand what your point is? Yes, things happened prior to the social contract. That experience is the whole point of contracting out of the state of nature.
    - cperciva 13y ago
      Maybe I misunderstood. Were you intending to imply that 12 or more years of freely licensed software constitutes "nasty, brutish, and short"?
      - dfc 13y ago
        You misunderstood, but no worries. If you missed the reference I imagine many others did as well. "Nasty, brutish and short" is the Hobbes quote about the state of nature. Here is a little teaser from WP: Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature" human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape, and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community i.e. civil society through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute Sovereign, preferably (for Hobbes) a monarch. [1] Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau's social contract is similar to mpyne's "Sometimes long-term freedom does require constraint on permissible action."[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Overview [2] At least in my reading of his comment, it is entirely possible that he thinks I am a crackpot and completely missing the point.
        mpyne 13y ago
        No, you're pretty much right on point. Sometimes I like to think of it as the problem with local minima/maxima preventing an optimization algorithm from achieving the global minima/maxima, except applied at large. Put in the context of computer software licenses, one should simply imagine a world where all software were BSD-licensed and then see if open-source as we know it could feasibly continue. Certainly it would in some areas, but eventually if a given open-source project were consistently out-competing a proprietary product, the business being disadvantaged could fork the whole thing at once and turbocharge its now-proprietary development for long enough to supplant the old, open version. Witness what Nokia did with Qt. They poured tons of money into it and turned it in a short time into a mobile-class toolkit that was even more the "Best of Breed". They had so much resource investment that they were able to relicense the whole thing from GPL/QPL to LGPL/QPL. That particular case has turned out alright, but it should be illustrative of the danger of a world with a weak F/OSS ecosystem. Given all the problems we still have with software patents and other IP shenanigans I simply can't rest on the idea that the mere technical superiority of development "in the open" must necessarily and inevitably lead to a world where software is open and available to the users who would need it, without the judicious use of copyleft licenses in the mix along with BSD/MIT-style licenses. They both have their place.
  - throwaway2048 13y ago
    BSD was around, but the BSD license was directly inspired by the GPL. Prior to the Net/2 release, and the AT&T lawsuit, running BSD required paying multi-kilobuck prices for a UNIX source license.
    - cperciva 13y ago
      running BSD required paying multi-kilobuck prices for a UNIX source license. How is that relevant? Running linux requires paying multi-dollar prices to buy a computer; does that make the software any less free?
      - throwaway2048 13y ago
        Just to be clear, the BSD license did not exist previous to net/2 it was not open source or free software in any meaningful way.
        mpyne 13y ago
        Well, you can sell GPL'd software today for "multi kilobuck" prices too, if you wish, without affecting how Free the end product is.
    - kps 13y ago
      >the BSD license was directly inspired by the GPL. The BSD license clearly derives from the MIT X license (1985 at the latest) rather than the GPL. Berkeley's code in 4.3-Tahoe (1998) used the BSD license (with slightly different formatting).
cperciva 13y ago
I agree with the policies you mention, and I'd say that they serve the greater good of society. I would not, however, try to claim that they are "freedom policies" -- to the contrary, I'd say they're examples of how our quality of life can be enhanced by giving up some freedoms.
- saurik 13y ago
  The notion of "freedom" is complex and context sensitive. Some people (whom I largely disagree with, as I think this usage of terminology is itself context sensitive; it is, however, useful as a first approximation to get the ball rolling) look at the difference between "freedom to" and "freedom from"; by taking away my "freedom" to own other people, chaining them and forcing them to work for me by force, other people obtain the freedom from being slaves, and now have the freedom to run their own lives. The "freedoms" being looked at here are simply being given to different people: the GPL restricts freedoms of developers working with th software to provide and guarantee freedoms among the end users f that software; on the opposite side, BSD-licensed software tends to give developers more freedom, but the freedoms they are given are specifically for and really narrowly able to be used with the one purpose of later restricting freedoms of others. The question, thereby, comes down to which freedoms are more important and how many of each kind of consumer there are, in an attempt to define which philosophy provides more freedom. Advocates of GPL would say that there will always be more end users than developers, and that their freedoms are porbably more important anyway, so the GPL provides more essential "freedom", even as it is actively defined in a way that "restricts freedom", in the same way as we usually like to think the emancipation proclamation brought "freedom" even though it really was stating that slave owners had to give up some freedom: its all about perspective.
  - hhw 13y ago
    The tradeoff you are suggesting in this case is not valid. BSD-licensed software does not become any less free the moment someone uses it in a non-free project. It is only the changes to the code by the non-free project that are non-free, but none of the original code is affected. Whether those changes would have been made free if the original code was GPL-licensed is highly debatable, and there are plenty of examples on both sides. Notably, there was more or less no way MacOSX would have been built on GPL code. Conversely, many router projects have been forced to release source code due to being based on GPL-licensed Linux code.

by mpyne 13y ago

dfc 13y ago

> Sometimes long-term freedom does require constraint on permissible action. mpyne nailed it. If anyone is looking for further discussion of this concept check out "Social Contract Theory."[1][2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/soc-cont/ Sidebar: It doesn't hurt that you get to say cheeky things like "Before the GPL life was nasty, brutish and short."

cperciva 13y ago
Before the GPL life was nasty, brutish and short. ... never mind that GNU was around for 6 years, and BSD was around for 12 years before the GPL was published.
- dfc 13y ago
  I am not trying to be difficult; but I do not understand what your point is? Yes, things happened prior to the social contract. That experience is the whole point of contracting out of the state of nature.
  - cperciva 13y ago
    Maybe I misunderstood. Were you intending to imply that 12 or more years of freely licensed software constitutes "nasty, brutish, and short"?
    - dfc 13y ago
      You misunderstood, but no worries. If you missed the reference I imagine many others did as well. "Nasty, brutish and short" is the Hobbes quote about the state of nature. Here is a little teaser from WP: Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature" human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape, and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community i.e. civil society through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute Sovereign, preferably (for Hobbes) a monarch. [1] Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau's social contract is similar to mpyne's "Sometimes long-term freedom does require constraint on permissible action."[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Overview [2] At least in my reading of his comment, it is entirely possible that he thinks I am a crackpot and completely missing the point.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        No, you're pretty much right on point. Sometimes I like to think of it as the problem with local minima/maxima preventing an optimization algorithm from achieving the global minima/maxima, except applied at large. Put in the context of computer software licenses, one should simply imagine a world where all software were BSD-licensed and then see if open-source as we know it could feasibly continue. Certainly it would in some areas, but eventually if a given open-source project were consistently out-competing a proprietary product, the business being disadvantaged could fork the whole thing at once and turbocharge its now-proprietary development for long enough to supplant the old, open version. Witness what Nokia did with Qt. They poured tons of money into it and turned it in a short time into a mobile-class toolkit that was even more the "Best of Breed". They had so much resource investment that they were able to relicense the whole thing from GPL/QPL to LGPL/QPL. That particular case has turned out alright, but it should be illustrative of the danger of a world with a weak F/OSS ecosystem. Given all the problems we still have with software patents and other IP shenanigans I simply can't rest on the idea that the mere technical superiority of development "in the open" must necessarily and inevitably lead to a world where software is open and available to the users who would need it, without the judicious use of copyleft licenses in the mix along with BSD/MIT-style licenses. They both have their place.
- throwaway2048 13y ago
  BSD was around, but the BSD license was directly inspired by the GPL. Prior to the Net/2 release, and the AT&T lawsuit, running BSD required paying multi-kilobuck prices for a UNIX source license.
  - cperciva 13y ago
    running BSD required paying multi-kilobuck prices for a UNIX source license. How is that relevant? Running linux requires paying multi-dollar prices to buy a computer; does that make the software any less free?
    - throwaway2048 13y ago
      Just to be clear, the BSD license did not exist previous to net/2 it was not open source or free software in any meaningful way.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Well, you can sell GPL'd software today for "multi kilobuck" prices too, if you wish, without affecting how Free the end product is.
  - kps 13y ago
    >the BSD license was directly inspired by the GPL. The BSD license clearly derives from the MIT X license (1985 at the latest) rather than the GPL. Berkeley's code in 4.3-Tahoe (1998) used the BSD license (with slightly different formatting).

cperciva 13y ago

I agree with the policies you mention, and I'd say that they serve the greater good of society. I would not, however, try to claim that they are "freedom policies" -- to the contrary, I'd say they're examples of how our quality of life can be enhanced by giving up some freedoms.

saurik 13y ago
The notion of "freedom" is complex and context sensitive. Some people (whom I largely disagree with, as I think this usage of terminology is itself context sensitive; it is, however, useful as a first approximation to get the ball rolling) look at the difference between "freedom to" and "freedom from"; by taking away my "freedom" to own other people, chaining them and forcing them to work for me by force, other people obtain the freedom from being slaves, and now have the freedom to run their own lives. The "freedoms" being looked at here are simply being given to different people: the GPL restricts freedoms of developers working with th software to provide and guarantee freedoms among the end users f that software; on the opposite side, BSD-licensed software tends to give developers more freedom, but the freedoms they are given are specifically for and really narrowly able to be used with the one purpose of later restricting freedoms of others. The question, thereby, comes down to which freedoms are more important and how many of each kind of consumer there are, in an attempt to define which philosophy provides more freedom. Advocates of GPL would say that there will always be more end users than developers, and that their freedoms are porbably more important anyway, so the GPL provides more essential "freedom", even as it is actively defined in a way that "restricts freedom", in the same way as we usually like to think the emancipation proclamation brought "freedom" even though it really was stating that slave owners had to give up some freedom: its all about perspective.
- hhw 13y ago
  The tradeoff you are suggesting in this case is not valid. BSD-licensed software does not become any less free the moment someone uses it in a non-free project. It is only the changes to the code by the non-free project that are non-free, but none of the original code is affected. Whether those changes would have been made free if the original code was GPL-licensed is highly debatable, and there are plenty of examples on both sides. Notably, there was more or less no way MacOSX would have been built on GPL code. Conversely, many router projects have been forced to release source code due to being based on GPL-licensed Linux code.