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There's no intellectual dishonesty here, just a semantic mismatch. You're using the negative definition of freedom, which is the lack of explicit restrictions o

There's no intellectual dishonesty here, just a semantic mismatch. You're using the negative definition of freedom, which is the lack of explicit restrictions on behavior; the logic you expose only holds under that particular school of thought. The GPL is instead defined on the tradition of positive liberty, which defines freedom as the number of options freely available to each person to choose. There's a very real risk of those being reduced by permissive licenses, as you can no longer ignore network effects, as negative freedom (being defined over individual atomic actions) does. History shows us that if you allow open source code to be relicensed as proprietary, the competitive advantage of companies building and selling products with enhanced features tend to displace the original project, which gets abandoned. This happened to Unix, to Mac OS X, and is now happening to Android. If this continues for an extended time, the whole ecosystem evolves and the old software becomes unusable, greatly reducing the total options that users can effectively perform - not by an legal or coercive restriction, but because of pragmatic impossibility. There are permissive projects where this doesn't happen (at least for a while) because of the economic incentives of remaining close to the free+open project, but the risk is always there. What good is the permission to run the original, abandoned version of a software project if all the available hardware has been locked and is uncapable of running it, and it's impossible to modify it to support the modern functions that are available in the proprietary platform and required for any productive usage? Those are very real threaths, and the GPL was designed to combat them (as a reaction to the first time they happened on a large scale). Avoiding this "reduced total available options" scenario is what GPL projects call freedom, not "reducing the number of restrictions" definition that you use. Not a problem of rhetoric, but of chosen vocabulary.

gress 13y ago
I don't use a 'reducing number of restrictions' definition. That's a straw man that I was responding to. I also don't accept "history shows us" as establishing some law of nature when the history we're talking about is a couple of decades. I think the abandoning of ecosystems can just as easily be explained by them being based on inadequate foundations, than by a mythical horde of developers somehow being prevented from working on them. Usually systems are abandoned because of a lack of economic incentive, after all the displacement you describe can only happen if proprietary development produces enhancements more efficiently than open source. Witness the failure of the Linux desktop. I think 'greatly reducing the total options that users can effectively perform' is a statement that needs much more qualification. To me, that's a function of design, extensibility, and how much leverage a system provides, and is independent of whether the source is available or not. Extending by forking is a last resort. Nevertheless, I do respect the hypothesis that a GPL style open system provides an important counterbalance to proprietary systems. What I do not support is the dishonest use of language and morality to further it. If you are using positive freedom, then there is much more to be gained through improvements in software design - e.g. along the lines of Alan Kay's FONC - to increase leverage - than through ideology.
- TuringTest 13y ago
  We are talking of UNIX here. It has not been abandoned as an unsuccessful ecosystem, it has been rewritten away from the legalistic minefield that its permissive licensing allowed it to be; and that ''did'' prevent developers from freely working on it, and business from freely deploying it despite its open source origins. The history we've watched is that of Linux and GNU on the server (UNIX didn't have any strong desktop environment to begin with); and the UNIX wars span nearly 40 years, with Linux being the last half of it. I still fail to see what is it that you call dishonest use of language. If freely talking of one's perspective and goals is dishonest, then all ideologies are.
  - gress 13y ago
    Except that FreeBSD is just as freely deployable without the need for the GPL, so it is not the GPL that causes this property to come about. The dishonest use of language is the misappropriation of the word 'freedom', and the moralizing around what is essentially a business problem. But, if you are claiming to be an ideologue, then fair enough. In which case, I'd love to hear more about how that ideology translates into a better future economic future for software developers. To me it seems to just translate into greater dependence on powerful corporations.

gress 13y ago

I don't use a 'reducing number of restrictions' definition. That's a straw man that I was responding to. I also don't accept "history shows us" as establishing some law of nature when the history we're talking about is a couple of decades. I think the abandoning of ecosystems can just as easily be explained by them being based on inadequate foundations, than by a mythical horde of developers somehow being prevented from working on them. Usually systems are abandoned because of a lack of economic incentive, after all the displacement you describe can only happen if proprietary development produces enhancements more efficiently than open source. Witness the failure of the Linux desktop. I think 'greatly reducing the total options that users can effectively perform' is a statement that needs much more qualification. To me, that's a function of design, extensibility, and how much leverage a system provides, and is independent of whether the source is available or not. Extending by forking is a last resort. Nevertheless, I do respect the hypothesis that a GPL style open system provides an important counterbalance to proprietary systems. What I do not support is the dishonest use of language and morality to further it. If you are using positive freedom, then there is much more to be gained through improvements in software design - e.g. along the lines of Alan Kay's FONC - to increase leverage - than through ideology.

TuringTest 13y ago
We are talking of UNIX here. It has not been abandoned as an unsuccessful ecosystem, it has been rewritten away from the legalistic minefield that its permissive licensing allowed it to be; and that ''did'' prevent developers from freely working on it, and business from freely deploying it despite its open source origins. The history we've watched is that of Linux and GNU on the server (UNIX didn't have any strong desktop environment to begin with); and the UNIX wars span nearly 40 years, with Linux being the last half of it. I still fail to see what is it that you call dishonest use of language. If freely talking of one's perspective and goals is dishonest, then all ideologies are.
- gress 13y ago
  Except that FreeBSD is just as freely deployable without the need for the GPL, so it is not the GPL that causes this property to come about. The dishonest use of language is the misappropriation of the word 'freedom', and the moralizing around what is essentially a business problem. But, if you are claiming to be an ideologue, then fair enough. In which case, I'd love to hear more about how that ideology translates into a better future economic future for software developers. To me it seems to just translate into greater dependence on powerful corporations.