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The biggest problem (possibly the only problem, but still a severe one) with Stallman's views on software copyright licensing is that he seems either unaware of

by nzp 13y ago

The biggest problem (possibly the only problem, but still a severe one) with Stallman's views on software copyright licensing is that he seems either unaware of, or unwilling to accept, broader social, economic and political issues of our civilization. Software and processes around it, like any other product of human social production, doesn't and can't exist in a social vacuum. It's nice to be focused on a specific social issue, but when your work scales to a certain level it becomes impossible to consider it in isolation. Reading the comments on that article made me glad to see an LLVM developer who chimed in (silvas) understands this perfectly and he articulated it quite well: We don't do everything in public purely because of internal constraints of the companies that we work for and those won't go away without significant societal changes (i.e., the necessary changes vastly transcend the developers' own attitudes on the issue: we're talking changes at the levels of entire business models). [...] > What about iPhone platform support? I assume you mean that the platform is locked down? Well, that's their platform. They make the rules for who gets to compile for it. Now, you may say "well, they shouldn't restrict who gets to compile for their platform!" and that's fine, but it's a different issue, one which goes to the core of Apple's business model and the society that enables it and the individuals that make up that society. Even if LLVM/Clang were to magically become GPL'd tomorrow, the platform would still be locked down. [...] It's myopic to think that the software is somehow the key factor here: the assault on freedom in this situation is the incentive to keep it proprietary, and that is a much larger issue. There is a similar assault on freedom from the fact that their hardware designs are proprietary as well, and the incentives are similar. [...] In my experience, Stallman's view is extremely myopic because the real impediments to free software are larger societal issues[1]. Within the hacker community these issues don't really exist (Eric Raymond's essays cover this well), and so the default is that code is free software (four freedoms), but the other 99.99% of society is still stuck with archaic principles, and any time that a hacker's paycheck comes from "the rest of society", they are subject to a world where these issues exist. [1] The GPLv3 "anti-Tivo-ization" wording is a perfect example that shows that confining your view just to software is myopic. Why shouldn't we want the entire device and all its chips to be free also? Why shouldn't the company's internal discussions be done in public? The answer to these questions is the same as the answer to "why does non-free software exist?".

sp332 13y ago
He is pretty obviously "unwilling to accept" those issues, but he's not acting as if software is in a vacuum. He's been working to change those issues. Most obviously, the concept of copyleft, which uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce openness, is very much an attempt to change society. And it's been very successful.
- nzp 13y ago
  "Unwilling to accept" was meant in the sense "doesn't recognize the issues even exist", not "unwilling to let the issues go unsolved". He's been explicitly not willing to consider issues I'm talking about. In fact, he's quite happy to live in a system which enables and produces conditions which enable the existence of proprietary software. He's never been working to change those issues. In fact, the concept of copyleft, the mechanism it relies on, is firmly rooted in the status quo. You say it yourself, it uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce "openness", but the crucial point is that it's an openness with a severely limited scope. It does absolutely zero to change society in any meaningful, fundamental way. The very act of relying on capitalist state legal system to force people to be "open" serves only to further legitimize that very system which makes possible, even desirable, for things like proprietary software to exist. The GPL isn't even a subversive hack of copyright law--the law was meant to enable authors to put almost any kind of conditions on the use and distribution of their works, as they please. It's the purpose of copyright law all along to enable things like the GPL. The fact that it's highly unusual to release works under such conditions is beside the point. Stallman almost autistically only sees his most immediate grievance, the incidental fact that software can be restrictive to its users, but is completely blind to the actual fundamental social causes of the issue. So no, the GPL is not in any meaningful way successful at actually changing society, the whole concept is fundamentally conformant to existing socio-economic conditions.
  - devcpp 13y ago
    In order to enable the enormous societal changes that you suggest Stallman should focus on (in what way? revolution?), you first have to secure freedom. With proprietary software, you never know what happens, whether you are being watched, if someone has access to your system. Eventually, governments can just require software companies to implement censorship and surveillance. In Stallman's vision, the only way out of this is to have complete control over your software. This means no nonfree software whatsoever. In parallel, he's very aware of the problem of user adoption, but accepting nonfree software in FOSS environments destroys the purpose. Therefore, the only way to achieve total freedom is to turn to the users. And this is done the following way: (1) make excellent FOSS alternatives, and (2) tell everyone the benefits of FOSS and point them to the excellent free software that was made.

by nzp 13y ago

sp332 13y ago

He is pretty obviously "unwilling to accept" those issues, but he's not acting as if software is in a vacuum. He's been working to change those issues. Most obviously, the concept of copyleft, which uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce openness, is very much an attempt to change society. And it's been very successful.

nzp 13y ago
"Unwilling to accept" was meant in the sense "doesn't recognize the issues even exist", not "unwilling to let the issues go unsolved". He's been explicitly not willing to consider issues I'm talking about. In fact, he's quite happy to live in a system which enables and produces conditions which enable the existence of proprietary software. He's never been working to change those issues. In fact, the concept of copyleft, the mechanism it relies on, is firmly rooted in the status quo. You say it yourself, it uses restrictive copyright laws to enforce "openness", but the crucial point is that it's an openness with a severely limited scope. It does absolutely zero to change society in any meaningful, fundamental way. The very act of relying on capitalist state legal system to force people to be "open" serves only to further legitimize that very system which makes possible, even desirable, for things like proprietary software to exist. The GPL isn't even a subversive hack of copyright law--the law was meant to enable authors to put almost any kind of conditions on the use and distribution of their works, as they please. It's the purpose of copyright law all along to enable things like the GPL. The fact that it's highly unusual to release works under such conditions is beside the point. Stallman almost autistically only sees his most immediate grievance, the incidental fact that software can be restrictive to its users, but is completely blind to the actual fundamental social causes of the issue. So no, the GPL is not in any meaningful way successful at actually changing society, the whole concept is fundamentally conformant to existing socio-economic conditions.
- devcpp 13y ago
  In order to enable the enormous societal changes that you suggest Stallman should focus on (in what way? revolution?), you first have to secure freedom. With proprietary software, you never know what happens, whether you are being watched, if someone has access to your system. Eventually, governments can just require software companies to implement censorship and surveillance. In Stallman's vision, the only way out of this is to have complete control over your software. This means no nonfree software whatsoever. In parallel, he's very aware of the problem of user adoption, but accepting nonfree software in FOSS environments destroys the purpose. Therefore, the only way to achieve total freedom is to turn to the users. And this is done the following way: (1) make excellent FOSS alternatives, and (2) tell everyone the benefits of FOSS and point them to the excellent free software that was made.