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It weird to me that the free software license is more restrictive than other licenses. GPL maintain the end user freedom, but not the freedom of the programmer.

by subb 13y ago

dublinben 13y ago
The only freedom denied to the programmer is the 'freedom' to restrict the freedom of users. That's not a freedom I care to protect.
- clarry 13y ago
  So by combining code from two different "free" projects the developer would be restricting his users' freedom? Alright. So the developer can't give users that sort of code. The user has to do it himself, that is freedom after all. But doing that, the poor user essentially becomes a developer, and so he cannot distribute his thing to other users. That would be restricting the other users' freedoms. Right? Or how about this: imagine for a moment I'm not a programmer. I'm just a poor user, and I take some code under GPLv2, fetching it into /tmp as I usually do. Maybe the code doesn't work straight out of the box, so I search a little and find a hack to fix the code (but I'm still not programming it, just applying random advice from the net). Cool, I get the code working, install it into ~/home/ or /usr/local, whatever. After some days a friend finds out I've got this cool software running and he's not so savvy with the computer but he wants that software. Sharing is caring alright, so I zip up the binary & associated data files and send them his way. Whoops, I just violated the license. The license has a death clause that ends my rights when I violate it. I'm just a poor user, and now the freedoms granted to me are gone. Or did I really have freedom to begin with? EDIT: Actually, I'm pretty sure I've violated the GPL this way, more than once. Years ago I ran Gentoo as my main OS, and many of my acquaintances did too. Every once in a while the OS kinda pooped itself and friends asked friends to hand them a copy of a working libwhatever.so.whatever or somesuch. Some of these were patched by Gentoo, some of these might've been altered by me too. Sometimes we shared other binaries that had nothing to do with Gentoo per se. In any case I never gave these people a written notice saying how to get the source, nor did I host the source for three years, nor did I share the source when I copied that binary to a place where a friend could grab it. I was just sharing. The code is free, right? Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    > Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free. I prefer BSD licenses, to be honest, and anything I write from scratch these days is under those licenses. But there are cases where projects are forked and it is not really possible to change the license.
chriswarbo 13y ago
There aren't very many programmers. There are a vast number of end users. Even programmers are end users of each others software. If the goal is Freedom, it's not weird at all.
icebraining 13y ago
BSD is a free software license too: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD
b0rsuk 13y ago
That's a play on words. I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts. Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive things. Countries and societies all around the world restrict or forbid them. Freedom, when out of control, can result in bad outcomes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland Poland disappeared off the map because nobility and clergy had too much freedom. Most infamous was /liberum veto/ "This policy of parliamentary procedure was based on the assumption of the political equality of every "gentleman", with the corollary that unanimous consent was needed for all measures. A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had already been approved, became enough to strike the act." Unless you're a hardcore anarchist, you have to draw the line somewhere.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts. Nobody will disagree with that. The question is where to draw those lines. > Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive things. As Cicero pointed out (in "De Republica"), these things would prevent humans from living together in cities. I am a classicist. I look back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero far more than I do Locke. As far as I see it, the goal of the economy is to serve the household, not the other way around. > A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had already been approved, became enough to strike the act." And yet Quakers have shown an ability to make a universal veto work. The key thing though is what you pointed out: universal vetos weaken central authorities and return the power to small regional entities where people can more easily work together. This is a good outcome. The question really is how to define Freedom. Stallman tries to follow in FDR's footsteps of four freedoms. But in both cases you have logic which then requires centralization as a matter of policy, and then freedom in the service of freedom becomes self-consuming. Here's my radical idea: freedom requires limits, to be sure, but freedom is defined by the space within the limits. I.e. freedom is a matter of partitioning, physically or metaphorically, something in order to give people a right to control their own space. The freedom which then matters is economic freedom, and by this I mean the right to engage in economic production and trade without micromanagement from outside. To put it another way, it's one thing to have to do the dishes. It's another thing to be told not only to do them but be micromanaged in how one must do them. Evaluating software licenses from this perspective then gives one the sense that those licenses that the FSF is willing to call Free Software Licenses do not universally as a group deliver more freedom than proprietary software licenses. The AGPL places many more restrictions on products and services delivered with the software than does the license for the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library when obtained as part of development tools. So the question is: what can someone produce? What are the limits there? Who is making those decisions? So I side with the BSD folks.
belorn 13y ago
The confusion is only there because the English word "freedom" has more than one meaning. Freedom might mean a lack of restrictions, by defining it as contrast to what it is not. On wiktionary, this is definition #2[1]. BSD is a good example of a license with few restrictions. Freedom might mean liberty as a philosophy. There it is the is the quality individuals have to control their own actions[2]. Understanding liberty involves how we imagine, and structure, individual's roles and responsibilities in society. GPL is a good example of an license that tries to achieve liberty in today's society. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty

It weird to me that the free software license is more restrictive than other licenses. GPL maintain the end user freedom, but not the freedom of the programmer.

by subb 13y ago

It weird to me that the free software license is more restrictive than other licenses. GPL maintain the end user freedom, but not the freedom of the programmer.

dublinben 13y ago

The only freedom denied to the programmer is the 'freedom' to restrict the freedom of users. That's not a freedom I care to protect.

clarry 13y ago
So by combining code from two different "free" projects the developer would be restricting his users' freedom? Alright. So the developer can't give users that sort of code. The user has to do it himself, that is freedom after all. But doing that, the poor user essentially becomes a developer, and so he cannot distribute his thing to other users. That would be restricting the other users' freedoms. Right? Or how about this: imagine for a moment I'm not a programmer. I'm just a poor user, and I take some code under GPLv2, fetching it into /tmp as I usually do. Maybe the code doesn't work straight out of the box, so I search a little and find a hack to fix the code (but I'm still not programming it, just applying random advice from the net). Cool, I get the code working, install it into ~/home/ or /usr/local, whatever. After some days a friend finds out I've got this cool software running and he's not so savvy with the computer but he wants that software. Sharing is caring alright, so I zip up the binary & associated data files and send them his way. Whoops, I just violated the license. The license has a death clause that ends my rights when I violate it. I'm just a poor user, and now the freedoms granted to me are gone. Or did I really have freedom to begin with? EDIT: Actually, I'm pretty sure I've violated the GPL this way, more than once. Years ago I ran Gentoo as my main OS, and many of my acquaintances did too. Every once in a while the OS kinda pooped itself and friends asked friends to hand them a copy of a working libwhatever.so.whatever or somesuch. Some of these were patched by Gentoo, some of these might've been altered by me too. Sometimes we shared other binaries that had nothing to do with Gentoo per se. In any case I never gave these people a written notice saying how to get the source, nor did I host the source for three years, nor did I share the source when I copied that binary to a place where a friend could grab it. I was just sharing. The code is free, right? Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > Now I know better. I no longer redistribute GPL-anything, because screw all these restrictions. It is not free. I prefer BSD licenses, to be honest, and anything I write from scratch these days is under those licenses. But there are cases where projects are forked and it is not really possible to change the license.

chriswarbo 13y ago

There aren't very many programmers. There are a vast number of end users. Even programmers are end users of each others software. If the goal is Freedom, it's not weird at all.

icebraining 13y ago

BSD is a free software license too: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD

b0rsuk 13y ago

That's a play on words. I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts. Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive things. Countries and societies all around the world restrict or forbid them. Freedom, when out of control, can result in bad outcomes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland Poland disappeared off the map because nobility and clergy had too much freedom. Most infamous was /liberum veto/ "This policy of parliamentary procedure was based on the assumption of the political equality of every "gentleman", with the corollary that unanimous consent was needed for all measures. A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had already been approved, became enough to strike the act." Unless you're a hardcore anarchist, you have to draw the line somewhere.

einhverfr 13y ago
> I believe freedom of one person ends where freedom of another person starts. Nobody will disagree with that. The question is where to draw those lines. > Freedom to steal, freedom to kill, freedom to harm are not seen as positive things. As Cicero pointed out (in "De Republica"), these things would prevent humans from living together in cities. I am a classicist. I look back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero far more than I do Locke. As far as I see it, the goal of the economy is to serve the household, not the other way around. > A single member of parliament's belief that a measure was injurious to his own constituency (usually simply his own estate), even after the act had already been approved, became enough to strike the act." And yet Quakers have shown an ability to make a universal veto work. The key thing though is what you pointed out: universal vetos weaken central authorities and return the power to small regional entities where people can more easily work together. This is a good outcome. The question really is how to define Freedom. Stallman tries to follow in FDR's footsteps of four freedoms. But in both cases you have logic which then requires centralization as a matter of policy, and then freedom in the service of freedom becomes self-consuming. Here's my radical idea: freedom requires limits, to be sure, but freedom is defined by the space within the limits. I.e. freedom is a matter of partitioning, physically or metaphorically, something in order to give people a right to control their own space. The freedom which then matters is economic freedom, and by this I mean the right to engage in economic production and trade without micromanagement from outside. To put it another way, it's one thing to have to do the dishes. It's another thing to be told not only to do them but be micromanaged in how one must do them. Evaluating software licenses from this perspective then gives one the sense that those licenses that the FSF is willing to call Free Software Licenses do not universally as a group deliver more freedom than proprietary software licenses. The AGPL places many more restrictions on products and services delivered with the software than does the license for the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library when obtained as part of development tools. So the question is: what can someone produce? What are the limits there? Who is making those decisions? So I side with the BSD folks.

belorn 13y ago

The confusion is only there because the English word "freedom" has more than one meaning. Freedom might mean a lack of restrictions, by defining it as contrast to what it is not. On wiktionary, this is definition #2[1]. BSD is a good example of a license with few restrictions. Freedom might mean liberty as a philosophy. There it is the is the quality individuals have to control their own actions[2]. Understanding liberty involves how we imagine, and structure, individual's roles and responsibilities in society. GPL is a good example of an license that tries to achieve liberty in today's society. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty