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Letter to the FSF

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17 pointsAdrock12 comments

Stallman isn't thinking about you or anyone else who reads this forum. He is thinking about the 4 billion disconnected individuals who haven't even entered the net.

Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user. That is not equivalence, and it is sad to continually see developers heed simply because they know where their paycheck comes from.

There is more to this world than us enlightened ones.

For things that should be free, let them be truly free. Do not wall off software from adoption because the GPL prohibits certain kinds of use. Don't discourage people from producing free software by making demands about how and with whom they share their creations.

There is a certain kind of software that needs to be free, that shouldn't belong to anyone in particular. This is not all software, and arguably it is not even the majority of it, but it is an important subset.

Stallman seems to treat free software as if it were something that was a scarce resource that needs to be protected. This is absurd considering the limitless number of copies of software that can be made.

The act of sharing software has benefits to the individual who is sharing. This much has become obvious and will continue to be made clear to others.

If licenses like the GPL acted as a catalyst to promote this discovery then they have surved their purpose. That is not to insist they must be refined, become more restrictive, or further hardened against hypothetical aggressors.

Agreed. The older I get the more I like the BSD licenses.

I am not certain why you bring that up; the obvious context is that one might "grow out of" GPL or some such. To provide an alternative (and equally useless) anecdote, the older I get, the more I prefer GPL licenses (to the extent that I used to be adamant about "freedoms" and such, licensing all of my code as BSD, and then I ran through series of life situations dealing with, as far as I can tell, similar issues to those I hear Stallman had, and now I license everything I do under GPL3: for similar reasons I have come to understand the role of governments, why insurance works the way it does, and in general have become less libertarian); this is a pattern I have seen in others as well: I might argue that the GPL is something you come to later, after you've seen a glimpse of the world of software without it.

I don't think it's a matter of growing out of it. Rather when I was younger I tended to uncritically accept the rhetoric surrounding the GPL vs BSD licenses. As I have watched the way many BSD-licensed projects work on the ground, that's changed.

Two major realizations have occurred to me:

1) the GPL generally provides a shield to those projects which have a slow pace of development or are immature. They prevent things like Informix or Solaris from developing from PostgreSQL or BSD.

2) On the other hand, as projects mature, there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors. As a result companies like EnterpriseDB or Green Plum which offer proprietary versions of PostgreSQL have both contributed a lot of their code back. They don't contribute everything back but they contribute everything back the project wants to accept. This leaves EDB with some Oracle compatibility code and GreenPlum with a node coordinator and a few other things.

The quid quo pro is relatively simple. if the pace of development and quality of code is high, then you really want cost-effective access to new work. The more you keep to yourself the more it costs you to access that work, so you give things back so they become standard, and reduce your own efforts to integrate what is left.

I typed a much longer response, but I realized that the internal contradiction in this argument can be summed up in many fewer words: "...there is a real quid quo pro regarding future contributions which doesn't exist in the GPL. By contributing back you ensure you have access to future patches by other contributors..." <- that is, in fact, a description of the behavior the GPL requires... claiming that it doesn't exist with the GPL thereby is confusing at best. The reason people attempt to avoid the GPL is specifically because they either currently intend to not play "quid pro quo" or because they want to reserve the right to do so in the future.

> Who are we to say that the needs of the developer surpass those of the user.

This is a false dichotomy. The user pays or otherwise rewards the developer because he gets utility from the software. The developer makes software that has utility for users because there's no reward (monetary or otherwise) in making software that isn't useful a user (which could well be the developer himself).

Your false dichotomy is separating people as users or developers. We are all both, and we should all have the potential to grow as our minds see fit.

No. As I wrote: (which could well be the developer himself)

I dunno about the letter. I use the GPL v2 for most of my work and Stallman is a major reason I am opposed to moving to the GPL v3 (that and the license is long enough to be difficult to understand, while the GPL v2's difficulties come from simplicity).

Part of the thing though is that I am not convinced the GPL has the reach that Stallman likes to pretend it does. At least in the US (and presumably even fruits-of-labor countries) copyright is not supposed to be a way to monopolize secondary markets for practical tools. See the concurrance in Lexmark v. Static Control and also the opinion of the court in Sony v. Connectix. Note that no court in the US has ever allowed secondary markets for practical tools to be controlled through copyright of a work in the primary market, and I am not aware of any country which has held otherwise.

In general, copyright is supposed to protect artistic contributions, and protect and author from having his/her work distributed without compensation. How that work is used in a practical way (i.e. other than as a work of art) is beyond the scope of copyright law at least in the US, and presumably in other places as well. Indeed, steps required to use a piece of software, even where it involves literal copying and even distribution of literal copies, have been held to be fair use under 17 USC 102(b). See Sony v. Connectix, Lexmark v. Static Control, and Oracle v. Google.

So I think that copyright only gets you so far. The sort of control that Stallman wants to see the GPL have can only be possible through software patents and we know how he feels about that topic. The GPL cannot reach cases where interoperability is sought and where the original work is not distributed. Anything else is wishful thinking.

So I don't see the GPL as any great menace, but a lot of that is because I don't think it reaches as far as Stallman likes to think (or at least pretend) that it does.

IANAL, TINLA, and if you are looking for legal advice here you are a fool for trying to get it on HN ;-)

Shorter johnw: I heart Ayn Rand.

In particular, I'm pretty sure Stallman (like most Americans) is in favor of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, so trying to persuade him that free software is a bad idea because it's like that seems pretty clueless.

This is too long and will not change his mind.

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