This comment breaks the HN guideline that says Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them. It has triggered a devolutionary cascade that so far has made it as low as "Wow, what an asshole" and "man who thinks sex with children should be legalized". Blasting craters in the threads like that damages this site. I'm sure you didn't mean to, but please don't do it again.
I used to think the same as you, but I came around.
I am annoyed by the FSF dogma because they lay an exclusive claim on the word ethics when applied to software. I consider myself an ethical person even in software. But my definition of ethical is less strict than the RMS definition.
>they lay an exclusive claim on the word ethics when applied to software.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. They've defined an ethical framework for software and then they discuss things being ethical or not within that framework.
Anyone is free to use a different ethical framework and decide if an action is ethical or not within that framework instead.
Personally, I'm annoyed by RMS because it's annoying when someone I disagree with on so many things turns out to be right so often. I think they call that "cognitive dissonance."
He's consistent to a point. He's quite silent about the hardware aspect, even though free software licensed CPU designs have been available for a long while.
If you have the design, and you have access to FPGAs, I'd say that's got you pretty close already.
Edit: We were talking about CPUs, not complete systems. And yes, the performance would be poor, but RMS has already strongly established that in his book performance is a distant runner-up to free.
Assuming you have an open FPGA toolchain (which AFAIK exists for like a year or so), open FPGA designs supported by that toolchain (AFAIK doesn't exist yet). Even if you don't insist of the FPGAs design being open (which is a rather arbitrary border then), you'll have a hard time getting something with performance people actually want to use in the supported chips. It's a nice dream, but not practical right now.
By pretty close you mean no where near a usable system then you'd be correct. If you're not a hardware person, as I'm not, I don't think I could go from blank fpga and parts to a working laptop with a keyboard, trackpoint, and lcd screen in any reasonable amount of time, nor with any certainty that it would work and not be error-prone.
On the other hand, it's very difficult to build a design for an FPGA using only free software. (Until very recently, it was outright impossible; now, it's merely very difficult, and requires that you use certain very specific FPGAs.)
>By pretty close you mean no where near a usable system then you'd be correct. If you're not a hardware person, as I'm not, I don't think I could go from blank fpga and parts to a working laptop with a keyboard, trackpoint, and lcd screen in any reasonable amount of time, nor with any certainty that it would work and not be error-prone.
The exact same argument can be made about the operating system.
Eh, IDK about that. It's pretty well-understood how to make a simple but usable OS kernel. I think most competent programmers would be able to do it (or at least know where to start) given enough free time.
>RMS has already strongly established that in his book performance is a distant runner-up to free.
To him, maybe. Not all of us have the luxury of getting paid to be a techno-luddite, using antiquated workflows and having the spare time available to re/write drivers when necessary.
If I made the same performance/freedom trade-offs I'd be completely unable to do my job.
The fact that you consider performance and freedom to be a trade off means that you've already given up even the slightest hope of freedom. You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter. In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds. The war won't be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL.
The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them.
Businesses have a huge amount of leverage on the OSS software ecosystem and so it's really no surprise that the licensing choices are to benefit the businesses funding the development rather than the users. It's to be expected but no less sad. There's a small group of passionate people who have basically dedicated their lives to making the world a better place by writing software that's truly free and respects its users, they built an entire community and movement around the idea, and actually stand by their beliefs -- yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.
I wonder what kind of world we would have if GNU were completely defeated, if no one released anything under the GPL anymore. Sure, free software would still exist, but nobody would call it "free software" and no one would prevent anyone else from creating non-free derivatives. Nearly all software would be "open core", with some free software here and there but with many or most of the interesting components non-free.
We're already very close to that world. Many people seem happy to see GNU losing ground every day. For myself, I am not sure that we are working towards the best possible future, but I'm not even sure what that future should be.
We used to call that "public domain software" and it was big in the 80s from what I recall (I was a kid then). You'd release something to the public domain and people can do with it whatever they wished. Then GNU came around and ate everyone's lunch, for better or worse. I suspect for better.
Maybe GNU is just a stop-gap movement to get everyone on board the FOSS train, who knows. BSD licensing hasn't caused any apocalypse yet and arguably it provided a networking stack for Windows that was superior to anything MS could rush out the door back in the NT 3.5 days. There's something nice about being able to put the code into commercial products without worrying about strict GNU/GPL-like conditions.
It was Microsoft that came and ate public domain software's lunch, not GNU. GNU and the GPL were not needed until aggressive copyright enforcers such as Microsoft came on the scene. Bill Gates wrote a famous rant calling anyone that shares code a thief, essentially. The GPL was a reaction to that attitude and has saved the culture of sharing code.
If most people defaulted to sharing code like was done pre-Microsoft then BSD would be fine. Read RMS's rant that is linked above. He's still at defending against "adversaries" of Freedom. This is war!
OK, so even MS is now open sourcing (some of) their code. Maybe it's not "war" anymore, but you need to understand the history a little.
> Bill Gates wrote a famous rant calling anyone that shares code a thief, essentially. The GPL was a reaction to that attitude and has saved the culture of sharing code.
Didn't Gates' letter come out ten or more years before the first version of the GPL.
Going back even further, we used to just call it "software". The idea that software could be copyrighted didn't even happen until the 1970s, and it took a while for the idea to really take hold.
This is why rms is the way he is. He's old. He remembers the days when all software was free. He's been trying to get that back ever since.
RMS is an idealist. If people actually made what he proposed (envisioned), world would be much better place.
It is hard to see the entire impact of Free software and even harder to predict how the world would like if people actually stood up to it but I can say that I am sure we would have:
- more secure Internet
- more decentralized/distributed Internet
- no ISP blocks
- much harder if not even impossible NSA spying
- no disgusting DRM
- no patents and patent trolls -> more inovation
- no force updates, no abandoned users
- more competition in hardware and software field
- things being developed for people and not sheer profit
- ...
- add your points
You listed a bunch of things without substantiating. For example, how would free software prevent the NSA from spying? Internet backbone taps don't care if your HTTP implementation is running under Windows or Linux...
> how would free software prevent the NSA from spying?
A lot of hard problems come from the fact that you need lots of developer attention to build and maintain solutions that just work. The domain is tricky and complex enough to where, you can make it zero-effort for one configuration, but making it zero-effort for all possible or even all likely configurations takes more resources than is available.
The example relevant here is cryptography software. It's not hard to encrypt stuff. It's hard to make end-to-end solutions that just work, for all possible uses and across all possible platforms.
Free software has a restrictive effect of only making software platforms that are open and extensible, vastly reducing the effort needed to maintain end-to-end, user-friendly encryption.
It would make it pretty much impossible for the NSA to spy on citizens if we only had free software platforms to support.
Not all answer need to be pure technical ones - they don't go and search person by person via manpower but they use meta data and algorithms. Simple overflowing their meta data would force them to use other means. Also you forget social impact - if majority of people actually listened to RMS that means majority of people would be very privacy and security minded and would press the government to change the laws (NSA spying is illegal anyway but with majority of folks actually actively pursuing this would made their existence hard or at least not possible to just go and spy and ruing privacy of entire planet).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html