[caslon]

> So is GNU, though. For instance, https://gcc.gnu.org/steering.html identifies the affiliations of most of the GCC steering committee, and they're generally proprietary companies. (Several work for Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM.)

Red Hat releases most things under free licenses and as far as I know everyone on the GCC steering committee from Red Hat was there pre-acquisition. That said, I don't love the GCC steering committee for many reasons (many of which admittedly were before most of their appointments). You are right, though, that much of the steering committee for GCC isn't pro-freedom as much as it is pro-convenience (and in the case of SiFive, is a very proprietary company).

...also, the GCC steering committee isn't representative of all of GNU.

> Also, if we're going to claim that working for a proprietary-software company means you're not a member of the free software movement, the movement is very small indeed.

This is true! I wouldn't say working for one excludes you (though it kind of does), but I would say working for one is incompatible with leading the free software movement or having moral ground to coup it.

> That may be the case, but the FSF has a long history of saying that you can work on free software for profit, too.

You can! It really is wonderful. Nothing I said conflicts, there.

> Frankly, that's why the FSF exists separate from the GNU project - to be a place that you can order physical media with GNU software from and expense it.

Half-truth, but close enough. Again, this doesn't conflict with anything I said.

> This is untrue of the authors of the open letter - you should look at their stated positions on free and proprietary software. (It might be true of some of the signatories, of course.)

That isn't actually true for all of the authors; one I can recall offhand, Garrett works for a company making proprietary software of the worst kind: the type that can kill people. And that's on top of a long history of opinions far more controversial than anything Stallman has been accused of, let alone done (the guy mocked a man who the UN has admitted was being tortured, for example).

[geofft]

Pre-acquisition Red Hat was awfully excited about supporting proprietary software whose intended purpose is to kill people: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article213676919....

My point here is that you can always pick a partitioning and then backsolve ethical principles that support that partitioning. "If you work for a company that sells proprietary software, you're ineligible to be a leading voice in the free software movement" has never been a principle - otherwise IBM and Google would never have had a seat. "If you work for a company that makes software that can kill people, your ethics don't line up with ours" hasn't been a principle either - RMS in fact has advocated for multiple militaries to use free software, see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed... . (Garrett's employer, for what it's worth, makes software that kills people when it breaks, i.e., the better he does his job, the fewer people die. I don't think it's easy to claim that about a military!)

The only real established standard is that you advocate that free software is a matter of ethics/morality/liberty and not simply one of convenience, and as far as I can tell, all the coauthors do so.

[caslon]

Thanks for pointing this out, I had forgotten this! Yeah, Red Hat has been rotten for a long time. I don't like it; I think it's been a terrible company for many years; but I do think it's never released non-free software, which was the bit I am mostly concerned about on this particular topic.

I do agree that they have no real moral ground to stand on. Forgive me for pointing this out, but given they're one of the organizations that signed the letter... (Though they sort of have more casus belli to than most that signed the letter.)

Seriously, though, thank you for pointing this out! I really genuinely appreciate it (and also appreciate that you're civil here).

Ah, you stealth-edited; give me a second to read that one.

> otherwise IBM and Google would never have had a seat.

Google has never had a seat at anything other than OSI, and IBM only purchased one.

> "If you work for a company that makes software that can kill people, your ethics don't line up with ours" hasn't been a principle either -

Obviously didn't claim this. I pointed out Garrett worked for a proprietary software company that made proprietary software that kills people. Specifically, I noted that this was worse than normal proprietary software, because if you're going to have the lives of others in your hands, they should at least know the rulebook you're playing by.

> RMS in fact has advocated for multiple militaries to use free software

This is consistent with everything else I've said. I personally dislike militarized forces to the point of being skeptical of most veterans, but proprietary software doesn't make sense for a military any more than using American bombs would make sense for North Korea.

[geofft]

Yeah sorry about the stealth-edit, I realize the first sentence by itself sounded kind of like a gotcha and I wanted to make a more substantial point :)

I'm referencing the GCC steering committee - IBM (actual IBM, not just Red Hat, mostly because they support GCC on their mainframes) and Google (presumably for gold, gccgo, etc.) have been involved for many years. (I don't mean they have seats on the FSF board or anything, that may have been unclear. I just mean their employees have leadership positions in a flagship GNU project, and at least for those two employees, their involvement in GCC is even part of their day job.)

I see your point about proprietary software that has the risk of killing people when it goes wrong, but what I'm claiming is that this is a sensible first-principles argument that is being newly introduced. When Red Hat contracts for the US defense apparatus - their largest customer - they know full well they're supporting proprietary and classified code, whose intended purpose is killing people, running on RHEL. (And given that RHEL's business model is support, I would seriously doubt that they never see/access/work on the proprietary code - I would bet they have engineers with clearance to help out with that code.) I think you can make an equally-sensible first-principles argument that this, too, is incompatible with the principles of the free software movement.

But we haven't made that argument, and we've been fine with Red Hat for years, and we've been fine with IBM for years (who has customers that are so distasteful that they had to negotiate an exception for JSON's "This software shall be used for Good, not Evil" license :) ), etc. I'm actually super interested in having that discussion and seeing where it leads, because I think there hasn't been much discussion of free software ethics in the last many years. But I think we can't retroactively apply it to decide who really is able to be a voice for the free software movement and who isn't.

[caslon]

It's all good! I was just trying to avoid looking like I was only responding to half a post!

You're right about IBM & Google being there for a while, and I think their participation is largely innocent (ironically, one of the main reasons I dislike the committee enough that I went out of my way to note that I dislike the committee a few comments up was actually protested by as far as I'm aware most of the proprietary companies & Red Hat). I still don't believe that funding GCC development is really enough to count the organizations, though. It's something I'll think on for a while, if nothing else; thanks for bringing it up.

The argument is actually a pretty classic one (it comes up nearly every time autonomous computers of any sort come up, and was something I read for the first time in a book from...1998, I think, though I can't recall the name; something on cybernetics from some university press).

I agree that Red Hat is and has largely been in violation of free software principles since their move unto SaaSS. You certainly won't find me arguing they're a moral company. I do think it's unlikely they actually work directly on proprietary code, but that would lead the discussion into very murky territory trying to draw a line, and so I'll largely cede the point. Red Hat is antithetical to free software as a movement.

I don't think we've been fine with IBM for years as some steward of the free software movement; they contribute to free software, yes, but only tangentially. Their support is of open-source, and is orthogonal to the free software movement. It's still useful to the free software movement, but I don't think we're fine with IBM itself.

I, too, want to have that discussion at some point! And yeah, the JSLint story is incredible. It's less IBM's customers (though they are definitely by-and-large evil) and more...IBM outright, though. They did support the Nazis, after all; there's really no coming back from that.

[DetroitThrow]

"though it kind of does"

It absolutely does not, and this has been understood throughout my entire time contributing to free software and participating in the movement. You can't just create purity tests for free software as a convenient way to demonize people when there's literally decades of core contributors and champions who'd then fall in this brand new exclusion zone.

[caslon]

It's hardly an arbitrary purity test; if you see proprietary software as immoral, and the free software movement as a moral movement, then people who release proprietary software aren't part of the free software movement. This has been the case since the ideological genesis of the movement.

You seem to be arguing in favor of the open source movement, which is a distinct one, with far different goals (rather than being a moral movement based around liberation, it's a movement based around profiteering free software).

[DetroitThrow]

"It's hardly an arbitrary purity test"

I never said it was, I said it was one which seems to have been created on the spot as a convenient way to demonize "others" given that the moral movement has never been morally bankrupt enough for the last few decades to exclude individuals based on their participation in proprietary projects.

And no, I'm very explicitly talking about the free software movement, not open source. There is nothing in my statements to suggest that I was talking about open source other than that I'm yet another that didn't meet your ahistorical and anti-freedom purity test.

[caslon]

> I never said it was, I said it was one which seems to have been created on the spot as a convenient way to demonize "others" given that the moral movement has never been morally bankrupt enough for the last few decades to exclude individuals based on their participation in proprietary projects.

Free software has always been a moral movement; it's those who promote proprietary software that are morally bankrupt.

> And no, I'm very explicitly talking about the free software movement, not open source. There is nothing in my statements to suggest that I was talking about open source other than that I'm yet another that didn't meet your ahistorical and anti-freedom purity test.

Being against proprietary software is pro-freedom, and nothing I'm saying is ahistorical. You're pretty clearly conflating the open source movement (based around profiteering and not caring about freedom) with the free software movement (has always been about morality).

[DetroitThrow]

>Free software has always been a moral movement; it's those who promote proprietary software that are morally bankrupt.

Ah, so those employed by proprietary software inherently promote it? You lack a grasp of those within the free software movement, then.

>Being against proprietary software is pro-freedom, and nothing I'm saying is ahistorical. You're pretty clearly conflating the open source movement (based around profiteering and not caring about freedom) with the free software movement (has always been about morality).

Again, you're inventing purity tests because you've never contributed to the movement and you clearly lack an understanding of the movement's history. The GNU Manifesto and Debian Social Contract are in direct contradiction to your purity test, and the former explicitly discusses the subject at hand.

My advice is to read more of the source documents about the movement or contribute to it before creating revisionist and anti-freedom purity tests.

[dang]

Please don't get involved in tit-for-tat flamewars on HN. They're tedious and inevitably degenerate. Also, please omit swipes, regardless of how wrong or provocative some other comments are or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[caslon]

> Ah, so those employed by proprietary software inherently promote it?

This is how it works, yes. We are complicit in our employers' deeds, whether that's working for a company that does ICE contracts or working for a company that harms people with proprietary software.

> Again, you're inventing purity tests because you've never contributed to the movement and you clearly lack an understanding of the movement's history.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

> The GNU Manifesto and Debian Social Contract are in direct contradiction to your purity test, and the former explicitly discusses the subject at hand.

The GNU Manifesto is far different in aim than the Debian Social Contract, and it doesn't whatsoever encourage proprietary software. It promotes selling software, which isn't the same thing. It criticizes proprietary software at multiple points and insults people who make it:

"Proprietary and secret software is the moral equivalent of runners in a fist fight. Sad to say, the only referee we've got does not seem to object to fights; he just regulates them (“For every ten yards you run, you can fire one shot”). He really ought to break them up, and penalize runners for even trying to fight."

It might be time for a reread.