[NeutralCrane]

If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

[MarsIronPI]

Not so. Stallman created copyleft licenses as a defense against the current implementation of copyright. Copyleft uses the existing system of copyright to protect authors of free software from people who want to use copyright to restrict distribution. It wouldn't be necessary if copyright didn't exist.

[degamad]

Important nit-pick:

Copyleft was created to protect users of free software from authors/distributors who tried to use copyright to control the software running on the users' computers.

[jll29]

Stallman wanted to protect the right to fix bugs, he was not against paying for goods and services.

[MarsIronPI]

Sure, but an idea is not a (physical) good, nor is it a service. Coming up with an idea or writing a book is a service and should be paid for (probably by commission), but (and Stallman would agree) the idea or book itself should be free.

[LocalH]

He was also famously staunchly against proprietary software in any way, so therefore he wouldn't have been spending money on software unless there was no other option that came close to meeting his needs.

[degamad]

He was not opposed to paying for the software. He was opposed to being limited in what he could do with it after it was paid for.

[minraws]

Knowledge is free as in *free beer once in a while because you genuinely can’t pay*, not free as in *scale up the freemium model, keep grabbing free stuff daily, weekly, monthly, and then start running your own pub with the free beers you took from the neighboring pub.*

This discussion is intellectually dishonest. Either some people here genuinely dont understand the concepts of kindness and gratitude, or they do understand them and are just choosing to spread falsehoods anyway.

Just because my beer pub isnt going out of business because you took some free beers doesnt make it ethical for you to exploit my kindness and use those free beers to build your own competing beer pub.

If people are still confused: that setup is not sharing knowledge. It is stealing with nicer branding to help you and your friends sleep at night.

[psychoslave]

But then we step back a little further and ask what this thing that is called property, why should any human be granted any beyond what actually constitute them as an entity of their own.

What matter at the end of the day is not what the document pretend about who possess what, but how people feel in their life, what they can access to, and what they are bared to access for which actual reason.

It can't even be purely narrowed on what human people feel like. We all know our species is dependent on many physical phenomena and other species which owe nothing to us.

[minraws]

Property may be a social construct, but the costs of living are not.

You can question ownership in the abstract, and I am not even against that conversation. But that does not answer the actual point here. We still live in a world where food, rent, healthcare, clothing, hygiene, servers, tools, and time all cost money.

So if someone gives something away out of kindness, access, public benefit, or community spirit, that does not automatically mean everyone else is entitled to industrialize that kindness for their own business.

Open source is not a mystical anti-property pact.

Open source is not a contract where people are expected to provide endless unpaid labour for others to build businesses on top of. At some point this stops being a discussion about sharing knowledge and becomes a way to justify taking advantage of people’s work.

I just don't like these replies, if this was sarcasm, it might not have worked for me. I just find these social comparisons deeply unserious when the discussions are against theft or harm done to actual people with actual human needs.

[psychoslave]

> We still live in a world where food, rent, healthcare, clothing, hygiene, servers, tools, and time all cost money.

We, as "anyone online able to read this", certainly are pushed by social pressure to consider world through that kind of lenses. Not sure money mean anything for any animist tribe isolated in Amazonia.

We can even consider costs, without talking about money. We can for example deem attention span, ecological impact, human relationship, emotional burden. So many things that money tend to weight zero in its process to flatten judgements to dull "well ordered" scalars.

[NeutralCrane]

First of all, I’d recommend you not accuse others of being intellectually dishonest simply because they have a stance you disagree with.

Second of all, “knowledge is free” doesn’t mean it is free to generate. It means that it literally cannot be owned. Property implies scarcity. If I use a thing, it makes it so you can’t use that thing. This does not apply to something like knowledge. The fact that I use your idea doesn’t mean you can no longer make use of that idea. Your analogy is flawed, because drinking a beer means that is a beer that cannot be used by someone else. Intellectual property is an oxymoron. There is nothing actually stopping someone from making use of someone else’s knowledge, and therefore we must artificially construct barriers in order to maximize the ability to profit off of it. In the most charitable sense, this in theory provides financial incentive for people to generate knowledge. In a less charitable sense, it is literal though policing for the sole purpose of extracting money.

I get that making use of knowledge without compensating the person who produced it is “theft” under our system. The problem is not with the act. It is with the system in which knowledge work can only support an individual if these dystopian measures are enforced. Frankly, most knowledge work is built on mountains of previous knowledge work that never is compensated for it anyways, so the model of the world isn’t even internally consistent.

[harshreality]

If knowledge is to be free, then any corporate/commercial interest that locks up modified knowledge (code) to run their own services should have that locked-up knowledge freed from their commercial silo as well.

[NeutralCrane]

If they lock it up, they lock it up. They don’t need to be forced to open it up. But they also shouldn’t be able to prevent others for making use of any knowledge gleaned from it.

In the case of AI, I don’t think LLM providers are required to make their models completely open source just because they were trained on the data freely available on the internet. Those model weights aren’t the original data anyways, so they aren’t even selling access to that original data. However, there is should be nothing preventing others from creating and selling something produced from those LLMs. Distillation, for example, is free game.

In short, you should be required to make your knowledge freely available. But once someone has access to that knowledge, you can’t stop them from using it however they wish, including if they wish to sell it themselves.

[xboxnolifes]

This is ultimately just a reframing of "a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance".

[rbanffy]

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge

To be considered open source software, the license cannot impose any restrictions on how the software is used. You are free to use the software for whatever purpose you want.

[bornfreddy]

Absolutely not. Go read e.g. GPL license before spreading such falsehoods.

[kennywinker]

Nowhere in the GPL does it say how you can USE the software - you are free to run, modify, and use it any way you see fit. All its restrictions are triggered by DISTRIBUTION of the software, especially modified versions.

[bornfreddy]

The big gotcha is what one understands under the word "use". If I want to USE it as a basis for my business where I sell routers with the GPL software, there are some tiny restrictions regarding that, as Linksys learned [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt (see History section)

[rbanffy]

That’s correct. You can’t take freedoms away from your downstream users. As I said before, violating a free software license usually means you are stealing from your users, negating them rights they ought to be given.

[NeutralCrane]

Distribution is a subset of use

[kennywinker]

That’s one semantic interpretation of “use”, but not the only or the obvious one.

For most physical objects and concepts, distribution isn’t a subset of use. e.g. the post office. You can be a user, but you have no ability to distribute the post office - because that’s not a thing that is possible or makes sense. In that case distribution is not a subset of use. Other examples: most saas, e.g. gmail. Good luck distributing gmail.

[rbanffy]

Please enlighten us.

[NeutralCrane]

There’s plenty of licenses that dictate that code can’t be used in commercial applications, or what kind of license derivatives can use.

[mathgeek]

This is the same “beer not speech” argument that has been going on for decades. A quick search will show you why your claim is incomplete.

[rbanffy]

Would you like to clarify how open source licenses restrict how you use the software?

[jchw]

Knowledge should be free, but that can't be treated too literally. Not a unique case of this kind of phrase. If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely". I mean, speaking of open source, consider "free" software.

Open source licenses are almost entirely unrelated. They're strictly a hack around the copyright system, and not only that, they literally do nothing other than grant you rights you wouldn't otherwise have. Talking about open source is mostly a distraction. When people say knowledge is free they almost always mean access to knowledge. Open source grants people access and more.

People are not mad that they can't just steal things, they're mad that access to things is tied behind massive gatekeepers (essentially indefinitely...) that essentially exist to continue to enrich themselves while somehow almost none of the money makes it back to the authors, and is sometimes completely untethered from where the money comes from that funds the works to begin with. You can't just freely navigate, search through and consume information, it's all tied up behind various pay walls and monetization schemes while authors starve anyways.

We could have a more equitable and reasonable system that allows broad access to knowledge while providing some approach to monetization that is reasonable for both people seeking it out and people consuming it. There's little point in trying to enumerate the number of ways it could be done. We already have a system for taxes, we already have seen commercial schemes like Spotify, you could slice it thousands of different ways. Plenty of pros and cons. I'm just saying it could be done and we know it could be done.

But it can never work if all media and knowledge dominated by rent seeking gatekeepers standing in the middle whose primary purpose will always be to enrich themselves first and foremost. They will always want to get more and give less, because that is more or less their fiduciary duty.

[NeutralCrane]

> If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely".

Therein lies the entire issue. Intellectual property is a paradox and a farce, but our current systems require IP as a concept to exist. 99% of human history existed without the concept of IP law, and yet people still innovated, learned, and shared knowledge. But now we are at a point where human beings can only survive if they have something they can productize and sell to others, and so for knowledge to be produced, it has to turned into something that is artificially scarce, so that those producing it can be compensated for their labor. Maybe this is unavoidable for this point of our evolution. I doubt it, as 99% of human history managed without the concept of IP, and we still produced and shared knowledge.

But even if it is necessary for this stage, it is still a dystopian model. And I imagine we aren’t far off from a point where we can provide for everyone’s basic needs, and therefore we don’t need to introduce artificial scarcity to make knowledge work economically viable.

[sam1r]

Wow very well put.

[kennywinker]

Except it’s not. That poster is just doing an IP law version of the “paradox of tolerance”. Their argument is just: you say you want information to be free yet you believe in licenses that keep information from being made un-free.

[NeutralCrane]

Has absolutely nothing to do with the paradox of intolerance. If you have a more substantive criticism, feel free to elaborate.

[kennywinker]

That was what’s called an analogy. What you said and the PoT are similar because they both rely on eliminating nuance using language.

Paradox of tolerance: to maintain a tolerant society one must be intolerant of intolerance.

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

Your proposal: to make information free one must restrict how information can be used.

The biggest hole in your argument is just the MIT and BSD licenses. Sure what you say might apply to the GPL and other copyleft licenses - but MIT/BSD are as close to no-strings attached as can be achieved in our current legal framework.

So, clearly plenty of people are happy to freely give up ownership of their works. But others value keeping the code out in the open - not zero restrictions.

This is analogous to the paradox of tolerance, because they both rely on eliminating the variability in what people want when it comes to free knowledge or a tolerant society, and they both rely on using words to create a false dichotomy: tolerant vs intolerant, free vs restrictive. A tolerant society is still tolerant event if it is “intolerant” of murder - just because i used an antonym doesn’t mean those are the same exact concepts being negated.