Why “open source” is a route to placating software proprietors.

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Background

For some time now, Firefox advocates have been discussing this web browser in terms of its popularity. Many have cited how Microsoft Internet Explorer’s usage shrinks because Firefox’s usage grows. One of the most recent of such arguments comes from Asa Dotzler, Firefox and Thunderbird product release manager.

I have no objection to the Firefox web browser, in fact I use it as my primary web browser and have for some time now. Before that, for many years, I used the Mozilla suite (a combination of web browser, email client, chat program, and webpage editor). However, the argument with which one is ostensibly convinced to use Firefox is particularly weak and has been repeated for so long those who espouse it are unlikely to closely examine why it fails to convince.

Here’s the theme, from the best essay I’ve seen on the philosophical differences between the free software movement and the open source movement (emphasis mine):

“Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn’t all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea–and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the “keep quiet” approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.

At present, we have plenty of “keep quiet”, but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom–usually because they seek to be “more acceptable to business.””

The next major release of Microsoft Windows will come with a new version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, a version which is already being tested in public and many users have had time to try it out. Like Firefox, this new MSIE features tabs, a speedy webpage renderer, and an interface to run extensions. But MSIE is proprietary software. How it works is a secret, so that you can’t easily learn what is happening to your data. Experts are equally stymied as the secret is kept from them too. The software may not be shared, so even if you discover that MSIE is doing something you don’t want it to do and you somehow figure out a way to change how MSIE behaves you cannot share that improved version. Being a good neighbor or a good friend is prohibited with proprietary software, thus proprietary software is an anti-social trap.

Free software is the exact opposite of this: free software is software that respects the user’s freedom to share and modify the program to help themselves, help their neighbors, and help their community. Everyone has the right to inspect, share, and modify the software for whatever purpose at any time so that they can make the computer behave as they want it to behave.

The problem with Firefox and MSIE debates from many Firefox advocates and corporate media

Sadly, the debate involving Firefox and MSIE is being framed in terms of features (or on the equally poor argument of “choice”) instead of software freedom. Particularly with well-financed, well-advertised proprietary software with the power to bundle something with the OS, proprietors can maintain a strong popular lead. The argument Firefox proponents offer doesn’t take any time to teach users to value their software freedom, thus these users have no reason to reject the next version of MSIE. Hence, popularity is both (1) a minor concern that (2) has yet to really be tested at all.

Choice is often an effective way to railroad someone out of something they value. In US presidential elections, narrowing one’s choices is a way to railroad most voters into voting for the interests of the wealthy (Bush versus Kerry). In the context of web browsing, choice meant railroading users out of their software freedom. Mozilla suite and Firefox are not needed to provide choice. At one time, well before the current Mozilla project was a part of our lives, the three most popular graphical web browsers were Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. Since there were at least two browsers in the set, choice was satisfied. But software freedom was not satisified at all because none of the browsers in that set were free software browsers. Hence, Mozilla suite and Firefox don’t give one “choice”, one had choices before these browsers came along. But one did not have software freedom.

Software freedom is something Microsoft chooses not to supply to its users. Software freedom serves the needs of the users and proprietary software is untrustworthy by default. Hence, the debate should be focused on technical concerns and features after one has whittled away the competition by asking which program respects the user’s freedoms to share and modify the software.

Why not discuss software freedom

The Mozilla Foundation and Firefox proponents often don’t discuss software freedom because they are advocates for the open source movement. This movement started over a decade after the free software movement. The open source movement was formed to be more business-friendly. To accomplish this, this movement’s founders decided that they could more effectively talk to businesses by touting practical benefits of so-called “open source” software—that software is developed faster, cheaper, and with fewer bugs when more people can have a hand in writing the software—while pushing aside any freedom talk. User’s freedom to control how their computers work is not a cause the open source movement fights for. Effectively, the open source movement is a call to value an efficient development methodology by getting businesses to leverage the talented hackers of the world to work for them at no charge.

The harm of the least-worst in Bolivia?

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When you hear or read about what goes on in other countries fighting for water or land rights, it is rarely made clear that this is what will happen to more Americans. More Americans will learn that water will be priced out of reach of most people, water fountains will be replaced with commercial soda dispensers (the soda made with water that was hoarded or taken away from the public as Coca-Cola does in India), the land made uninhabitable (through nuclear or biochemical “accidents”) or unaffordable to the vast majority of the population. We don’t see how privatization of natural resources and collectively owned public resources can harm us. We also don’t see who pushes for these moves to privatize — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Along these lines, today’s Democracy Now! has an interesting message for Americans with regard to voting for people versus voting for policies from Marcela Olivera, Bolivian researcher and activist who works at the Democracy Center in Cochabamba. She was a member of the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life that organized a popular uprising against the privatization of the Cochabamba water system by Bechtel and the World Bank. Last year she worked with Public Citizen in Washington to develop an Interamerican water activist network. A rough transcript of part of her interview follows (starting at 31m19s, emphasis mine):

“Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada is a very symbolic person for us because he represents all the policies that were coming to my country from the World Bank and the IMF, you know, he’s the guy who sold, for us, all our companies, all the state companies, who sold all the natural resources, who killed people in the streets without any feeling about that. So this guy represents, for us, the model that [husband?] posed in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

I think when people kicked him out from our country we were feeling that we were kicking out all these policies too. But at the same time, you know, even thinking that this guy is a symbolic guy for us, I don’t think that the angriness of the people are focused on just one person. I think it’s all the political parties in our country that were doing — doesn’t matter who is in power, who political power is running the country, you know, the political policies that come from them are exactly the same. The names change, but the policies are exactly the same. So it’s all these political parties that belong to these old [?] in Bolivia and all the angriness of the people are against them, it’s not just one person or one political party in singular, it’s all of them and I think that was perfectly reflected on the streets in Bolivia.”

Perhaps it is time we recognized that it is not the candidate’s personality that matters, or how they look on camera, but what policies they endorse, how they want to implement those policies, where their campaign funds come from, and what their political history is.

Is the Democrat support machine revving up this early?

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Cynthia Bogard claims that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is “still our last best hope for saving the nation“.

Bogard doesn’t fully come to terms with the reality that Sen. Kerry worked along side the other Democrats to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during Pres. Clinton’s terms, or that Kerry and a majority of the Democrats supported Pres. Bush’s power to supersede Congressional oversight to make war anywhere (before the 2004 election, Kerry told the AP that he thought this power was proper for the President to have; I suspect he said this because he knows what a pain it can be to convince the public that war is a good idea). Instead Bogard calls Kerry’s support for the Iraq war “equivocation”—the use of ambiguous or uncertain language. No, he wasn’t hedging, he liked the invasion of Iraq and he should be identified as such.

Bogard says that “We are thrilled that you have decided to raise the Downing Street Memo with your colleagues in the Senate.”. Who is this “we”? I see the actions described in the memo as an unbroken line of aggression against Iraq. Apparently I’m not alone. Jeremy Scahill touches on this argument on today’s Democracy Now! (transcript). To have a Democrat now point out Bush’s foibles on this means that we have to be willing to put aside a huge bombing campaign and the Iraqi sanctions which killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Complaints coming from proponents of these acts are hard to interpret as a principaled condemnation of Bush. Bush does deserve impeachment and to be imprisoned, but so other US Presidents.

Apple is a problem for the progressive Left.

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Apple computer software is somewhat popular and widely known for being easy to use, easier to use than other equally unethical competition from other organizations including IBM, HP, an uncountable number of smaller software development houses, and Microsoft. When faced with paying the high price Apple computers and Apple software costs, some defend Apple’s ease of use.

But is that really the best argument the Left can offer? Consider this one instead:

Apple harms us when they:

Stump for software patents—Apple’s patent on font rendering, for example, stands in the way of free software hackers and all computer users who want to render their fonts in a way that is aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Distribute proprietary software—MacOS X is a combination of free software (the underlying Darwin software) and proprietary software (Quartz, QuickTime, etc.). This leaves all of Apple’s customers unable to inspect, share, or modify the software they have copies of. Increasingly Apple is leveraging their power here to restrict what their iTunes customers can do with legally obtained audio tracks (visit Boing Boing for many Cory Doctorow stories on this; Doctorow is an avid MacOS user).

So why is this a problem for the progressive Left?

Because many Leftists purchase MacOS X machines and continue to upgrade them whenever Apple tells them they should.

The Left will, quite rightly, be the first to tell you about why you shouldn’t do business with Wal-Mart or Nike. Wal-Mart is losing lawsuit after lawsuit which point out how shabbily Wal-Mart treats their workers (forcing floor workers to punch out early and keep working afterwards, locking employees in the store, managerial sexism, etc.). Most Wal-Mart workers are paid so little they can’t afford the Wal-Mart health care plan. Nike goods are manufactured by underpaid workers in oppressive working conditions (see “The Corporation”, either the movie or the book on which the movie is based, for first-hand accounts and documentary evidence of this pulled from Nike’s trash).

The Left sees how the workers are treated and concludes that it’s not ethically justifiable to do business with these organizations.

But Apple’s software patents adversely affect all computer users; for example, nobody can legally distribute or use software that renders smooth fonts in an obvious way because that method is encumbered by Apple’s patents. Software to implement this idea is in FreeType, but by default it is not compiled when FreeType is used. For more information on how software patents are harmful and why it is important to work to eradicate them, listen to Richard Stallman’s speech or read the transcript of that speech on “The Danger of Software Patents”.

Proprietary software adversely affects the users by restricting what the user is allowed to learn about what their computer is doing with their data. Nobody can legally help their neighbors by sharing copies of Apple’s non-free software, nobody can legally inspect the software to see what it is really doing, nobody can fix the software if it breaks or improve the software to do something that they want done.

Are we supposed to only look narrowly at who is adversely affected here? If Apple’s workers are treated unethically, we can rally against their products but otherwise we must learn to swallow what they’re distributing? I don’t think that is ethically defensible.

But you supported exactly the opposite!

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Today’s DN! (34m04s into the show) features an interview with Howard Zinn, famed historian, civil rights activist, author of the excellent “A People’s History of the United States” and the companion book “Voices of a People’s History of the United States”, also worth reading (and probably more accessible to a casual read). I was given copies of both of them by two thoughtful relatives (thanks N&L), so I know first-hand that they are worth reading.

Late in the interview, you can hear Zinn say (54m03s):

AMY GOODMAN: Were your surprised by the election of President Bush, November 2004?

HOWARD ZINN: A little. A little. That is, I thought that maybe by then, perhaps there would be enough understanding about the deception, the hypocrisy of the US government, just enough to dethrone Bush, but I say only a little surprised, because on the other hand, I knew that John Kerry was not the candidate to represent the feelings of the American people. By then, by the time of the election, at least half of the American people were already against the war. Now they faced an election where 100% of the candidates were for the war. So, they had nobody to vote for. [...]

But Zinn had signed a letter which aimed to discourage people from voting for one such candidate, Ralph Nader, and may have helped to disincentivize people from even discussing his campaign with like-minded people on the Progressive Left.

[...] And so I — with nobody to vote for, with no real alternative, of course, 40% of the voting population did not vote. And people ought to remember this. You know, Bush did not win overwhelmingly. You know, he won by one or two percentage points. And if you consider how many people voted for him against the voting population, you know, he got, you know, maybe 30% of the voting population. But it was a commentary on the pitiful showing of the Democratic Party, its failure to be a true opposition party in this country, and I think maybe a wake-up call to Americans to try to create a new political alternative to a political system that is really a one-party system, and it is quite corrupt.

Who has been saying this for the past three terms, at least? Ralph Nader, former Green party candidate and independent candidate for US President, and virtually every other so-called third party presidential candidate. They’ve been saying it for years, probably decades if one goes back far enough. I’m glad to hear more people recognize the effect of our first-past-the-post election system, debate lockouts, and years of corporate funding of both major parties.

But this would ring more true coming from someone who hadn’t spent the last election pushing people away from one candidate who shares these views.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see that movement developing now? Outside of the two parties?

HOWARD ZINN: I hope so.

AMY GOODMAN: Or within one of the parties?

HOWARD ZINN: Well, there is some movement within the Democratic Party. And I think it will take work within and work without. That is, it will take people in the Democratic Party to demand a change in the Democratic Party. I notice that the Democratic Party in California has just had a convention in which they voted for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq. And this is a good sign, and if Democratic Party groups around the country would demand that the National Democratic Party call for an end to this war and an end to the occupation, that would be a sign that the Democratic Party is changing and moving in the right direction. But it will not do that, I think, unless there are groups outside of the Democratic Party that create a movement that puts pressure on the Democratic Party.

Within the Democratic Party, there is no such movement in this direction that I know of. I only know of the “National Security Democrats” who are, among other things, helping to try and eradicate all anti-war sentiment from the Democratic Party so they can more efficiently pursue their corporate masters’ interests.

Outside the Democratic Party, Nader is one candidate who has consistently been applying pressure specifically aimed at the Democratic Party, pointing out their foibles (and they are numerous and important). The Socialists too have been doing this work, and they get far too little recognition even from sympathetic leftists.

I hope that Zinn can remember talk like this come election time when it will count for something most people can appreciate in their own lives. If voting is most Americans’ most overtly political act, it matters who they vote for or if they don’t vote at all. We should care more about the quality of the choices and we should care why so many Americans don’t vote. If people can be motivated to divorce themselves from the political process by not voting, can they be motivated to give their vote to someone who could use it to help justify political moves to the left?

And I hope Amy Goodman can bring some challenging questions to leftists during the time in between elections so that we’re reminded how self-defeatingly inconsistent (or is that “diverse”?) the Progressive Left is. The cycle of settling for the least worst is self-perpetuating; it always produces choices which are so bad that some will get caught in the trap of seeing the worst without noticing how the trend tends toward what most Americans don’t want. If anyone can appreciate the value of recalling history to avoid repeating it, it’s a historian.

Elizabeth Schulte examines the Democratic Party sitting on the right

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Elizabeth Schulte writes about the Democrats on the right and the progressives who championed the Democratic Party’s cause during the most recent election.

It will happen again in 2007 during the run-up to the 2008 election. The Democrats are starting early, telling anti-war advocates to be silent, but the progressives will join them when the pressure is put on them.

I think the time has come where I’ll have to add the Socialist Worker to my short list of things I read regularly.

Getting mad about the lack of an opposition party…for now.

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Common Dreams is pretty worked up about the recent bankruptcy bill and about the “73 Democrats Who Sold Out Consumers”.

Please don’t forget to chastise Common Dreams when the Democrats are running for office and Common Dreams carries article after article on how we should let the Democrats run without asking them any tough questions or taking them to task for their voting record or campaign funding.

The Democrats are trying to bring in anti-abortion supporters, get the anti-war supporters to either shut up or leave, and somehow they think they’ll win elections? Or is it that it really doesn’t matter if they win elections because they can just wait for voters to become pissed off at Republicans and vote Democrat out of spite?

The real solution: let third parties and independents run, get on the ballot, and debate in real debates with their corporate-funded duopolistic competitors. Also, we need to get a ranked voting system (feel free to haggle over which method is appropriate: instant run-off, some Condorcet method, etc.) so we can get away from “a vote for X is a for for Y” (where X and Y are candidates of the Democrats and Republicans in the same race). The goal is to shift focus from personalities and on to policies.

Tridge trumps Torvalds: film at 10

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Timothy R. Butler, editor-in-chief of “Open for Business” offers his take on businesses running proprietary software starting with how Linus Torvalds blew it when picking a proprietary program (BitKeeper) to manage the source code for his fork of the Linux kernel. RMS, the founder of the free software movement, and virtually everyone else in the free software movement saw this coming years ago when they first learned of Torvalds’ decision. But Torvalds’ hypocrisy has gone unmentioned and it’s important that it be challenged because Torvalds is looked to as a hero of the free software movement.

Background

For those not in the know, in 1992 Torvalds decided to BitKeeper to track the various files that constitute the Linux kernel (roughly, a part of an operating system that manages hardware resources and allows programs to use them harmoniously). BitKeeper offers attractive technical features Torvalds couldn’t get elsewhere. Instead of improving a comparable extant program, or asking the community to improve something for him (he has the celebrity and the following to be able to get some things he wants by asking), his poor example essentially asked fellow kernel hackers to also install and run BitKeeper. Some time later, BitMover (BitKeeper’s copyright holder) distributed a proprietary but zero-cost version of BitKeeper that was limited in its capabilities, but enough to tempt some hackers into buying a BitKeeper license.

BitMover learned that Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell, one of the authors of Samba (a program which lets Microsoft Windows and free software OSes share printers and files), was reverse-engineering BitKeeper’s network protocols to make a drop-in free software replacement for BitKeeper. Larry McVoy (head of BitMover) knew that the Samba team had the skill needed to get this job done because much of the work in Samba had been done the same way by examining how Microsoft Windows systems interacted when authenticating, sharing files, and printing. McVoy decided to not sell Torvalds or anyone else at OSDN any more BitKeeper licenses. OSDN’s current BitMover licenses are now void and McVoy doesn’t even want them running the program any more (although how McVoy will enforce this, I don’t know).

More recently

McVoy claims that Torvalds tried to get Tridgell to stop development and that he and Torvalds think the same way on this issue:

Larry [McVoy] is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement. He’s told me so, and I believe him, because I actually do believe that he has a strong moral back-bone.

What Larry is _not_ fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what _he_ did.

Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: “You can compete with me, but you can’t do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don’t compete by looking at my solution.”

And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: “Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader”. And I can’t really argue against that.

But that’s not what the BitKeeper license says because copyright law doesn’t let them have that power. Also, Torvalds didn’t mention the part of the BitKeeper license that says the licensee isn’t allowed to use it to develop competitive programs. Compatibility and software freedom be damned, if you do something like what BitKeeper does, don’t think it’s okay to allow BitKeeper users to move to something they can inspect, share, and modify!

If the free software movement held Torvalds’ ridiculous opinion, Torvalds’ own desire for popularity would be squelched. A GNU/Linux system is currently the most popular way to run Samba or OpenOffice.org, both programs built on reverse engineering proprietary protocols and file formats. Nobody would care about a GNU/Linux system if it had absolutely no compatibility with what is already in use. As you’ll see if you read the next link, doing one better than UNIX systems was a design decision for GNU which RMS two decades ago. GNU programs are widely known for doing the same jobs UNIX programs do but handling junk data better than they do. Should we look at RMS’ effort and persuade him to stop because it might draw sales away from proprietary UNIX systems?

I see nothing wrong with reverse-engineering the software to achieve freedom. Even the Free Software Foundation says they would run the non-free software to achieve this end, then when the free program was far enough along, they would stop running the non-free program and delete it from their system.

Retaining your software freedom matters.

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As the New York Times recently reported, Brazil is asking for free software. What’s not clear is that Brazil, like Peru, is not asking for open source. The headline and the quote inside the NYT article get it right. Seeing “open source” language is an attempt to horn in on the popularity of software freedom but without actually consistently delivering software freedom or pitching a message based on software freedom. This has happened before. A few years ago, Peruvian Congressman Villanueva was being lobbied by Microsoft about a free software in government bill the congressman was pushing in Congress. The congressman took a the Microsoft rep down a peg when the MS rep wanted to reframe the argument to focusing on “open source”; Villanueva corrected him and insisted on debating the issue around software freedom.

Microsoft wants to challenge “open source” because they know they can’t compete with software freedom. Microsoft is a proprietor and what they sell caters to people focusing on price and features — two values that matter a great deal to the open source movement. The open source movement was built to deny software freedom in exchange for values Open Source Initiative founders believed that their target audience—business—would respond to. So, goodbye software freedom, hello leveraging an unpaid workforce to help write software in exchange for a slightly more amenable license.

Soon, OpenOffice.org v2.0 will come out (beta versions are available now), but there’s a catch: some of its functionality is based on a Java runtime engine which is non-free software (Sun Microsystem’s JRE). This means that some of OO.org’s functionality is written in a programming language (Java) for which there is no free software replacement yet. Therefore, in order to run some parts of OO.org v2.0, users will need to install Sun’s non-free JRE or do without the functionality. Fortunately for most users, the bulk of OO.org’s most popular functions (word processing, drawing, presentation, spreadsheet, and equation editor) are not adversely affected.

But the message is clear: this is what happens when you stop caring about software freedom. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software community, warned us about this. He said that such a program would be “free but shackled” to a non-free program, and thus not useful in the free world where users run nothing but free software.

Frank Schönheit is a Sun employee cited in a Newsforge article on OO.o 2.0. He is quoted as saying that “functionality is what matters”, and he’s not lying. For software proprietors and for the audience the open source movement speaks to, adopting proprietary software in order to get some job done is a perfectly amenable thing to do. For free software advocates, writing a free software replacement is far more attractive.