On October 6, 2011, one day after Steve Jobs died, Richard Stallman (rms) posted his reaction to Jobs’ death:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.Richard Stallman, October 6, 2011

My thoughts

I find Stallman’s reaction to be very well written: clear, respectful, concise, but most importantly it has its priorities straight:

• Nobody deserves to have to die. No matter what people do, the dead cannot learn and become better people. Stallman’s words brought to my mind the death penalty, not because it applies here (Jobs died as a result of his pancreatic cancer) but because America has many states which do kill “people guilty of bigger evils than theirs” and Stallman’s phrasing somehow reminded me of recent state-sponsored murders (a topic which strikes me as far more important than Jobs’ death).
• Everyone deserves software freedom. Whether Apple was building proprietary derivatives from FLOSS, supporting patent pools that threaten FLOSS users (Apple contributes patents to MPEG-LA which spreads FUD about Theora and VP8, Apple wants to patent spyware), trying to dissuade people from controlling their own computers (see also FUD), or setting up services aimed at locking users in (iTunes service has many titles with DRM): Jobs’ life work was proprietary computing. A less effective proprietor means a chance that more users will enjoy software freedom.

I feel compelled to consider death as Peter Tosh said: (but Tosh was talking about matters far more important than consumer electronics)

Let the dead bury the dead now
And who is to be fed, be fed
I ain’t got no time to waste on you, no, no
I am a livin’ man, I’ve got work to do, right nowPeter Tosh, “Burial”

I think it’s unfortunate Jobs died, but the US kills a lot of people who lived lives filled with struggle. We don’t know their names, we are encouraged by corporate media to think of them as collateral damage and not-quite-people. Jobs’ life was too short but I think it’s safe to assume he wanted for nothing and got as much treatment for his cancer as anyone can.

Reactions to rms’ post

Of all the disagreements with rms’ post I’ve read, none were written well. The best of the lot is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ criticism, to which this post is mostly a response.

Regarding Vaughan-Nichols’ grandmother’s aphorism If you don’t have anything good to say, then don’t say anything at all.: Apparently she was a fan of censorship (though her rule seems to apply only selectively as Vaughan-Nichols apparently feels quite free to violate the rule by criticizing rms). I am not a fan of censorship. One of the followups to Vaughan-Nichols’ article mentions Voltaire’s quote which is far better:

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

It’s more important to put Jobs’ life work in its proper place; Stallman did that far better and more concisely than anyone else I’ve seen.

Vaughan-Nichols says I’m glad to say that the vast majority of open-source developers don’t agree with Stallman’s myopic views: Stallman was never and is not now an open-source developer. His movement is the free software movement which is older, philosophically different, and at heart a social movement. Stallman talks about this distinction at every talk he gives as well as writing about it in multiple essays. Vaughan-Nichols isn’t alone in trying to co-opt Stallman into the open source movement but no matter how many people do it, it’s still wrong.

Vaughan-Nichols favorably compares Jobs to Walt Disney and Henry Ford: Disney is widely known for proprietary derivatives of works in the public domain. The Disney corporation is known for following suit by backing copyright extension efforts to disallow the public from doing to Disney’s movies what Disney did with the Brothers Grimm stories. Apple is currently switching compilers from GCC (licensed under the GNU GPL) to LLVM (licensed under a permissive FLOSS license). If Bradley Kuhn of “Free as in Freedom” is correct—Apple will be making their own proprietary LLVM derivative when that compiler gets to a point where it’s more useful. Apple’s entire compiler switch to LLVM is part of a larger strategy to get away from GPL’d programs. This strategy probably has roots in Apple’s GPL hatred after NeXT got caught committing copyright infringement illicitly distributing their GCC derivative years ago. Apple would later make copyright infringement against free software a habit with their app store (1, 2).

I don’t recall what Jobs did that would make him comparable to Henry Ford. The article Vaughan-Nichols links to compares Jobs and Disney. One of those points is “Disney knew about land grabs” well so did Ford—Fordlândia—Ford’s billion-dollar Brazilian rubber plantation where he could more efficiently exploit the natives through what Greg Grandin described as a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance. Intense surveillance is one thing that would fit Apple as proprietary software gives any proprietor an opportunity to closely track what their users do. But Ford was a nastier man than people commonly credit: he mistreated his workers and he sympathized with nazis, nazi sympathizing is something I don’t associate with Jobs. As for Ford’s chief invention, the assembly line, I can’t imagine how Jobs’ computers or his animation company are an apt comparison. The assembly-line was far more culture-changing than anything Jobs’ companies ever made.

Lots of people are poor at critical thought when they’re feeling sad. It should be an adults responsibility to see things as they really are and keep perspective, not maintain an atmosphere where people are too afraid to speak freely (like how Apple treats app store users by keeping so many things out of that store). The limits Apple and proprietary software impose will adversely affect people far longer than any malaise brought on by Jobs’ death. As people get some more time to let this pass they’ll be more willing to part with their indignation. In so doing perhaps they’ll re-read Stallman’s words and come to see how reasonable, well-worded, and appropriately respectful Stallman’s assessment was while simultaneously keeping his eye on the prize: all users deserve software freedom.

Related Links

• Labor issues at Apple and Apple’s suppliers
  • Apple’s Rotten Core mistreated workers from Apple’s own employees to the workers of upstream suppliers with “aggressive anti-union strategy”.
  • Blood on the Trackpads discusses Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” wherein Daisey poses as an investor, travels to the “Special Economic Zone” of Shenzhen, China, and gains access to Foxconn workers who are eager to share their stories. One story was about an “employee [who] mangled his hand in a factory accident and was fired instead of compensated” and another where “[s]everal workers speak of an employee who died after working a 32-hour shift”. Sadly for human rights sake, not everything Daisey said was an exaggeration. It is telling that many Westerners are so concerned with Daisey’s exaggerations than with the suffering of Chinese laborers.
  • Three Strikes Against Apple about Apple’s response circa the time of the multiple Foxconn suicides of 2011.

In May 2010 Apple distributed copies of a computer version of the classic board game Go through its App Store. This GNU Go variant is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GNU GPL) which does not allow additional restrictions to be added to the license. Apple’s App Store imposes additional restrictions on the applications distributed through the App Store, restrictions which are incompatible with the GNU GPL. Hence the incompatibility Apple introduced when it drafted the rules for its App Store.

Apple reviews every program it distributes through its App Store so Apple knowingly distributed this Go program in violation of the GNU GPL. This constitutes copyright infringement.

Apple has all the permission they need to distribute GPLed software through their App Store. The GPL ensures this; Apple could even distribute GPLed programs commercially charging users for downloading copies of GPLed programs.

The Free Software Foundation, GNU Go’s copyright holder, pointed this out to Apple in their usual way aiming for compliance not litigation:

In most ways, this is a typical enforcement action for the FSF: we want to resolve this situation as amicably as possible. We have not sued Apple, nor have we sent them any legal demand that they remove the programs from the App Store. The upstream developers for this port are also violating the GPL, and we are discussing this with them too. We are raising the issue with Apple as well since Apple is the one that distributes this software to the public; legally, both parties have the responsibility to comply with the GPL.

The only thing we’re doing differently is making this announcement. Apple has a proven track record of blocking or disappearing programs from the App Store without explanation. So we want to provide everyone with these details about the case before that happens, and prevent any wild speculation.

Free Software Foundation’s License Compliance Engineer Brett Smith

Instead of changing the App Store rules to get themselves into compliance with the GPL, Apple decided to stop distributing GNU Go. This choice deprived Apple’s users of GNU Go.

The latest chapter: VLC

Now Apple is at it again: this time with VideoLAN Client (VLC)—a versatile media player one can use to watch all sorts of movies. VLC is quite famous in free software because it is so easy to use and because it plays so many different media formats.

Someone made a version of VLC for Apple’s iOS (the operating system Apple ships on the Apple iPad). The programmers submitted their variant of VLC to Apple’s App Store and Apple chose to distribute the program. Apple never changed the conditions which prohibit them from distributing GPL-covered programs, so they are again infringing the copyright of a free software developer.

This time one of the VLC copyright holders, Rémi Denis-Courmont who is also one of VLC’s primary developers, complained to Apple:

VLC media player is free software licensed solely under the terms of the… GNU General Public License (a.k.a. GPL). Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices.Rémi Denis-Courmont

and the FSF concurs:

The GPL gives Apple permission to distribute this software through the App Store. All they would have to do is follow the license’s conditions to help keep the software free. Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store, and they’d rather kick out GPLed software than change their own rules. Their obstinance prevents you from having this great software on Apple devices—not the GPL or the people enforcing it.

Apple continues to use more DRM in their products: they just announced that a Mac App Store will be coming soon to their laptops and desktops, and you can bet it will have the same draconian restrictions as today’s App Store. Meanwhile, people enforcing the GPL like Rémi are fighting against DRM, so that everyone can be in full control of their own computers. We’re thankful to him for taking a stand. If you want to show your support, too, it’s easy: just steer clear of Apple’s DRM-infested App Store.

Free Software Foundation’s License Compliance Engineer Brett Smith

Anyone failing to comply with programmers who license their work to freely share and modify comes off looking very bad because they step on the efforts of people who are trying to treat people nicely. Therefore Apple comes off looking very bad every time they deny their users free software for non-compliance with copyright.

Update (2010-11-23): Brett Smith posted FSF analysis of Apple’s terms and conditions to the VLC-devel mailing list (local copy). Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn also go into this issue on their show “Free as in Freedom” (Ogg Vorbis recording, local copy). As I pointed out elsewhere, Apple’s changed terms and conditions still don’t allow them to distribute GPL’d works; Apple is still disallowing themselves from distributing GPL’d works.

Update (2011-01-07): Rémi Denis-Courmont writes to Planet VideoLAN:

At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. I am not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.

Q: I bought the movie Up on DVD, it had a digital download. I put it on my iPad. I hooked up my VGA adapter and tried to play it… but I couldn’t because of HDCP. Can you tell me how you’re helping with this?

A: We didn’t invent this stuff…

Q: But you did deploy it…

A: Well the content creators are trying to protect this stuff, and they’re grabbing at straws. Sometimes they grab the right ones, and sometimes they don’t. If we want access to this stuff, we have to play by some of their rules. I feel your pain.

So for proprietors it’s okay to deflect blame for restricting users from fully controlling their computers and simultaneously profit in restricting the users. Apple is big when it suits them (I’m sure they want consumers to believe they are the pre-eminent vehicle for delivering movies and music) and small and helpless against the publishers when it suits them (“We didn’t invent this stuff….”). This attitude rewards those who restrict and does nothing to help users who want to watch their legally obtained copies of movies as they see fit (dare one want to see a movie on a non-approved screen!).

This attitude is bad in itself, but not life threatening. As it applies to watching movies, this DRM is more annoying than anything else because there are plenty of free software movie players (like VLC) that will happily show you a movie on any device you like ignoring DRM that would otherwise get in your way; you can simply choose those programs instead of the proprietary stuff and go about enjoying a little bit more control over your life.

But what if DRM is in a device you need to live, like a heart pacemaker/defibrillator to monitor and regulate your heartbeats? Nowadays these devices are digital and run on software—software you aren’t privy to inspect, change, or share. Some of them are even set up so the software they run on can be altered remotely. Remote administration is sold on convenience, like proprietary traps usually are: A trained physician puts you within radio distance of a device that alters the pacemaker/defibrillator’s settings entirely wirelessly—no surgery or injection after the initial installation!

Remote control is a convenience you might be willing to accept for your garage and car door. But regulating a critical function in your body? This doesn’t sound so good when you consider the ramifications for a device you depend on in order to live. Brad Kuhn and Karen Sandler, co-hosts of the Software Freedom Law Show, recently discussed this problem. Sandler looked into these devices because she has a enlarged heart. The size of her heart increases her risk of sudden death. She has a pacemaker/defibrillator implanted inside her (it mostly monitors her heart but it could shock her heart to keep her alive). Sandler did research on these devices and learned some of the scary facts about them. She said that not only is patient information is carried in some of these devices which can be retrieved remotely without the user’s consent or knowledge, but she also learned that a similar device’s operation was altered without using the original manufacturer’s hardware. Knowing the risks of remote administration, she chose an older model which requires close contact with the device to be adjusted or interrogated. But most patients are not so well-versed in the consequences of choosing a modern medical implant; they’ll pick one which can be adjusted from a distance using something available to everyone (such as software defined radio, like GNU Radio).

What if manufacturers use DRM to restrict who can administer the implanted device? Why should anyone have to surrender control over their body in this way?

We need software freedom for medical devices. There are compelling ethical reasons we need software freedom for all published software (well-covered ground by the free software movement) but also because our lives could be at stake. Whether you choose to learn, alter, or share this software should be up to you as well.

Update 2010-07-21: SFLC publishes their report on “Safety Benefits of Free and Open Source Software in Critical Technology“. More on this report can be found on their site.

In short, the pledge applies precariously to developers who work in a vacuum: those who write original software in their spare time, receive no payment for it, and do not distribute it to anyone under the GNU GPL. It’s worse than useless, as this empty promise can create a false sense of security. Don’t be confused by the illusion of a truce; developers are no safer from Microsoft patents now than they were before. Instead, Microsoft has used this patent pledge to indicate that, in their view, the only good Free Software developer is an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.

Why did Novell get involved with Microsoft and stand behind this? Is Novell simply so cash-poor that deals with Microsoft look good?

Read Kuhn’s complete essay here:

November 9, 2006
Bradley M. Kuhn’s Letter to the FOSS Development Community Regarding Microsoft’s Patent Promise

Last Thursday, Novell and Microsoft announced a new collaborative effort involving both licensing and technology. The Software Freedom Law Center has been following the situation, and as its CTO, I’ve held a particular interest in how it will impact Free Software developers. One result of the agreement, Microsoft’s patent pledge to developers, has received significant interest from the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development community.

A careful examination of Microsoft’s Patent Pledge for Non-Compensated Developers reveals that it has little value. The patent covenant only applies to software that you develop at home and keep for yourself; the promises don’t extend to others when you distribute. You cannot pass the rights to your downstream recipients, even to the maintainers of larger projects on which your contribution is built.

Further, to qualify for the pledge, a developer must remain unpaid for her work. Experience has shown that many FOSS developers eventually expand their work into for-profit consulting. Others are hired by companies that allow or encourage Free Software development on company time. In either situation, Microsoft’s patent pledge is voided for that developer.

Even if the patent pledge were to have some use aside from these problems, our community simply could not rely on it, since Microsoft has explicitly reserved the right to change its terms at any time in the future. A developer relying on the pledge could wake up any day to find it revoked. She’d have to cease development on her non-commercial and (mostly) non-distributable modifications that were previously subject to the covenant.

In short, the pledge applies precariously to developers who work in a vacuum: those who write original software in their spare time, receive no payment for it, and do not distribute it to anyone under the GNU GPL. It’s worse than useless, as this empty promise can create a false sense of security. Don’t be confused by the illusion of a truce; developers are no safer from Microsoft patents now than they were before. Instead, Microsoft has used this patent pledge to indicate that, in their view, the only good Free Software developer is an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.

by Bradley M. Kuhn, Chief Technology Officer, Software Freedom Law Center

Bradley M. Kuhn has served as CTO of SFLC since its inception. He previously served as the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and has contributed to many Free Software development projects.

Copyright © 2006 Bradley M. Kuhn
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

I don’t think so.

According to Jack Valenti, former spokesman for the MPA, in a talk he gave on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign a few years ago at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Movie Festival, one should not be able to make their own backups. Consumers should buy another copy of the media because Hollywood studios (his former clients) invested so much money in making those movies. Nothing was said about the investment consumers spend in buying copies of the movies and the consumer’s desire to not see that investment lost to sticky-fingered kids mishandling costly DVD collections. For Valenti, copying and illicit distribution is framed as “piracy” and “theft”; Valenti was clear to position copyright infringement to be exactly like shoplifting. He didn’t once call it by the name the courts use: copyright infringement. Valenti thought it right and proper for Congress to extend the term of copyright again during Pres. Clinton’s term, thus denying some works entry into the public domain through expiring copyright (most notably, one of Valenti’s former clients’ earliest movies). The MPA strongly backs increasingly punitive laws which punish copyright infringement more harshly than other illegal acts like rape.

The FSF doesn’t place any of these restrictions on my use of their copyrighted programs. The FSF licenses are written to allow sharing and the FSF never stands in my way of making a backup copy for my personal use. The FSF’s speakers I’ve heard (including Prof. Moglen, RMS, and Brad Kuhn) are against copyright term extensions. They frame copyright infringement as copyright infringement, speaking out against conflations of real piracy and theft. I don’t recall anyone from the FSF advocating for more punitive measures to be taken against copyright infringers, but I do recall reading about the FSF working with GPL infringers to amicably resolve the infringement so that nobody pays a fine, goes to trial or prison, or is necessarily publicly embarrassed about their infringement. Even for works that express a political point of view or convey artisic merit, the FSF isn’t out to nail the public to the wall as an example in order to scare us into compliance. Instead, the FSF asks us to examine the merit of the laws, consider what copyright law was meant to achieve in the first place, and to consider that there can be bad laws which don’t deserve our respect because they stand in the way of building community or transforming a dog-eat-dog society into a place we’d rather live.

I don’t think the FSF and MPA treat us the same way despite working under the same copyright regime. I also don’t think these two organizations have the same influence over how that copyright regime works in the US or abroad. I think the FSF shows us by example that we can choose not to become harsh like the big book, movie, and music publishers are. By the way, for all of their continued rants against what they call “piracy”, one wonders just how ineffective their MPA’s measures are since they apparently can’t contain the “problem”. One also wonders if stopping copyright infringement is the MPA’s goal in the first place.

Looking at a Slashdot summary of the BusinessWeek article and the BW article:

• Contrary to what the Slashdot poster maintains, there is no hold-up in getting GPLv3 out. GPLv3 is on schedule. The documents that lead up to the public releases of the draft GPLv3s specify when (L)GPLv3 work will be released (all documents concerning GPLv3 work can be found online).
• The GPL is properly credited as a free software license. It was written by RMS (chiefly), Eben Moglen, and others at the Free Software Foundation. This is the first version of the GPL that anyone from the open source movement has had any say in because prior versions of the GPL were released before there was an open source movement. The Open Source Initiative started the open source movement in 1997, years after the first two GPLs came out. The Open Source Initiative placed the GPLv2 on a list of approved licenses. Placing a license on a list of approved licenses hardly compares with writing the license and starting a social movement which uses the GPL as a constitution of sorts. If any organization is to be credited as “becom[ing] even more irrelevant”, as BW maintains, it’s the Open Source Initiative, not the Free Software Foundation. So much for the idea that we’re dealing with a meritocracy as so many open source advocates like to say.

• Torvalds has shown repeatedly that he doesn’t care about software freedom either for himself or others (and the BW article touches on this). Better to take the counsel of Eben Moglen who has a profoundly deep understanding of what’s going on with GPLv3 and software freedom in general. The BW article addresses Moglen’s work, but still gives Torvalds’ views more significance than they deserve. Torvalds’ maintenance of a popular fork of the Linux kernel should not be conflated with expertise in matters of ethics, social movement building, or license writing. Torvalds deserves no credit for writing “an open-source operating system”. He deserves credit for writing the initial versions of the Linux kernel. Linux is and was a kernel, a part of a complete OS that allows other programs to harmoniously share hardware resources.

  Contrary to what BusinessWeek maintains, the Linux kernel is under GPLv2 because Torvalds didn’t do the work to collect copyright assignments. Torvalds made that choice early on, the consequences of which Linux kernel users are now seeing. So the Linux kernel will remain GPLv2 not because Torvalds objects to GPLv3 but chiefly because he won’t do the relicensing work necessary to make Linux GPLv3. Perhaps someone else will do this relicensing work and create a GPLv3-covered Linux kernel; only then will Torvalds’ (often wrong) criticisms of GPLv3 come to bear. If he maintains his objections when the final GPLv3 is published, others can remove Torvalds’ code and replace it with new code. In other words, Torvalds can be replaced. BusinessWeek places Torvalds on an unjustifiably high pedestal in their article.

• Contary to discussions on Slashdot and descriptions in the BW article, Richard M. Stallman wants all published software to be free and he has no problem with making a profit publishing free software commercially or selling services tied to free software. RMS did this to support himself financially. The free software movement isn’t anti-business, in fact a license can’t be considered free if it prohibits commercial users from engaging in the freedoms of free software (one of the reasons some versions of PGP are semi-free software is that PGP only allows educational users to change the program and distribute changed versions for non-profit purposes). According to Brad Kuhn, former Executive Director at the FSF now a techie at the Software Freedom Law Center, some consultants charge hundreds of dollars an hour for GCC modifications and they have a long waiting list.

The Slashdot poster writes:

[...] the ever-more-likely possibility that the newest version of the GPL just isn’t relevant.

With TiVOization going on GPLv3 is more relevant than ever. Proprietors would like the free software community to stick with GPLv2 now that they have the means to exploit some holes in GPLv2 enforcement and GPLv2 wording. But that really gets to the heart of what proprietors fear: they see a large and growing volume of GPL-covered software they’d like to take advantage of, but they realize that if the GPLv3 prohibits them from keeping the user locked up through DRM, proprietors will have to build a system from new BSD and MIT X11-licensed software, or write their own code instead. Judging by the work embedding the Linux kernel in various devices, that’s not what these manufacturers apparently want. Eben Moglen covered this extensively in his talk at the 2006 Free Software Foundation member meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BusinessWeek has much to learn about all of the players involved here: the free software movement, the open source movement, RMS, and Linus Torvalds.

“The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support. Instead, there are communities of gentle, altruistic individuals working together voluntarily for the good of mankind. Unsullied by the sordid world of commerce, the code that they produce is somehow purer and more ethical than proprietary software.”

Actually, the thinly veiled reference to Microsoft is wrong. Microsoft has long distributed software which is licensed by OSI-approved licenses. Microsoft’s Services for Unix package has long included GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection which is licensed under the GNU GPL, a free software license which is also approved of by the OSI.

Commerce is very much a part of this software, many FLOSS programs are developed for business and/or distributed for a fee. In fact, the “open source” term was coined in part because the OSI founders wanted a term that would not convey the idea that the software must only be distributed gratis (despite that the GNU Project was using the word “free” to convey freedoms users have with the software, not a price one must pay to get a copy of the software). The ethics of the situation are not considered by the open source movement; that movement does not say that some licenses respect your freedom to share and modify and other licenses trample those freedoms and are wrong. The open source movement’s philosophy centers on a practical developmental methodology and is chiefly aimed at a business audience. That anyone would conflate ethics as a part of the open source movement’s message is a tip that Stephen J Marshall doesn’t clearly understand the differences between the philosophies he’s talking about. We see this more clearly when Marshall argues that:

This utopian vision of technology is championed by high-profile pressure groups such as the Free Software Foundation [...]

The FSF does not argue anything in terms of “OSS” or “Open Source Software”. They explicitly disclaim such points in their essay “Why Free Software is better than Open Source“:

“We are not against the Open Source movement, but we don’t want to be lumped in with them. We acknowledge that they have contributed to our community, but we created this community, and we want people to know this. We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy, not with theirs. We want to be heard, not obscured behind a group with different views. To prevent people from thinking we are part of them, we take pains to avoid using the word “open” to describe free software, or its contrary, “closed”, in talking about non-free software.“

To put a fine point on this, consider a hypothetical situation Richard Stallman laid out in a recent interview with the newly renamed GNU/Linux Show where the user is faced with a proprietary program that works well and a free software program that is unreliable (about 44 minutes and 54 seconds into the program). The open source philosophy advocates for high-quality technical achievement, and thus is likely to endorse the former program despite its license having no chance of being OSI-approved. Free software advocates, on the other hand, would endorse the latter program pointing out that the technical quality of a program can be improved, while the proprietary program’s license is probably very hard to change. No free software advocate will complain about having a reliable program. But they will complain and work to reimplement non-free software. Free software advocates won’t push aside their freedom to share and modify software for immediate practical gains.

Marshall writes:

“Despite the overt counterculture and anti-globalization agendas displayed by certain sections of the open source movement, many governments are now also turning towards OSS in their quest for an information society for every citizen.”

Don’t confuse the philosophy of the movement with some of its participants. Stallman holds political views which don’t express the opinion of the GNU Project or the FSF. Neither the GNU Project nor the FSF have opinions on corporate globalization except where this intersects with computer software, as Stallman pointed out in a 2003 interview where he explains that: (starting at 3 minutes 17 seconds)

“Free software shows how globalization can be a good thing. The free software movement has been global since the Eighties when we had developers and users on four continents, and now it’s six continents I believe. Free software doesn’t tend to concentrate wealth, it provides ways for some people to make a living, so we can see the contrast between globalization of power versus globalization of voluntary cooperation.“

Both the free and open source software movements are pro-business; neither has a problem with the software they endorse being used for business purposes. The FSF tells people to distribute free software for a fee and get as much money as one can doing so, and to alter free software for a fee. Some people take this message to heart: Brad Kuhn, the FSF’s former executive director (now Chief Technology Officer of the Software Freedom Law Center) has gone on record talking about the high hourly fees commercial GCC hackers charge and the long waiting lists these firms have.

On the categorized complaints Marshall raises, his complaint about so-called “IP” (intellectual property) is that many employees of various organizations are under contract such that “[a]ny software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer” and therefore much of the software they wrote and distributed is not actually theirs to license, but instead their employers’. No specific examples are presented to support this claim and Marshall does not approach this topic from the perspective of recommending to workers that they closely examine their employment contracts so that they will not fall into the trap of giving everything they do to their employer, even if what they’re working on is completely unconnected to their job. Thus this claim comes off as unhelpful as well as unsupported. Marshall’s conclusion that “[a]nyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer’s IP.” takes the term “intellectual property” at face value without ever critiquing it (which is, ironically, something that members of both the free and open source software movements are likely to do). One of the reasons the term “intellectual property” is so problematic is because it is prejudicial. We are left to believe that copyright, trademark, patent, and other disparate laws ought to be thought of as property; not that framing these issues as property is unnatural and merely one choice of many. Spirited debate of this issue is so much a part of the free and open source movements, it is appalling that any examination of how the free software community works would leave out this debate.

“Conceptual integrity” is Marshall’s call for adhering to “good design and tight specifications to minimize bugs” and that community development doesn’t achieve this. This is a developmental methodology and does not address the more important issue of software freedom and how people ought to treat one another, but one can see significant counterexamples. The GNU Project, started in 1984, is one such community-based project that has come up with a lot of useful software that many individuals and organizations rely on (directly by running the programs or indirectly by hiring the services of an Internet service provider which directly runs the programs). The Mozilla programs offer another set of counterexamples, as more people discover how well Firefox and Thunderbird work. It seems like a number of developers choose the Bugzilla bug-tracking software to use in their own projects. I think Marshall reveals the most in his call for “professionalism” where he essentially chastises “bedroom programmers” for being insufficiently professional. I wonder how the judgement is being made without actually hiring someone to do work under contract, as a professional would.

Innovation is the last of Marshall’s bulletted points and here he claims that “[t]he open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.”. Marshall’s example here, the GNU/Linux operating system, inaccurately referred to as “Linux“, fails to acknowledge certain other factors involved here:

• “Killer apps” are hard to come up with which explains why non-free software developers don’t often come up with them either.
• Some “killer apps” were free software first but go unacknowledged as such. Internet email that we use today (as opposed to email systems used chiefly on BBSes and email systems that require use of a certain client program) and the World Wide Web were free software and are still two big reasons that people want to get on the Internet. Beagle predates Apple’s Spotlight desktop search program, but since most reviewers are biased in favor of reviewing non-free software, they have no idea Beagle exists. Beagle is, for all its faults, more trustworthy than Spotlight or the Google desktop search software for Microsoft Windows because Beagle can be free software and the others are not. Thus, if you are concerned about what Beagle does—perhaps you suspect that your index data or your search queries are being distributed without your approval—you can inspect Beagle and change it to meet your needs, or you can hire someone to do this work for you. These are simply not options for non-free programs because the only people who have the source code and the legal permission to share and modify the improved software are the organizations you shouldn’t trust by default in the first place.
• Innovation is commonly overvalued, even to the point of giving up freedom in exchange for innovation. I don’t believe that most people need programs that are radically new. I believe that most people use a computer for just a few things and they need those programs to work well. I don’t need an innovative email client, I need one that is easy to set up and use for my most frequently used functions. I use a web browser to see content published by someone else. Most of what I would like to see are ways of doing the right thing by default, not giving me a lot of options to do things I’ll rarely want to do: automatically configuring a reasonable setup so that I don’t have to spend time configuring things myself, updates that never leave my computer in an unusable state, an easy way to do recommended things like making periodic backups, encrypting email, storing only encrypted data on my media, and seeing what services are available to me on my network. And I want to do all of this without giving up my software freedom. I believe that these are non-trivial requests which require a great deal of coordination, but I doubt users will widely refer to them as something akin to “killer applications”.

The natural questions from reading “In theory, an OSS license doesn’t actually prevent anyone from selling the software but in practice no one will buy it if the source code is freely available, unless the seller is also providing some kind of added value.” goes unasked: why is it our job to support bad business models? Why are business concerns so prominent? Why can’t they switch to a consulting model and try to get work? Also, one notices how many failed businesses distribute proprietary software at no fee, allowing people to use the program, but disallowing users from understanding or changing what the program does. But it’s clear in Marshall’s essay that tending to user’s individual needs is not considered “innovative” and probably won’t be until it becomes the mainstay of large multinational corporations that get a lot of press attention (like Microsoft). IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and others doing this apparently aren’t interesting. Exclusivity is not needed when the business is based on talented and attentive consulting, in fact one should be glad that this is not exclusive to anyone or any organization in case one consultant doesn’t work out.

But what’s more important is the effect on society, not framing every question in terms of how it will affect business. As RMS explains in the aforementioned GNU/Linux Show interview: (about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the show)

“Businesses should have free software just as every computer user should have free software. But we [at the FSF] don’t focus our concerns on business. And that’s a matter of a basic philosophical decision: we don’t want to make business the measure of all things. The world is plagued today by a philosophy which is called businessism. Just as humanism meant measuring things in human terms, businessism measures everything in business terms. I’m not a businessist. When I think about how to promote free software, I don’t think “above all: business”, I think “above all: schools”. Schools must switch to free software because they should not be teaching their students to be addicts to proprietary software; to develop a dependency that will be hard for them to get out of.“