Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : Arthur J. O'Dwyer
Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 10:09 pm


On Tue, 23 Aug 2005, Randy Howard wrote:
> Arthur J. O'Dwyer wrote
>> (Similarly, some people don't see
>> anything inherently immoral about pot-smoking, or abortion, or murder,
>> or promoting democracy.  Some people do.  It's all relative, the
>> post-modernists would say.  Certainly it's /subjective/.)
>
> There is nothing remotely similar between programming and
> illegal acts.  Unless you can point to a law that makes it
> illegal to work developing commercial software (in general), the
> above is a total crock of excrement.

   If murder was legal, you'd be cool with it?  I'm confused.  Remember, 
nobody is claiming that non-free software is /illegal/. It's wrong.
   The facts that pot-smoking is illegal in parts of the USA, and murder is 
illegal pretty much everywhere, are completely irrelevant to the point I 
was trying to make.  I mean, some people actually believe that murder is 
/wrong/, in the absolute moral sense. Some people actually believe that 
abortion is /wrong/, in the absolute moral sense. Some people actually 
believe that pot-smoking is /wrong/, in the absolute moral sense. And 
Stallman believes that the dissemination and use of non-free software is 
/wrong/, in the absolute moral sense.  Legality has nothing to do with 
it.

>>> [People have a choice, thanks to the free software movement]
>>
>>    Right. Which from the moral standpoint is a good thing: Since free
>> alternatives are available, people must choose between good and evil,
>> rather than simply "following orders" (to invoke Godwin's Law;).
>
> It's not between good and evil.  There is no law, or moral
> precedent for claiming that people charging for their work
> product

   Who's talking about "charging for their work product"?  I was talking 
about Stallman's views in re non-free software.  "Free as in freedom."
Let's not drag anti-capitalism into this. :)

> Why isn't stallman insisting that artists
> don't charge for their paintings or sculpture,

   I actually asked him something along these lines back in May, when he 
spoke at Pitt. He doesn't see anything wrong with restricting the 
consumer's rights when it comes to essentially "entertainment" products 
like music, art, or DVDs. He views software as distinguished by its nature 
as a "tool" for /getting things done/.  IIRC, I asked what he thought 
about non-free screensavers, and he said something like, well, that might 
be okay.
   The obvious counter-argument is that Windows and Mac OS X are basically 
"entertainment" and "tool" all mixed up together, with perhaps a little 
more of the former in many cases (Clippy, anyone?).

> or doctors
> perform brain surgery for no charge?

   (Once we strip out the "no charge" strawman, there's nothing left of 
this example, so I can't think of anything to say.)

[and from elsewhere in Randy's post...]
> Why would any rational person accept such a ludicrous position?
> Are copyrighted books morally wrong?

   According to Stallman, no, because they're not "tools."  According to 
me, maybe sorta.  I've been reading Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" in the 
past couple of weeks, and I'm extremely annoyed by my inability to fix the 
dozens of typographical errors, illiteracies (e.g., "cane breaks"), and 
generally poor-quality typography of the paperback edition.  Maybe I'll 
send him an e-mail. :)

>  Why is Ford allowed to
> sell cars, without Stallman insisting that they give them away?

   Because raw materials, unlike ones and zeros, cost money.  (Randy: "So 
does college."  Stallman, presumably: "Bill Gates was a dropout.")

>  What kind of deranged
> cult-leader does it take to come up with the theory that you
> should spend many $$$$$$ on a college education to learn how to
> write software, then do it for free for the rest of their life
> while bussing tables at McDonald's?  Furrfu.

   Oh, you can still get paid.  You can even sell your software, if you can 
find anyone willing to pay for it.  And of course you can sell tech 
support (if you can find anyone willing to pay for it), and you can sell 
T-shirts with penguins on them, and you can even get hired by the 
government to write code for Mars rovers on the taxpayer's dime, and you 
can still get hired to be the company's IT guy, or to write their 
proprietary salary database. You can even get hired by rich private 
citizens to hack their Linux shells just the way they want them. It's
just that a lot more people get to benefit from your labor, and you 
get to benefit from a lot of other programmers' labor.
   Yes, Stallman is talking about a decrease in the number of working 
programmers worldwide. But I don't see that as much of an issue, any more 
than Henry Ford's idea that a bunch of stablehands should get laid off. 
I don't even think the transition, if it ever came, would be /that/ 
dramatic --- a lot of programmers would keep doing what they've been 
doing, as I indicated in the paragraph above.

> The fact is Stallman likes the idea of free software, and I do
> too.  The problem is he wants to remake the entire software
> space into his own view of how it should be.

   Yeah.  On the one hand, that's a turnoff, I agree.  On the other hand, 
you could think of it as just an aggressive standardization push.  I 
forget your position in the recent OpenOffice thread, but isn't it kind of 
annoying that OpenOffice can't get the Microsoft Word format just right? 
In Stallman's world, they could! :)


> Okay, you explain, and please be specific, exactly how it using
> closed-source software is wrong.  It must be so in all cases,
> and you must support it.  When you have made a properly
> formulated absolute position, I will be happy to blow holes in
> it for you.

http://www.gnu.org/
   And from there, I also found a good position from Jimmy Wales on
why Wikipedia is free-as-in-free-software.
http://blog.jimmywales.com/index.php/archives/2004/10/21/free-knowledge-requires-free-software-and-free-file-formats/


>> Let him write his own program, if he's too impatient or
>> disconnected to get someone else to write it!
>
> Once again, the fallacy that all users are programmers.  *sigh*

No, just the fallacy that all computer users know how to use computers. ;)
Less disingenuously, the fallacy that all computer users who want a 
problem solved badly enough will solve it themselves, or else pay someone 
else to solve it.
   ("But wait!" you say. "If they paid someone to do it, wouldn't they 
naturally distribute the resulting program as non-GPL, so as to make a lot 
of money off the solution?" Yes, says Stallman, if they were immoral 
bastards.  Not if they were committed to Doing Right even at an 
opportunity cost to themselves.)


>> The tech-support market for
>> free software is much more chaotic and free-market-capitalistic, and in
>> practice ends up being pretty bad, at the moment.
>
> Horrible, if it is even there at all.  It is not ready for
> prime-time, but usually quite adequate if you are already quite
> a capable techie yourself.

   And, as you point out, as a general rule only capable techies use free 
software. There are at least three chicken-and-egg problems here. :)

[...]
>>> [Hypothetical: MS lifts non-GPL open code into their own program.]
>>
>>    More places than what?  Microsoft's code isn't "massively
>> peer-reviewed."
>
> I was referring to the 'lifted' libraries and what not.

   Once they've been isolated inside a massive closed-source project, they 
lose that benefit. How does the end user/cryptanalyst/hacker/tech support 
guy know that some unknown Microsoft engineer hasn't accidentally (or not) 
/broken/ the copy of the library used by the closed-source program?
   (DLLs help, in theory. In practice, Microsoft would ship their own 
[closed-source] version of the GPL'd DLL, just in case the user didn't 
already have a copy.)


>> Giving code to Microsoft for free would be increasing the
>> amount of /non/-peer-reviewed code in the world, not vice versa. (And
>> besides, so what? This isn't about engineering practices, it's about
>> morality.)
>
> And I have yet to hear a single convincing argument that it is
> immoral to work for a living in the field of which you are most
> competent.  Feel free to provide one at your convenience.

   Kidnapping for ransom.

-Arthur

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