Re: [ossig] ESR on BSD and GPL

[Ditesh <ditesh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2005-06-27 at 18:50 +0800, Dinesh Nair wrote:
> In its first one he visits to Brazil, Eric Raymond defended the development 
> model open source and polemizou: "we do not need truth of the GPL. This is 
> established in the belief of that open software is fragile and necessary to 
> be protected. With it, we continue wounding we ourselves, in cutting of the 
> economic benefits of license BSD ".

Ah, so Mr Raymond is back to enjoying the many pleasures of that lovely
weed.

Reading the article, its clear he /still/ doesn't get it.

He's attacking the fundamental tenets of the FSF, in that free software
is a moral goodness, that sharing is a moral goodness and that removing
the ability to share with your neighbour is a position that must be
fought against.

Why does Mr. Raymond insist on downplaying the value of the moral issue?
If it is because it doesn't mean jack shit to business folk, then he has
got to remember his roots - FOSS has never been about bringing value to
business folks, it has always been about building value for everybody
and the framework of the FSF is exactly that - bringing value to
everybody by recognizing the moral highground of the willingness to
share.

"We must decide if we want ideological profits or to have success? I
prefer the last one!" - Here you have Mr. Raymond playing mindgames with
you. Notice how he phrased it as a win-lose situation? Why does it have
to be that way? Stallman has never phrased it that way (on the contrary,
at last year's presentation in KL, he acceded to the fact that
competitive advantage is a fair reason to close source a product, but
only for a year or so) so it's not fair that Mr. Raymond paint the
scenario as such. The success of the Linux operating system and of the
GNU utils, the incredible popularity of the GPL (look at the top
downloads at sf.net and note how many of them are GPL or LGPL), the fact
that a majority of FOSS applications are licensed under the GPL paint a
world where the success of the FOSS movement has never been hindered by
the GPL license. So why does Mr. Raymond insist that its a win-lose
situation? I have a hypothesis which I'll give in a bit.

Let me first demolish his statement that the GPL has connotations of
being anti-capitalistic. 

On the second point, attempting to distinguish the two licenses via the
promotion of economic freedom and capitalism is shooting yourself in the
foot. Capitalism, among other things, is defined as:

"... an economic system in which all or most of the means of production
are privately owned and operated (commonly for profit), and where
investments, production, distribution, income, and prices are determined
largely through the operation of a "free market" rather than by
centralized state control (as in a command economy)"[1]

The question that naturally arises is whether FOSS is anti capitalist
because the means of production have become un-owned (meaning, you lose
ownership of your intellectual rights) or whether it is anti capitalist
because we have removed the free market. My take is neither are true.
All FOSS is dependent on copyright protection which promises ownership
and actually increases financial gain of the creator by sharing (this is
not a position of argument but a statement of fact[2]) and secondly, it
actually encourages a free(-er) market by not allowing dominant
monopolies which try to restrict free trade to their benefit to be
built.

So why is Mr Raymond so insistent on spreading FUD about the value of
the Free Software movement? My take is that its personal - he just
doesn't like Stallman. In all writings, he has always taken a negative
view of Stallman and in all his talks, he has nothing good to say of the
FSF. Which is strange, considering that none of the other founding
members of the OSI make attacks on the FSF and GPL the way Raymond does.
Bruce Perens, Tiemann and the rest all see the value that Stallman and
the FSF have provided to the world, and their objections were never
against the moral position of the FSF/GPL. Only Mr Raymond takes this
position and his refusal to consider the moral issue on a meritous basis
has reduces his credibility in my eyes.

Read this http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
and tell me why Mr Raymond has no similar indepth meritous argument
against the FSF and GPL.

Ditesh

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
[2] http://www.itworld.com/Man/2685/031208torvalds/


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