cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1366698
Richard Stallman was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not Richard Stallman or the Free Software Foundation. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen.
You must log in or # to comment.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “Richard Stallman was right again”.
The problem with copyleft is that it makes it inherently difficult to make a living off of developing software. It prevents people from using the most straight forward way of selling their product. To be fair, some people do make it work but it’s either because they sell enterprise support or SaaS. This model doesn’t work for desktop applications and regular users. All you’re left with is donations. Go look at some of the average salaries for incredibly popular software like VLC. You won’t like what you’ll find.
It’s really a problem with the way copyright, or copyleft advocacy is done, written or proposed … there will be an endless debate about it forever.
One of the things that should change is our collective culture of paying for things we value and are actually important in our society and civilization. Everyone should be made aware of the work that developers, admins, hobbyists and programmers do for free. We should normalize donations, contributions and subscriptions to these things and these people.
If it became normal that thousands or millions of users everywhere contributed dollars or even cents for the work that is done for the benefit of everyone … there would be more than enough money to protect the copyright of software and even pay for the work these people do.
One of the few things Stallman is wrong about is his view that Free Software is compatible with capitalism
Hasn’t capital been trying to get rid of free software for a while? Isn’t free software an antithesis to for-profit software most of the time?
It has and it is, respectively.
Huh. Interesting. Do you have a source to understand why he believes so?
I couldn’t tell you why he believes such a thing, but this page summarizes this wrong belief.
This article doesn’t necessarily make a statement on whether FOSS is compatible with capitalism. It could be that RMS encourages developers to charge for free software because it keeps FOSS projects sustainable while devs are forced to operate in a capitalist framework. It seems to me that the FSF has always refrained from directly making any kind of statement on capitalism, focusing (as the article says) solely on software freedom.
By failing to make a statement on capitalism, it necessarily assumes the two are not in conflict. This is a bad assumption.
The business model suggested in the article does not exist. Companies which distribute Free Software make their money by selling secondary products and services, like Canonical or Red Hat’s support services, Firefox’s Google search integration, or System 76’s hardware, not by selling the Free Software itself.
The ultimate goal of the FSF is that all software should be Free. With that in mind, the question we must ask is this:
Why is there nonFree software?
The answer is the profit motive. Without the profit motive, there would be no incentive to make software nonFree.
Consider the examples Stallman cites as the inciting incedents of his entire Free Software advocacy career: Xerox’s printer drivers and Scribe’s paywall. Why did Xerox refuse to share its driver source code? To protect its profits. Why did Unilogic ask Brian Reid to put time bombs in his code? To profit from their investment in buying that code from him.
To ignore this is fundamentally a failure, or a refusal, to understand the conflict the Free Software movement finds itself in.
By failing to make a statement on capitalism, it necessarily assumes the two are not in conflict.
No it doesn’t. Either there’s no logic in that statement at all, or you’re playing 5D chess with time travel and I’m playing checkers. While the article says:
Selling a copy of a free program is legitimate, and we encourage it
it makes no statement on whether this activity represents a sustainable business model, nor does it explore how selling FOSS may or may not affect other businesses. I said:
It seems to me that the FSF has always refrained from directly making any kind of statement on capitalism, focusing (as the article says) solely on software freedom.
because the article itself ended with:
When we defend users’ freedom, we are not distracted by side issues such as how much of a distribution fee is charged. Freedom is the issue, the whole issue, and the only issue.
I don’t (and can’t) know whether the absence of discussion on FOSS’ relation to capitalism represents a touch of myopia (as you suggest) on the part of RMS & the FSF, whether RMS intends to be the Gary Yourofsky of free software and it’s a deliberate choice for the sake of optics, or whether it betrays a pro-capitalism stance, but my feeling is that RMS is more concerned about FOSS as a vehicle for the creation and preservation of a digital commons, and a safeguard against privacy violation, and likely doesn’t have terribly many well informed thoughts and opinions on economic systems.
Since you’ve completely ignored my main point, I’ll just repeat it:
Why is there nonFree software?
The answer is the profit motive.
Capitalism is not a side issue. It is the central issue.
The man is my life lol.
I discovered GNU/Linux in school in the 90’s, then as I got better access to the internet at home and Linux magazines I learned everything about RMS and GNU and the FSF.
I latched on to it all. Apart from retro systems with their various proprietary operating systems I have no time for any proprietary software if I can help it.
The Retro systems get a pass because I’m interested in old computers.
A really good read. And kudos to the author for seeing the error of their ways.
This was a really good read and definitely one of those things I’m hoping begins soon. As someone who yearns to use FOSS for all things it’s certainly getting harder and harder
Wow, amazing read!
Prohibit the privatizing of commons 🤝 owning the means of production.
Interesting read, although a bit too preachy at times.
In my opinion, this is a utopian point of view that does not work in real life and glances over a lot of good things of GPL.
Linux and a lot of open source would not be here today, in this shape, without big companies using it for their commercialized software. You really think Microsoft would contribute to Linux source code if it can not use it commercially? You really think ANY company would contribute to ANYTHING if they can not commercialize it?
Linux is what it is today because not only volunteers, but companies depend on it being stable and feature-full. If companies did not care to contribute to it, it would be dead and only a pet project of few volunteers.
Who would pay all these people to work on it? Sure, some of them would work for free as a hobby, some of them coud get paid from donations. But its nowhere near enough to make Linux or any other FOSS project big and popular.
Until people need money to survive, AGPL will never be the most popular license and it should not if you want to have FOSS.
And what is so bad about it? You still have base open source code that they use to make their software, make your own. You are mad because companies take open source code, and charge for it. Then, you take it and make the software free.
You want everybody to use FOSS, sure. Who will be customer support? Who will fix and be responsible for stuff when they dont work? How will you pay these people?
Free as in, free to do whatever the fuck you want with it. Not free as in free to do whatever you want, except make money to survive.
The problems you describe are due to capitalism: profit motivated commerce. The open source business model has a focus that monetizes the human actions that are a value-add, such as continued development of targeted features, tech support and other things it makes sense to pay for specialized knowledge, but the tangibles are still open for all to modify, audit or use as they want.
I think we need more choice. The problem is modern hardware forces proprietary blobs
Open hardware is a thing. Buy it.
It’s really not. All modern CPUs contain treacherous computing hardware
Not really unless you want a potato from 2008
Stallman is one of my biggest inspirations. It’s nice that there was a guy who was right about so much for so long when the vast majority of people around him were wrong. I don’t think he’s right about everything, but he’s right about most things. I think he could go further in some ways. For example, I think copyright and patent laws should die.
For example, I think copyright and patent laws should die.
Stallman doesn’t want anything like that. The GPL for example wouldn’t work without copyright.
What Stallman wants is software patents do be illegal (you can patent your new garden hose as much as you like) and copyright should be returned to what it was, a much shorter term. It’s supposed to give a time limited monopoly on a work in order to make sure the author is encouraged to create new works frequently. Instead it has become a gravy train for life plus a huge number of years after the authors death.
It should return to 5 or 10 years.
For example, I think copyright and patent laws should die.
Copyright doesn’t need to die, it just needs to become irrelevant. The GPL and Creative Commons depend on copyright law to exist. So if everyone just started using Free Software licenses and Free Culture licenses (which will realistically never happen), the negative consequences of copyright would be minimized. It’s the best of both worlds, really.
