Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 26, 2006 11:34 PM
To make it clear right away, I prefer the "free software" camp. In my opinion, the only way to understand the nature of the rift is to think of the social reality, which is (in somewhat simplistic terms), that as far as software is concerned, there are two quite distinct groups: corporations and users. The former group is more powerful economically, while the latter is much more powerful in numbers.
All the moral differences stem from this basic reality. Most importantly, the spirit of GPL and the four freedoms are designed not to give an individual user a total freedom - that extreme is already taken by the public domain software. GPL was designed to protect the community of users (of which some are also programmers that can and want to contribute to the community) from the natural tendency of corporations to take over what they can in order to make profit. This is capitalism, and a corporation has to do what it can in order to survive. It is not sociopathic or unethical, it simply has to turn profit or die.
OK, so where does all this lead? 1) There is no use calling corporations or open source people evil or immoral. 2) Equally, there is no use trying to accommodate to them. 3) GPL v3 will proceed, whether Linus likes it or not. It is a manifestation of the Free Software community protecting itself from new attacks (such as DRM) that didn't exist at the time of v2. 4) There is no civil war going on, but the rift between Open Source and Free Software communities will not go away; I cannot predict the future, but the pressure from the corporate community may enlarge this rift. More and more software corporations are "open source" and many of them don't accept "free as in free speech" argument.
For me, the insistence of the Open Source community that open source software is better not because it is free, but because it is higher quality is strange: what happens if it turns out that this conjecture does not hold for all times? You give up on open source because you have a better alternative? Then you call those who refuse to compromise dogmatic?
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It comes down to community vs corporations
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 26, 2006 11:34 PMAll the moral differences stem from this basic reality. Most importantly, the spirit of GPL and the four freedoms are designed not to give an individual user a total freedom - that extreme is already taken by the public domain software. GPL was designed to protect the community of users (of which some are also programmers that can and want to contribute to the community) from the natural tendency of corporations to take over what they can in order to make profit. This is capitalism, and a corporation has to do what it can in order to survive. It is not sociopathic or unethical, it simply has to turn profit or die.
OK, so where does all this lead? 1) There is no use calling corporations or open source people evil or immoral. 2) Equally, there is no use trying to accommodate to them. 3) GPL v3 will proceed, whether Linus likes it or not. It is a manifestation of the Free Software community protecting itself from new attacks (such as DRM) that didn't exist at the time of v2. 4) There is no civil war going on, but the rift between Open Source and Free Software communities will not go away; I cannot predict the future, but the pressure from the corporate community may enlarge this rift. More and more software corporations are "open source" and many of them don't accept "free as in free speech" argument.
For me, the insistence of the Open Source community that open source software is better not because it is free, but because it is higher quality is strange: what happens if it turns out that this conjecture does not hold for all times? You give up on open source because you have a better alternative? Then you call those who refuse to compromise dogmatic?
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