FOSS: The Consideration Bridge
A debate, seemingly endless in the Free and Open Source landscape between purest Free Software activists and Practicalist Open Source is starting to find it’s way into a recognisable, worthwhile settlement. At least in my own head.
Freedom Through Production
I’ve never been very fond of the Free Software Foundation’s recent destructive, abstinence only, political approaches to advocacy. It may seem that they’re no longer concerned with Free Software as a social issue, but as only a political issue, but I don’t believe this is the only thing the FSF is up to, only what they are most loud about in the press and the way they allow themselves to be perceived.
The difference of course is how you fight. Back in the days when the FSF was finding it’s feet Richard and others began this amazing process of taking functional proprietary tools and recreating these tools as free software, drop-in replacements. This process of “doing all the boring bits” really set the technical foundations and I think is why a lot of people were really amazed by the principled dedication and out of this grew respect.
You could of course be strong by simply denying yourself the pleasures of technology, because it’s not Free Software. But this is something that only a very small majority will do and while it does show conviction, It’s not producing anything and it implies negative guilt in those unwilling to give up their Wii or Blackberry. Protests are great, but they have to resonate with the public and can’t just be about showing how rotten everyone is for being human and wanting nice things.
I know the FSF is still producing software, taking troublesome closed software and making new free versions of it (hence OpenSocial), but the strength of that production has not been keeping up with it’s ability to be loud, vocal and political. What we’ve ended up with is a political organisation, but not a guiding light that executes and demonstrates the way forward as it used to.
My key consideration: Support Free Software, have conviction, be strong on the issues and be principled. But don’t whine protests, instead make solutions. Let creation do the talking (and advertise it) and invite others to come together to make Free Software solutions. Freedom through production.
Utility Through Liberty
The open source movement grew out of the lack of compromise in the Free Software community, but it’s grown further from being just about inviting businesses into a friendly arena and into a more pragmatics’ hiding hole, there are no difficult questions to answer, and free as in beer software is how it’s all advertised with no further explanation about how it became free in the first place.
It’s disappointing because while the open source movement should have be trying to figure out the best ways to execute Free Software ideals in a realistic economic and business sense, it instead set off with a more vague set of principles that are simply less strict, but with the same intention as the FSF. Sure there is much more practical movement, more code production, but there is also a lot of confusion and grey areas being produced which are not helpful.
How many licenses are ratified by OSS? Why did they need to ratify licenses at all? or even bother with definitions? There is quite a good set of principles right there ready to use from the FSF, all that was needed was a more business, less political direction and advertising strategy. Something that business pragmatists would look at and be happy understanding and supporting based on it’s practical benefits, but also not shy away from explaining it’s long term reasons.
For me I find being practical in the immediate sense is important, but far too often this id-like satisfaction eclipses my responsibility to make sure I prepare for the future. Far too often you’ll find practicalism going hand in hand with myopia and an inability to see the future beyond next month. Even if I need to use some closed source bit of code, or some driver firmware to get everything working. I think I should always be mindful of making sure I am a) not investing further into the closed source ecosystem and that I can b) invest something into the FOSS alternatives in order to help the future of that functionality dig it’s way out of the hole.
These are long term practical and economic considerations for the open source philosophy that I wish were much more widely practised. We certainly can’t be thinking of how to construct new and exciting economic opportunities for free software development when in for example Ubuntu we shall have closed source programs with economic incentives (that users pay for) and Free Software programs with no economics beyond self interest (they’re all free and not linked to any sort of donations or investment information).
A deplorable imbalance in consideration of the future of Free and Open Source which I hope can be solved with some discussion with the distribution organisations and perhaps the organisations that manage projects financially. A standard formula and way to advertise that to end users would be most welcome.
My key consideration: Practicalism is good, but I’m weary that it doesn’t lead to complacency and myopia on the future issues. Free Software principles are very strong foundations for the long term and closed source solutions are very weak stop gaps in comparison. Be sure to invest in that long term solution even while using the short term stop gap.
Your thoughts on my whole ramble today?
Tags: business, consideration, debate, Economics, free and open source, free software, open source, Ubuntu
Makes perfect sense
We talked a little at UDS Dallas and I mentioned my hatred of the FSF talking about but not doing much. I support their ideals but I would never boycott a product launch just because I dont like the product. From a purely political standpoint that tactic never works. Doing gets things done not talking about it. RMS got GNU started years ago and we still use some of the tools he started but since then they have simply made us a laughing stock with their tactics.
Personally, I’m glad to read something like this on one of my Ubuntu feeds. There have been issue with Ubuntu that concern me. I won’t go into it here. It’s nothing awful yet and I’ve seen worse. It’s simply a steps backwards for a distribution derived from Debian.
More on the points, I don’t see much difference between the FSF back in the day (which for me only goes back to the early 90’s) and today except that now they are big enough to be noticeably obnoxious. To put it another was, I believe they’d have put on the same kind of protests back in the day had it not been for the fact that they would have gone unnoticed. It would have been impractical for them.
I haven’t really been keeping up with their protests recently and have normally found out much after the fact. I don’t really pay much direct attention to them because they are so over the top and counter productive in public. But I do believe they are still important if only to serve as a reminder for what got us here with the freedom we have and how we could lose it if we are not mindful of preserving that freedom.
Also, considering all the copyrights the FSF owns, I’d rather the be the over the top activists they are than to have then be like some of the more compromising organisations that sprung up with the Open Source movement. I shutter to think what could happen if if they did. We could see the UNIX balkanization all over again.
Of course, they could continue to be that reminder without being obnoxious about it with protest and over the top behavior, but don’t see that happening. They just fit my stereo type of activists when they do that sort of thing.
Getting back to you post, please do keep rambling. I can’t say I’ll always agree, but that isn’t what’s important. Best of all, you don’t tend to be over the top or counter productive.
Edd
Dear Sir
In your article you state “I’ve never been very fond of the Free Software Foundation’s recent destructive, abstinence only, political approaches to advocacy.” Could you please give examples of what is meant by destructive, abstinence only, political approaches to advocacy as well as outlining the difference in current and past approaches to advocacy by the Free Software Foundation?
Peter Tomberwell
a) http://en.windows7sins.org/
b) http://www.gnu.org/
@doctormo thanks for those links. I actually like the links you posted. I don’t find them offensive at all. Could you describe in detail why they are destructive, abstinence only, and political approaches to advocacy?
Also, I think the future of Free programs in a capitalistic society will end up being illegal. We are already seeing this with the urge of USA congressmen trying to put some south American countries on the trade embargo list for suggesting their respective countries use FOSS.
The problem with FOSS in a capitalistic society is that it eliminates profit from the established software companies. M$ and other companies with patents will eventually crush FOSS. We are just starting to see this with the case of Apple suing HTC. Its only a matter of time for GNU/Linux to be declared illegal. Its truly sad but it should be apparent that Capitalism and FOSS can’t exist together.
Michael: Only that they focus solely on the negatives and dangers of their targets, that there is very little positive about them. They are created with the aim of informing the general public and the main lesson for the public is to avoid these products. (Not that I don’t avoid them anyway)
Note: I’m probably one of the more socialist people I know, I tend towards the distrobutionist side politically.
When you talk about capitalism I think you are grouping too many things together. Capitalism is a form of social organisation, it’s a set of simple mechanics which in and of themselves do not contradict Free Software. In fact Free Software can actually be seen as the ideal embodiment of a capitalist free market system. What I think you are talking about is the monopoly driven, exclusive weak capitalism that only makes a profit because it’s able to remove competition and force the sale of products through extortion. In this system we see the granting of monopoly rights through various government backed schemes to break the free market for various trade offs. Most of which don’t work in the modern world if they ever did.
Don’t confuse authoritarian monopolies with your normal capitalist ideals, there is much to disambiguate.
@doctormo What is wrong with the FSF warning of the dangers of Closed Source software? Is the FSF of the opinion that the bad of closed source far outweigh the good? Is withholding information from someone bad simply because that person cannot afford the information or that the information is secret?
Capitalism:
The system we have now is the height of capitalism and the free market. Once a company gets power (aka, lots of money and market share), those companies will do anything in order to maintain their establishment.
Monopolies are the end product of capitalism.
I do not understand how Free Software can be “seen as an embodiment of capitalism”. How is this so?
From my understanding, profit is required for capitalism to exist. No profit, no money, no incentive, and people stop working in a pure capitalistic society (note, I do not advocate such a society). Free software eliminates profit from selling software. Meaning, software cannot be sold/traded for money and must be freely given away. This goes against the very fabric of Capitalism (using capital to gain advantage over others).
Michael: “Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”
Monoopolies are anti-free market. Remember when I talked about it being a social system? Social systems need to be managed like fine Victorian gardens. They are not natural systems as is supposed by far too many and are social systems and as such need regulations which are their foundation (not their retardant).
Free Software is the embodiment of a free market. It removes restrictions from participation int hat market and makes the _development_ of software the focus, instead of the arbitrary licensing of copies. It means that support, further development and research are all possible by any market member, Richard himself is not against free market economics as such, just when they are used to destroy freedoms through lack of foundational regulation. Monopolies are far more similar to feudalism in my book.
There is no such thing as a Free Market. The reason for this is simple, those with more capital have more freedom. Those with ZERO capital, have no freedom. Everyone in the “market” desires to attain more capital. So you end up with monopolies because the system is setup in this manner.
You can say that monopolies are anti-free market; however, the free market is the cause for the monopolies to begin with.
Again, how can software be a Free Market? Doesn’t Market require an exchange of money, goods, or services? Free Software is FREE requiring no exchange what so ever.
Ah I see, you don’t understand the economics of FOSS. You may need to read some of my past posts and the posts of others in order to fully grasp how the economics works. Otherwise your going to be stuck saying that the software is free as in beer, when clearly it is not.
As for your definition of capitalism, it mixes the art of constructing a market place with the vending upon that market place. Truly the construction of the market place can not be done by the same people who are vending in it. A common mistake that needs correcting in many minds if we are to put things on a better path.
Hello Doc, I’m in the early stages of trying to set up a localized open source-centric community center intended to give 15-25 year olds a place to learn from one another, gain hands-on skills and eventually take part in scholarships, contests and build projects which would help out the local community.
Would you categorize this as ‘new and exciting economic opportunities for free software development’ or ‘the ideal embodiment of a capitalist free market system’ to use your own words?
I really have to disagree on a lot of this. The FSF help to fund projects they consider important to the future and they also do development. I was at Libre planet and there were a fair amount of events for hackers and networking about building FLOSS tools. so they are still heavily involved in development.
As for campaigns they are totally necessary. Yes maybe it can be viewed as negative bashing but someone needs to point these things out. You will always be fighting an uphill battle if you say use GNU/Linux because it’s technically better or faster then X product. because X product can sling those same arrows back at you. We need to say use GNU/Linux because it respects your freedom and this is what freedom means. If people switch for freedom they will never go back to product X because it offers no freedom and never will. But in talking about switching for ethics you are saying that Windows is bad. you either implicitly doing it or explicitly doing it but it’s happening. These campaigns tell people to think twice about what they are buying. Even if the message is negative it makes it easier to advocate. if people ask me “What’s so bad about windows? I can just say “look at windows7sins” instead of need to have an hour long discussion. If someone asks the harm of DRM I can just say “look up defective by design”. These situations have happened to me and from further conversations I can tell people really do look at these sites and try to understand.
As to the person that mentioned capitalism I can only assume two things either you haven’t read about Free Software enough to have learned how it’s good for Capitalism (which there is tons of evidence) . Or you are being purposefully malicious and a horrible troll. Or you have read the evidence and are just dumb. I don’t know which one and I am not implying that you are any specific one. If you fall into the first category here is a link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10159370-16.html and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html Also let me point out the bad for anti capitalist argument doesn’t hold a lot of water. Some of our biggest supporters are those horrible communists Google, Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Cable companies, Banks, TV manufacturers. Yeah we are all just having a big communist field day.
Fully Free Distros do help they point out holes in our development where we need to pick up the slack. we still need to put a lot of pressure on hardware manufacturers to free up their drivers and firmware or start writing better free replacements. for instance nouveau is a great replacement for nvidia drivers but is still buggy and many people don’t even realize it relies on a binary blob in the kernel. I didn’t know that until I started using Trisquel. If we keep using proprietary solutions and settle we may never get frustrated enough to plug up those holes and instead settle into complacency. what have the fully free distros inspired?
Well that list keeps growing, each year there are more and more of them and the functionality is getting better. there is actually now a company (lemote; Freedom Included is the American distributer) which sells a full 100% free software laptop from the bios to the OS on top. It’s not the best laptop in the world but I watched people buy dozens of the things at Libre planet excited by the prospect of 100% free Software machine. I nearly bought one good thing I was broke.
There would be no drive to have 100% free distributions and hardware if it wasn’t for the FSF and their work that they are doing today. there would be no GNU/Linux system without there work, no License, no community, or ethics. I think we owe them a lot even if we don’t agree with them all the time. If you think they are crazy then thank them for making you look sane in comparison.
I don’t know what the right thing is to do about people’s Black Berries and Xboxes and other devices. I don’t think they will throw them in the trash but maybe over time they will get frustrated with them. Maybe they will look for alternative that are Free and seeing none make them. It doesn’t have to be solved today and the jury is still a bit fuzzy on what freedom should mean for a video game. but it’s something we are prepared to begin to handle I think
sorry for the long rant.
Mike C: Please read blog post again. There is much in your post where you are agreeing fully and saying you are disagreeing. Quite how you managed that, I’m not sure. but you may just need to digest what I’ve said as it’s not what you think it is.
@doctormo wrote:
“Ah I see, you don’t understand the economics of FOSS. You may need to read some of my past posts and the posts of others in order to fully grasp how the economics works. Otherwise your going to be stuck saying that the software is free as in beer, when clearly it is not.
@Mike C wrote:
“As to the person that mentioned capitalism I can only assume two things either you haven’t read about Free Software enough to have learned how it’s good for Capitalism (which there is tons of evidence) . Or you are being purposefully malicious and a horrible troll. Or you have read the evidence and are just dumb.”
I’m glad both of you are stating your assumptions about me and my knowledge of FOSS, Capitalism, and the Free Market. I find it interesting that you do not address my points and simply call me names or say I have lack of understanding.
FOSS is actually bad for Capitalism because its bad to give your product away for free. Now if the FSF’s ideology says you can sell your software, their License makes this impossible. Its a bit of a contradiction. I understand the argument of “Free as in Beer” and software that has the GPL attached to it is in fact free. Please see CentOS as a positive example.
You might point out the companies giving away their services for free like google as an example of companies giving products away for free works; however, google depends on advertising revenues. The advertisers are selling products. If the advertiser’s companies start giving away their products or stop selling products, then they will have no money to pay for the adverts, and the whole system stops working. Meaning, its necessary for a sale to occur for this mechanism to work.
Doc wrote:
“As for your definition of capitalism, it mixes the art of constructing a market place with the vending upon that market place. Truly the construction of the market place can not be done by the same people who are vending in it. A common mistake that needs correcting in many minds if we are to put things on a better path.”
How do you propose “putting things on the right path”?
Do you think that the Free Market is a valid solution given the state of our technology? Do you really think that money is a valid tool for distributing the earth’s resources?
Money was a tool that might have been useful in the past, but with today’s technology is out dated. We currently have the technology to feed, house, clothe, and educate every single human on this planet. We do not due to Profit. Why continue supporting a system that promotes war, stealing, and restriction?
Michael: I assume your ignorant because of what you’ve said. I’m not calling you names, I’m being honest and frank. You do not understand FOSS economics, that is clear. The GPL allows selling of software licensed under it and the product you selling is not “licenses” but development it’s self. This misunderstanding is at the root of your miscalculation.
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