I’ve been struggling to come up with words to describe my frustrations with the definition of free software and how it ignores some of the nastiest behaviours of corporations.
Stuff like EEE, repositories that are technically free but owned by a corporation and too big to fork (chromium), and other hazier real life conditions. Could there be a “free software but dialectical” definition that would be more useful?
care to explain what you mean?
richard stallman may disingenously call the copyleft licensing as “idealist pragmatism” but it has nothing of idealism. It is a materialistic approach through and through, they studied the current intellectual property laws and designed the copyleft license to use intellectual property laws for their goals!
open source =/= free software, richard stallman extensively wrote about this. i think you may be confusing open source with free software.
I find that the classic “copyright wars”, de Raadt vs Stallman/ BSD vs GPL arguments about freedom are really analogous to idealism vs materialism.
“Ours is the most Free”, the idealists preach. “You can take our stuff and close it and sell it if you like! Yours carries authoritarian restrictions!”.
And this is true, but those restrictions insist on the spread of freedom, in that you’re forced to grant others the same freedom you enjoyed.
Look at how Microsoft took a lot of BSD code and profited from it, giving nothing back. Where is BSD now and where’s GNU/Linux?
Often we just need to accept the paradox that sometimes freedom must be imposed and that maximalist, idealist freedom includes the freedom to exploit others and limit the fruits of their “freedom”.
This is 100% correct, and why no one should be using “permissive” / soft / weak copyleft licenses. All they do is permit corporations to take your work, extend it and then close it off, under liberal notions of freedom.
Weirdly similar to the paradox of tolerance when put like that. i do completely agree.
Ironically, a lot of corporations who began by extolling the virtues of “open source” are now changing over to source-available restricted licences. At this point, licenses like MIT seem to exist only for the small developers who hope to use their open source projects as a vehicle to jump onto the payroll of established companies.
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AFAICT Chromium isn’t free software, it’s BSD-3 and a few other non-copyleft licenses. GPLv3 seems fairly solid to me
The success of the Linux OS (operating system) that give rise to the Android mobile OS and the WordPress are prove that artificially scare goods like software does not need monetary incentive for innovation and production. Artificially scarce goods like software and knowledge have cost to serve the first consumer but not the other subsequent consumers which creates problem in traditional market incentive system that rely on high variable cost and no fixed cost. The incentive system that makes Linux OS succeed, under the rule that any improvement to the OS must be shared with others, incentivize development with the self-consumption by prosumer (people who produce and consume a good) and the ability to gain any benefit that others made to the OS.
The Liberals tried to use government intervention like intellectual copyright law to force the artificially scarce goods to function like private goods, so that they can operate under the principle of the market economy, but the Capitalist government interventions always backfired with legal loopholes that allow a person to take ownership of intellectual work by other people like the other hypocritical government interventions by the Liberals against the free market.
Gnu has thought this through in their definition & clarification of the four essential freedoms. It’s worth a read.
Haaave you met GPL, it’s related licenses, and copyleft, yet?
GPL and similar licenses which enshrine these four freedoms are legally actionable. You could argue how actively a bourgeois law apparatus respects them is dubious. But I don’t know what you mean by idealistic here. Are you saying that the four freedoms do not guarantee freedom in reality?
This is similar to Marx’s critique of freedom under liberalism as merely ‘formal’. The problem is the gap between that can exist between a nominal right and practical exercise of that right.
This kind of problem is common with rights-based approaches to justice and can be witnessed with human rights broadly. Its identification isn’t unique to Marxism, either; liberals sometimes get at it with the phrase ‘equality of opportunity’, for example. To say that opportunities can be unequal (and that this is a problem) is to admit that justice requires the guarantee of more than just formal rights. I’d say this a problem that has shaped liberal ‘privilege’ discourse as well: privilege is just such a kind of gap that allows (or constitutes?) the persistence of injustice in the face of nominal/formal/legal equality.
Like in other cases, I’d say that the four fundamental software freedoms get at something genuinely important, and that it’s better to have them, even just formally, than not. But like with other freedoms and rights, it’s easy to conceive of them too ‘thinly’. They need to be fleshed out with a more general awareness of power relations and of the practicality of their own exercise.
To some extent, that awareness of software freedom as situated within power relations is actually already present in free software discourses, which talk often of things like subordination, domination, subjugation, etc., from the start. Unsurprisingly, that dimension is largely absent from the ‘open-source’ perspective.
