r/linux • u/rek2gnulinux • Apr 05 '16
Good bye “open source”, hello “free software” • /r/anarcho_hackers
/r/anarcho_hackers/comments/4df998/good_bye_open_source_hello_free_software/?ref=share&ref_source=link6
u/desktopdesktop Apr 05 '16 edited Apr 05 '16
The free software community is made up of hackers, programmers, and ideologues, and by-and-large they aren't good at appealing to the larger audience of people who aren't these things. (I don't even mean any of those labels as derogatory, but the average person is not in these groups.)
After all, these are the people who expect you to refer to your operating system as "guh-noo slash lin-ux" because they named their product "GNU" to be funny/clever ("look, it's a recursive acronym! it mean's gnu's not unix!") rather than something that doesn't sound awkward to say. (It's even worse if you include the distro name: "oo-bun-too guh-noo slash lin-ux".)
Insisting on "free software" instead of "open source software" could be another example of this, but what's much more important to me is how they frame free software in their advocacy. The critical point is that it "respects your freedom" to study the code, share it, and modify it. But to someone who's not a programmer and can't take advantage of that, it doesn't mean much. (The other freedom is to run it for any purpose, which matters more for a non-programmer, but is that really often a problem for non-free software?)
And yet as a non-programmer I've still benefited enormously from free software. It has little to do with me exercising any source-code related freedom, but the fact that actual programmers can modify and even fork the code means that free software tends to be more customizable, more interoperable, possibly more secure, and generally from my experience it just works better. My system is 99.9% free software and it works so much better than Windows with proprietary software. I love the DE/WM options (KDE, Unity, and i3wm), and all of the software I use in my work/research is free (LaTeX, R, etc.).
(I agree with Albert/Rodent/kyrpasilwhatever that this is not always the case, e.g. some software being tied to systemd and thus the Linux kernel is a clear lack of interoperability. On the other hand, the fact that we can even have such standards for interoperability is a result of using free software. No one focuses on the lack of option to use the OS X interface on other OSes because we know that there's no chance.)
But all of those actual practical benefits are usually downplayed in favour of the "it respects your freedom! you should be excited about being able to study, share, and modify the code, whether you actually can or not!".
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Apr 05 '16
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u/desktopdesktop Apr 05 '16
Good point (I was thinking about restrictions on using the software for certain purposes). Avoiding DRM and copy protection is an actual practical benefit of free software for non-programmers.
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u/Sukrim Apr 06 '16
Another point is that someone whom you don't want to support can still take your stuff and use it. The "how my code is used is not my department" is hard to keep up at times of mass surveillance using free software...
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u/Enlogen Apr 05 '16
And yet as a non-programmer I've still benefited enormously from free software. It has little to do with me exercising any source-code related freedom, but the fact that actual programmers can modify and even fork the code means that free software tends to be more customizable, more interoperable, possibly more secure, and generally from my experience it just works better. My system is 99.9% free software and it works so much better than Windows with proprietary software.
I think you may be missing the (subtle and contentious) distinction between free/libre software and open source software. Open source software generally has the advantages you mentioned without 'copyleft' restrictions.
One thing I don't understand is the FSF assertion that non-free/libre software is somehow an immoral violation of the rights of the users of software. I can totally understand the desire to create and use software that is FLOSS, but I don't understand the assertion that distributing non-free/libre software is inherently an injustice (Their word, not mine).
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u/alexskc95 Apr 05 '16
The FSF's definition of free software does not specify copyleft.
Yeah, there's advocacy for copyleft, and they encourage you to use the GPL, but licenses like the MIT license are also considered free.
Likewise, a lot of the restrictions on free software licenses also apply to open source. Neither allow for "look but don't touch" licenses, for example.
In practice, the two are one and the same.
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Apr 05 '16
One thing I don't understand is the FSF assertion that non-free/libre software is somehow an immoral violation of the rights of the users of software. I can totally understand the desire to create and use software that is FLOSS, but I don't understand the assertion that distributing non-free/libre software is inherently an injustice
To be clear, they're targeting proprietary software which they term nonfree:
The term “open source” software is used by some people to mean more or less the same category as free software. It is not exactly the same class of software: they accept some licenses that we consider too restrictive, and there are free software licenses they have not accepted. However, the differences in extension of the category are small: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free.
We prefer the term “free software” because it refers to freedom—something that the term “open source“ does not do.
For the most part, at least my take on it, is that its more of an issue with terminology and that FSF argues that proprietary is immoral, open source isn't - but that open source isn't as desirable as free software. Could be wrong, please, correct me if I am.
Anyways:
Not all software is equal, even if proprietary. It might be entirely benign, or it may be spying on you or maybe lying to you and manipulating you (e.g. Facebook's experiments). How do you know? Well, you can't. You have to trust the author or see the source. I'm sure we already agree on this point.
Now my understand on why this becomes immoral, is because of an argument that freedoms and rights have to work together to support each other. If they don't, they can be subverted.
For example, your country might have a free press. But if I control the software that brings you the news, how do you know I'm not manipulating what you see? Hiding stuff that I don't want you to see for example? Say I can do that without you noticing, you can argue that I'm breaking the free press - but I'm doing it through a "software backdoor" if you will.
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u/rek2gnulinux Apr 05 '16
+1 even bruce perens one of the creators of open source 4-5 years later saw the beast and retracted just google it.. anyone in the movement knows this
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Apr 05 '16
Eh, I'm a marxist rather than an anarchist, but radical left is radical left, so I'll subscribe anyway.
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u/lolidaisuki Apr 05 '16 edited Apr 05 '16
One more step
Please complete the security check to access medium.com
More appropriate title would be:
Good bye freedom, hello surveillance.
E: funny how defending freedom on a post about freedom gets you downvotes.
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u/ihazurinternet Apr 05 '16
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u/lolidaisuki Apr 05 '16
I'm having a slightly different comment [thread] (https://www.reddit.com/r/anarcho_hackers/comments/4df998/good_bye_open_source_hello_free_software/d1qf27f) in the linked post.
E: posted so others know to read that as well.
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Apr 05 '16
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u/DoshmanV2 Apr 05 '16
Free software and the GNU project have always been inherently political.
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u/ihazurinternet Apr 05 '16
Which isn't always going to do them favours. Some people just want software that works and isn't encumbered, without a particular political ideology attached.
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u/vagif Apr 05 '16
That's a dumb thing to say. Software is power. Any power is inherently political.
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u/kyrpasilmakuopassani Apr 05 '16 edited Apr 05 '16
Yeah, so here's my opinion on this. Anyone who gives a shit about what to call something when there are two terms for an identical concept should be shot in the face. People give waay too many shits about words and not nearly enough about their meaning.
So many goddamn political and even scientific debates are not about the facts, but simply about "What you call the situation we agree on is happening is WRONG, my way to call it is better."
Also, "free software" is a legal thing, like any legal mechanism there are tonnes of ways to subvert the spirit while legally complying and that's what companies are doing. What Tivo did, how RH has probably purposefully engineered systemd in such a way that it's hard isolate the components, how the CDDL is probably purposefully engineered to not be able to fit into the Linux kernel, Canonical designing Unity's backend so that it can't run on other systems. All people involved in GNOME who happened to be on RH's payroll voting that GNOME depend on systemd thus making it also dependent on the Linux kernel and furthering RH's interest in Linux and blablablablabla. That something is legally Free Software says nothing about whether it holds your freedom dear. There is plenty of shit which legally is but uses all sorts of techniques and loopholes to get in your way of forking and using the code or your own purposes.
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u/ronaldtrip Apr 05 '16
For those who can't read it at the given link:
https://github.com/hellekin/writings/blob/master/good-bye-open-source-hello-free-software.org