Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Robert Riebisch]

Rugxulo wrote:

> The irony is that most people choke on the complexity, even on
> "simple" systems, because they get caught up in creeping featurism,
> featuritis, code bloat, or whatever you want to call it. It really
> shouldn't be this hard to (re)build world. The fact that we (still!)
> haven't solved this only proves that (like you imply) nobody cares
> enough about having reproducible builds / portable sources or that
> (more likely) nobody knew how to adequately solve the issue,
> universally.

At least some people care about https://reproducible-builds.org/

Robert Riebisch
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Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Just coming back to this  I hope this isn't too (accidentally) polemical.

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 8:25 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> For the developers and communicants of the open source religion, the
> critical part is "Free as in freedom".  You can get the source to what
> you run.

For some, that is the entire point because their goal is to solve
technical problems, serve others (literally), even do something else
that isn't directly related to software or money itself. Some tasks
literally cannot be solved without freely-available sources (or, at
the very least, would be exponentially more difficult).

> For the vast majority of end users *running* open source code, the
> critical part is "Free as in beer."  They don't have to *pay* for it.

Very rarely are people forced to do anything in software. More or
less, you are free to not use software if it doesn't suit you. I know
some schools and governments may force certain decisions, but overall
end users can buy or rent or develop whatever they want. (Draconian
legalese hurts more than it helps.)

My point is that they never "had" to pay for it. They were free to use
something else. That's why we have so many compilers, archivers, text
editors, graphics viewers, audio players, etc. You are (almost) always
free to look for alternatives or even write your own. It's not always
easy, but it's definitely not impossible (for the most part).

Money is not the only decision maker, nor should it be. It's a very
naive view that "money solves all problems". Similarly you could say
that open/free doesn't either. So there really is no
one-size-fits-all, no panacea for every hindrance.

> The majority of *users* of open source products don't *need* the
> source, and couldn't use it if they had it.  They aren't programmers,
> wouldn't understand the code, couldn't fix bugs or make enhancements,
> and couldn't reproduce the build environment and build a duplicate of
> the binary they got on their own machine.  The just want
> free-as-in-beer code that does what they need and they don't have to
> pay for.

That's not quite true. There have always been scripting environments
and similar interpreters for end users. They were always allowed to do
some reasonable things. Maybe not modify the kernel itself or build
world, but they certainly had enough room to fiddle. (You already
mentioned Lisp, which blurs the lines between data and code.) Awk,
Sed, Sh, Bc/Dc, Rexx, Debug, QBasic, Lua, Javascript, Forth, etc.

It's more than just editing a configuration file or a simple command
batch script. It's more than just simple arithmetic or file
manipulation. Heck, it's even more than just arrays or raw pointers.
Some things just can't be done with canned (proprietary) binaries,
esp. those that run on no other OS or architecture (which is most of
them), which are soon obsoleted. Proprietary binaries are only of
limited use "if" they have been exhaustively tested. (Of course, you
could say that about all software, but proprietary moreso because it
can't be easily fixed. Of course, too many fixes/changes ruin
stability.)

>> These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are
>> pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably.
>
> The question becomes whether you mean Free as in Freedom, or Free as
> in Beer. :-)

Honestly, I think all the talk of money here is overly cynical and a
waste of time. It's not a good way to solve technical problems by
constantly worrying about money. It may be a necessary evil,
sometimes, but it's certainly counter-productive for most
conversations.

Do you want your software to be used? Does it need improvements? Has
it been heavily tested? Do you need money? Do those goals conflict?
Will circumstances change in the future? Who is the target audience?

> If you *only* wanted software in a FreeDOS distro that met Stallman's
> requirements, you might have problems actually making a distro.  Too
> much of what you might like to include won't be under a GPL license.
> If you relax your licensing requirements, things become easier.

Even RMS has to know that licensing is a tricky minefield, and that
relicensing isn't even always possible. But even he can't be so
destructive as to throw everything away at every impassible hurdle.
Sometimes you have to accept things as imperfect, whether you like it
or not, or you'll have nothing to work with.

Even if you don't like or prefer GPL, he still has a point: without
the freedom to modify and redistribute software, it's much harder to
get "real work" done. You can try living without but eventually you
hit a wall.

Not everyone is meant to make their own OS distribution, but it's
certainly a difficult and thankless task. For anything trying to reach
as wide an audience as possible, it's much more reasonable to be as
free as possible than overly restrict end users (which would be
short-sighted 

Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

It's very hard to speak wisely here. Please keep in mind that I'm not
strictly advocating against proprietary software (even though I think,
sometimes, it has very limited appeal).

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 8:25 PM, dmccunney  wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> For the vast majority of end users *running* open source code, the
> critical part is "Free as in beer."  They don't have to *pay* for it.
> The majority of *users* of open source products don't *need* the
> source, and couldn't use it if they had it.  They aren't programmers,
> wouldn't understand the code, couldn't fix bugs or make enhancements,
> and couldn't reproduce the build environment and build a duplicate of
> the binary they got on their own machine.  The just want
> free-as-in-beer code that does what they need and they don't have to
> pay for.

They already paid for their hardware, phone/Internet, host OS, etc.
Isn't that enough? It's not reasonable (to me) to have to infinitely
pay pay pay just to be able to halfway sometimes use software in a
very limited and restricted fashion. Face it, endless royalties only
sound good to potential millionaires. To the poor schlubs stuck with
the bill, they hate it; they don't want more taxes.

But sometimes it's not about "no cost" but instead about finding
something that is easily available (you know, not having to scrounge
eBay for used copies from a company that doesn't exist anymore).

Do you think all proprietary software is well-supported? Nope, it's up
to the whim of the copyright holder. At least with free/libre
software, you can fix it yourself or pay literally anyone else to do
it. There's no chance to do that if proprietary developers don't care.

> That's Stallman's problem.  The question is how much anyone else
> *cares* what he thinks.  My impression is that increasingly few do.

He received the 2015 ACM Software System award for GCC. Now, I have no
idea how much he is still involved in that, but he was historically
very crucial there. And yes, GCC is an impressive behemoth that made a
huge impact on the world. There are still plenty of commercial
compilers (even those based upon Clang), but without GCC the worldwide
software ecosystem overall would be much "poorer".

I agree that RMS' influence isn't as much as he'd like anymore, but he
does have some good points. I assume you're implying that permissive
licenses are very popular as well, not just GPL.

> Every open source license I'm aware of assumes you will make source
> offered under it available.  If you aren't willing to release source,
> you don't *use* an open source license.  The differences lie
> elsewhere, like how the code may be reused.

No, most so-called "permissive" licenses don't force releasing
sources. Only the original batch is released, but that's not your job
to propagate (unlike GPL). So no, BSD or MIT don't force changes to be
public. Maybe I'm misunderstanding here, but I assume you knew that
already.

> And every license I'm aware of other than public domain

Which (like most licenses) isn't valid in 100% of all jurisdictions.

> has the expectation that if you fork it to produce a closed source commercial
> variant, you will negotiate a closed source license with the original
> author permitting you to do so.  You may not simply make a closed
> source fork.

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/Berlin/en/BCC64

"BCC64 is based on Clang." (No, I'm not aware of them paying any
royalties, nor of any legal need to do so. If they did, it wouldn't be
considered "free/libre" and it would be shunned like OpenWatcom.)

> You *go* closed source commercial because you plan to
> *sell* the software you will create, and you cannot successfully
> *sell* stuff offered as open source.  If you do that, the original
> author will generally expect a cut of the take, because you are making
> money off his code.

No, they don't expect any money, they gave it away "freely" (or maybe
got paid once for it). So they don't get mandatory royalties.

In general, like you admit, free software is more of a one-time bounty
type of thing. It's not about perpetual royalties ("hoarding", as RMS
calls it). RMS considers free software to be helping his neighbor,
less about excessively restricting them in both freedom and money.
Some things can't be solved with money alone.

>> These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are
>> pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably.
>
> The question becomes whether you mean Free as in Freedom, or Free as
> in Beer. :-)

FreeDOS uses a GPL'd kernel, so that would be "freedom". Otherwise,
what's the point? Just use old MS-DOS, but certainly Microsoft doesn't
produce DOS (or OS/2 or Win16) software anymore, and it's much harder
to find than it used to be.

>> To avoid running into problems, my preference is to include open
>> source software with FreeDOS.
>
> If you *only* wanted software in a 

Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[dmccunney]

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 5:19 PM, Jim Hall  wrote:
>
> I'll add a few comments here:
>
> Stallman holds a very strict view on "free software" because he
> created GNU and the Free Software Foundation for ethical reasons.
> Stallman didn't like that companies and organizations were no longer
> sharing the source code to their programs, and were "locking out"
> users from modifying these programs to fix bugs or to make the
> software do something different. Stallman wanted all software to be
> free as in "freedom."

Stallman started out working for the MIT AI lab.  They were doing a
lot of stuff in Lisp.  It was the days before personal computers.
Back then, Lisp Machines and Symbolics were selling dedicated hardware
for running Lisp.  Symbolics made some decisions Stallman disagreed
with that prevented the sort of code sharing he liked, and when a new
Symbolics release came out, he'd reverse engineer it and contribute
the changes to Lisp Machines.

The FSF and the GPL were Stallman's efforts to enforce the sort of
code sharing he cared about.  The GPL *requires* you to make source
available for code you issue under it.  The issue it encounters is
that it's *viral*: if your code links against GPLed code, it too
becomes GPLed.  There are folks writing open source code who won't go
near the GPL in consequence.  They want their code *used*, and see the
GPL as a barrier to adoption.

> Raymond came at the topic from a different direction. He was helping
> companies implement free software - either to use in-house or to
> include in a product. Raymond kept running into problems with the term
> "free." Companies would see "free software" and assume they would have
> to give everything away at no cost. "Free" software was confusing. So
> Raymond created the term "open source software" to clarify that the
> source code was something you could see and even modify, but you
> didn't necessarily have to give it away for free.

Raymond was a director of several corporations involved in open source
efforts, like VA Linux and Red Hat.  It was the days when the dot COM
boom was in swing, the Internet was a new paradigm, and stock prices
would ascend continually without details like actual revenues and
profits required.  Eric once predicted he would be immensely wealthy
when the dust settled on IPOs of companies where he was a director.
And he *was* briefly worth about $48 million after IPO, but values
dropped precipitously shortly after as the dot COM bubble burst. Eric
had software tracking and charting the downward trend of his net worth
and posting it for the public.

He has a bit stashed away from those days, but is by no means wealthy.
His wife Kathy is a lawyer, and has been mainly responsible for paying
the bills, leaving Eric free to concentrate on non-paying open source
projects.

(Eric *is* being paid to write code these days - a consortium of the
outfits that operate stratum 1 NTP servers are funding an effort to
update and harden NTP server code, because it's become an attack
vector.  Eric is architectural lead on the new code.  He estimates
he's reduced the existing code base by half, and expects it to be two
thirds by the time they are finished.  The core code was heavily
encrusted with special case code to support obscure hardware and
protocols no longer used. He feels that reducing code size reduces
attack surface, and notes that his code is not subject to 9 of 11
recently documented NTP server code vulnerabilities, because he's
removed the stuff those creating those vulnerabilities.)

> (Lots of companies make money by selling open source software. Red Hat
> is one such example.)

*NO!*

Red Hat does *not* make money *selling* open source *software*.  *Nobody* does.

They make their money selling *support*.

Red Hat's principal product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  You can get
the code for free, and the CentOS distribution is the open source
version.  It is identical to RHEL save for branding.  You can get it
and run it and not pay a cent to anyone.

I've been a point man pushing open source in companies I've worked
for.  The first question corporate users ask is "Who do we call if it
breaks?"  They like commercial software because they can *get* support
on products they've paid for.

Red Hat makes it's living being who you call.  If you run CentOS, and
decide supporting it needs more resources than you have, you can apply
an RPM that changes the branding from CentOS to RHEL, then call Red
Hat and say "I'm running RHEL, and I'd like a support contract.  What
are my options?"

Canonical, Ltd, Ubuntu's parent, is playing in the same space, and
offers supported commercial versions of Ubuntu Server.  Once again,
the software itself is free, and can be downloaded and run with no
charge.  You pay for support.

As a rule, people do not *buy* software you can get for free in open
source form.  There is nothing in an open source license that says you
*can't* charge money for it, but good luck 

Re: [Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Jim Hall]

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 7:01 PM, Rugxulo  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Although licensing discussions are usually not productive in their own
> right ("shut up and code!"), and it's always a waste of time and words
> rehashing the same old issues, there are some helpful web pages that
> clarify (at least to me) various aspects of the computing world at
> large.
>
> In other words, here's some links for your edification, but please
> let's not devolve this into arguments, flamewars, etc. This is more
> friendly advice than anything, just so some of you know what is up (if
> you didn't already).
>[...]

I'll add a few comments here:

Stallman holds a very strict view on "free software" because he
created GNU and the Free Software Foundation for ethical reasons.
Stallman didn't like that companies and organizations were no longer
sharing the source code to their programs, and were "locking out"
users from modifying these programs to fix bugs or to make the
software do something different. Stallman wanted all software to be
free as in "freedom."

Raymond came at the topic from a different direction. He was helping
companies implement free software - either to use in-house or to
include in a product. Raymond kept running into problems with the term
"free." Companies would see "free software" and assume they would have
to give everything away at no cost. "Free" software was confusing. So
Raymond created the term "open source software" to clarify that the
source code was something you could see and even modify, but you
didn't necessarily have to give it away for free. (Lots of companies
make money by selling open source software. Red Hat is one such
example.)

But Raymond also had a more permissive view to what could be
considered "open source software." Stallman didn't like that, and
thought Raymond was missing the point. They have never gotten along.

So while many people use "open source software" and "free software"
interchangeably, remember that Stallman does not think they are
interchangable.

(I've somewhat simplified Stallman's and Raymond's views, above.)

I usually describe "open source software" and "free software" as a
Venn diagram: All free software is open source software (all free
software requires that you make the source code available to others).
But not all open source software is free software (sometimes the
license for "open source software" doesn't meet Stallman's strict
requirements).

These days, I think "open source software" and "free software" are
pretty much the same. I use the terms interchangeably.


In general, I try to be careful about the licensing for programs we
include in FreeDOS. We have run into problems before.

1. One example is ArrowASM. We included ArrowASM with FreeDOS for a
long time, such as the FreeDOS 1.0 release. But in 2011, several
FreeDOSers found that ArrowASM was just a "hacked" version of MASM
3.00 (see technote #240) and we promptly removed ArrowASM from the
FreeDOS distribution and from the FreeDOS archives.

2. Another example from further back is FreeDOS SETVER. The developer
of this program claimed on the mailing list that his latest version of
SETVER featured better compatibility with MS-DOS SETVER because he
borrowed code from the recently "leaked" MS-DOS 6 source code. We then
dropped the SETVER utility from FreeDOS, and implemented that
functionality a different way using FDCONFIG.SYS.

To avoid running into problems, my preference is to include open
source software with FreeDOS. I don't necessarily draw the line at
"free software" the same way that Stallman does. Even a few years ago,
I wanted FreeDOS to meet Stallman's Free System Distribution
Guidelines (see Rugxulo's link), but these days it doesn't matter to
me. I don't care if it's "open source" or some GNU license. If the
program works, is open source, and let's others use it, I'm happy with
it.

Jim

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[Freedos-user] Open Source and/or Free Software?

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

Although licensing discussions are usually not productive in their own
right ("shut up and code!"), and it's always a waste of time and words
rehashing the same old issues, there are some helpful web pages that
clarify (at least to me) various aspects of the computing world at
large.

In other words, here's some links for your edification, but please
let's not devolve this into arguments, flamewars, etc. This is more
friendly advice than anything, just so some of you know what is up (if
you didn't already).

1). https://sourceforge.net/blog/the-evolution-of-open-source/
"It was during this time that Richard Stallman emerged and founded the
free software movement "

2). https://libreboot.org/
"Since 14 May 2016, Libreboot is part of the GNU project."

3). https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

4). http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-non-gnu-distros.html
(It was once naively suggested that FreeDOS could eventually show up
there. That will probably not happen without a fair bit of extra
effort, though. So I'm not sure how feasible that truly is, see
below.)

5). http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html

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