Re: Software cannot be free, but users can be
On 06/01/15 03:18, Gergely Varju wrote: Hi, In an e-mail about LLVM/Clang this email address was provided for those who would argue about changing some goals of GNU projects. When you say Free Software is a Free a sin Freedom, is the software itself realy free in that sense? No. Software itself doesn't have free will, and it would be hard to create a self aware AI with free will, that is free. At worst it isn't free, because if it goes against our will, we can turn that computer off and uninstall it. Users, contributors, developers and the market can be free. And there are two possible goals there: maximize this freedom, or reduce it by giving more control to a privileged group. The smaller this privileged group is, the more control they have, the less freedom everyone else would have. Agreed. Of course the above isn't new to you, but the question is: What kind of freedom an end user should have. GNU means GNU is Not Unix. Why? Because someone decided about the licensing terms for contributions of other people without their consent. And they did it to promote their own interests against those contributors. When the exact same thing happens with GNU project, you should ask yourself: What went wrong? And you can't claim you do it for the right reasons, because developers of UNIX could point to good reasons they protect. Like getting paid for your work (as programmer), return on investment to make sure investors finance RD. They have pretty good moral reasons, and once you are only against their property, against profit your agenda will be a communist agenda, and if you are willing to hurt other people to promote it you won't be any better than Stalin. I see no problem with people being required to license their contributions to an already existing project under a license that they do not like, both in the case of UNIX and GNU. Consider that the developers of UNIX received a contribution from someone under a license prohibiting commercial use, or requiring that Bell Labs pay them 90% of the company's profits. UNIX should be able to say - forget it. If you don't license your contributions under our license, we'd rather not have your contribution. Stalin had an interpretation of freedom too. And the moment people see that you can create any later version of GPL and even if they don't agree with it, there can be legal reasons why it is forced on them (old license can lose validity due to changes in law) and you ignore them, you are equal to Unix. And a lot of people didn't like GPL v3. And the conflict between so called Free Software which focuses on political ideas, and Open Source software which focuses on better products for everyone shows a lot of people are unhappy when you take their work and use it to your political interests. Too bad that it doesn't matter how you change GPL in GPL v4 or any future version you do it without consent of numerous software developers, and without considering interests of the contributors. I agree that this is definitely a problem. There is no way that you can trust that the FSF will always, even in 1000 years time, continue to make all versions of the GPL what a rational person might consider to be free. On the other hand, some form of upgrade mechanism is necessary, in case some part of a license is held unenforcable (as you mentioned above). This could be done by democracy, but you still have the problem of tyranny of the majority. Note, however, that you can only have a later version of the GPL forced upon you if you include the or, at your option, later version statement along with your software. Linux, for example, is GPLv2 only. You speak about commercial forks for LLVM/Clang. Let me ask a question: Why can't GNU project create a GPL fork for it? After all you have a chance to do so. And as you can take away everything the non copyleft folks made, but they can't take anything GPL folks make, and at that point, you can take away some of userbase, contributors, etc. and all the freedoms the original developers had, and use them as digital slaves to promote your political agenda. As you see that risk is there. I can't really comment on this, since I don't really see a problem with LLVM/Clang. Competition is healthy. You might claim it is there for a good reasons. But that would be a lie. As you can't make sure that all future decision makers of FSF would have any goals you or your supporters would considered noble. And GPL v6 might be a nonfree license that allows everything for preferred parties and nothing (without an additional license from the preferred party) for anyone else. So GPL Is a tool that lets a group to take over works of others. And in the end a single small organization gains total control over licensing of project they haven't even contributed to. With a goal that say: certain people (programmers who make stuff for the public) shouldn't have a right to get money for their work.
Re: Software cannot be free, but users can be
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 This is a lot of text expressing a pretty strong opinion, but it seems to demonstrate a lack of understanding of the details of GNU, the GPL, and free software. On Mon, Jan 05, 2015 at 17:18:12 +0100, Gergely Varju wrote: When you say Free Software is a Free a sin Freedom, is the software itself realy free in that sense? No. Software itself doesn't have free will [...] Free software is about ensuring that _users_ have four essential freedoms: - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html Like getting paid for your work (as programmer), return on investment to make sure investors finance RD. They have pretty good moral reasons, and once you are only against their property, against profit your agenda will be a communist agenda, and if you are willing to hurt other people to promote it you won't be any better than Stalin. There is nothing wrong with selling free software, support for that software, or services making use of that software. Your accusations seem to stem from something personal, because the FSF, nor GNU, has ever argued against selling free software. - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html Too bad that it doesn't matter how you change GPL in GPL v4 or any future version you do it without consent of numerous software developers, and without considering interests of the contributors. Much of your hostility seems rooted in this idea that the FSF will take GPL'd software with the or later clause (which is recommended, but not required) and somehow do something bad with it. Of course, bad is highly relative---GPLv3 is bad to some, even though it is still in lines with the goals of the FSF and free software. But to suggest that the community was not consulted is simply wrong: - http://gplv3.fsf.org/ If you do not trust the FSF, do not use or later; but note that you are then causing problems with future compatibility. Further, as the copyright holder, you are free to relicense your software at any point. In the case of software contributed to the GNU project for which the FSF holds copyright, the assignment paperwork ensures that the software will always remain free, regardless of how the GPL might change maliciously. So a malicious change to the GPL would not do projects like GNU much good, because they have other legal requirements. RMS originally added this clause to ensure that GNU software could never be made proprietary in the event that the FSF was somehow acquired or taken over by a malicious entity. You speak about commercial forks for LLVM/Clang. Let me ask a question: Why can't GNU project create a GPL fork for it? Why? We have GCC. LLVM is a competitor. * You aren't free to decide about what you want to do with your own work. Because of copyleft. You certainly are. You are the copyright holder. You are free to relicense, or even ignore your own license entirely. If you license your code under the GPL, and someone asks you for the source code, and you refuse to provide it, you have legally done nothing wrong. You will have lost trust in the community. If you are *not* the copyright holder of the GPL'd code, then you are legally bound by the GPL as a distributor. * You aren't free to decide what to do if the old license gets obsolete. Because your license doesn't let them to switch if it is the case. Covered above. * You aren't free to back out if you don't like the direction GPL takes, as there is no way to back out at new version. Do not use the or later clause, if you are worried. But again, that's discouraged. * GPL isn't about a free market, as it works like a virus (see my argument for GPL forks) it tries to take over the whole software licensing in the world. Without exceptions. Can you substantiate this statement? With free software you as end user aren't free to decide which software you use on a GPL infested system. Free market and fair competition is impaired. The GPL imposes no restrictions on the software that you run on your system. Yet we discovered a huge backdoor functionality in bash this year. It would be much harder to notice an intentionally created but well hidden security hole. Yet everyone has a good chance to submit such code. Even the Islamic State, North Korea, etc. This does not differ from open source. Indeed, your argument is in direct support of the concept of open source. Free software is always superior, because it is free: - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html So certain freedoms could be granted and enforced even for commercial software. If you allow commercial software. Are you referring to proprietary software? Software can be both free and commercial, as I mentioned above. A free system doesn't disallow running proprietary software. And many free GNU/Linux distributions are commercial. But if you understand what went wrong, create friendly license
