Free Software: An idea whose time has passed?
Alright. Let me save you an hour or so, and below I&#x27;ll point out spots where I take issue.<p>TL:DR<p>Through militant refusal to read up on linguistic context, and grammar nazi&#x27;ing, the author sets the stage for a complete teardown of Free Software.<p>Starts of with intentionally not getting the point, keeps going to explaining the historical suck that prompted the Free Software movement and villainizing the movement for forcing source code on people, and for depriving all those software providers of uncontested captive audiences.<p>Stipulates that whatever RedHat does must be the superior approach to burdening people with source.<p>Complains about free as in beer, and how they shouldn&#x27;t use that anyway, because they should brew their own beer if they actually followed their values that spawn out of an alleged origin myth of Free Software being the to protect people from Bad Actors. (Only partially, but never the only goal)<p>Asserts GPL wouldn&#x27;t have saved anyone from THERAC-25 (not that the proprietary binary only way did either)...<p>Honestly couldn&#x27;t go any further.<p>Excerpts below. If you&#x27;ll excuse me, I&#x27;m off to weep for the time I&#x27;ll never get back.<p>Number one: 
&gt;Those of us who are interested in issues of freedom and ethics and social justice related to software must explore alternative stratagems to achieve those objectives. The tactics of the Free Software Foundation (the insistence on copylefting software and fighting software patents)<p>Free Software was only about one thing: creating software that protects the rights of users. If you came to the movement to do anything else... I got nothing.<p>&gt;The first sign that free software is intellectually bankrupt is that the Free Software Foundation seems unable to develop new generations of leadership.<p>Hasn&#x27;t needed to. Stallman and the Board have done just fine, despite what a bunch of folks would like people to believe.<p>&gt;It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
The Free Software Foundation is famously fixated on insisting that it be given credit for Linux.<p>Noted; but follow up question: Author seems rather concerned about who shouldn&#x27;t be take credit, so... Why bring that up exactly? Also, last I checked, GNU never took credit for Linux. Linux is an OS kernel. GNU is the user space traditionally coupled with the Linux kernel. Together they are GNU&#x2F;Linux, GNU on Linux, or as I endearingly refer to it, &quot;the damn computer&quot;.<p>&gt;Thirdly, the rhetoric of Free Software devotees is awkward and unconvincing. The inflexibility (or inarticulateness) that has failed to evolve the talking points to make them more effective is a failure of politics. To take my own pet peeve, it is unarguable that inanimate objects cannot have freedoms. People have freedoms. Frying pans, as an example, cannot have freedoms. If one were to talk about Free Frying Pans, the only way to interpret that statement is that one is referring to frying pans that one needn’t pay for. When one uses the phrase “free press”, one is not suggesting that the pile of metal and wood that constitutes a printing press machine is entitled to freedoms. The word “press” in that phrase is a figure of speech known as metonymy. It refers to journalists It refers to journalists. “Freedom of the press” is talking about the freedom bestowed on journalists. Most people understand that “the press” refers to the journalist collective. So when one says “free software” or “software freedom” we know that the freedom is not given to an executable file. The expression (unless we are referring to software that we needn’t pay for) is referring to freedom for some group of people that we know as “the software” (y’know, like “the press”). And who are those people who are members of “the software”? That was a rhetorical question. Please don’t try to explain it to me. I was pointing out how nonsensical this framing is.<p>That entire gem, right there is a crime against any and all form of intellectual honesty, and to boot, falls completely flat rhetorically for me through nothing less than a surgical, malintentioned refusal to make a trivial mental leap. Free Software was never about giving rights to Software; it has always been about the rights transferred to users of Software, as Software in and of itself tends to come package with contractual attachments that are detrimental to those whose lives as individual actors may be adversely effected through the lordship of an extortionate rightsholder. It has always been about making computing safe for people, and increasing adoption of the personal computer through the guarantee of actually being able to control what it does. The author just seems blissfully unaware or inapable of realizing that. I was going to save space and not quote the entire thing, but in the end, I didn&#x27;t want to be accused of editorializing or trying to engineer the impact of that paragraph. Stand and weep mortals, for this straw man is the straw man to end all straw men. A quick dip through a literary reference later brings us to...<p>&gt;With all that said, the intent of the adherents to the term Free Software is to seek to promote certain freedoms for the users of software, by depriving the creators of software (at least in the United States) of the rights afforded them by Congress under Article I, Section VIII, Clause VIII. Many programmers are under the impression that “software freedom” is meant to increase the freedoms of software producers. Nothing could be further from the truth. The GNU manifesto and Free Software Foundation take great pains to explain that their intent is to increase the freedom of computer users — at the expense, of course, of software producers. “The Software” is a metonym for software users. The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want, and the freedoms that they wish to restrict for software producers are freedoms that most software producers would rather retain.<p>Ah! Here&#x27;s where we see the intent start to come out! Someone wants the freedom to a captive user base, and darn those free software jerks for giving the world an alternative! They shouldn&#x27;t do that! The Users don&#x27;t care anyway, and I want all the benefits of being the sole source of software to run and full control over how people use it on their computers, and what changes they can make to it!<p>&gt;Prior to 1983, (two years before the Free Software Foundation was founded), all computers sold by IBM (which in those days meant pretty much “all computers”) came with the source code to the operating system. Like Linux (although you usually have to download the source code separately nowadays). Every company (because computers were so expensive that individuals couldn’t afford them) had a “data processing” staff which might make changes to the source code should the need arise (fixing problems, adding features). Many companies, however, were not large enough or sophisticated enough to have the kind of staff which could do this effectively. They would prefer to contract out the maintenance of the operating system software to the vendor (IBM). IBM, however, was unwilling to take this on, since everybody had the source code, and might have made modifications. IBM had no way to know what modifications might have been made, and consequently would be unable to accurately estimate how much work might need to be done. Eventually, due to persistent customer demand, they came up with their OCO (Object Code Only) program — in which you could receive the software WITHOUT the source code. In that case, IBM could provide a service contract for their software as they wouldn’t have to contend with individual local modifications. It turns out that computer users mostly wanted freedom FROM source code, rather than the freedom to use the source code to modify their operating system.<p>Read: Half the reason why computing literacy has tanked so hard, is because a business decided it was too hard to make an estimate, so screw the customer, you only get the binary now.<p>&gt;Two years later, the Free Software Foundation was founded to try to foist the source code on people who didn’t want it.<p>&gt;If your counter-argument to that is “but that was the 1980’s and the nature of software has changed since then — so that situation no longer applies” I have two responses. Firstly, the GNU manifesto was written in the 1980’s, and the nature of software has changed since then, so it no longer applies.<p>A simple yes would have sufficed, though time passing has done naught to invalidate the GNU manifesto.<p>&gt;Secondly, the largest Free Software business, Red Hat, has always had “freedom from source code” as its business model. A business pays Red Hat with the same licensing scheme as they would for any proprietary commercial operating system, in exchange for which Red Hat frees them from the inconvenience of needing to be exposed to the source code.<p>And? RedHat also brought such hits as systemd (the undebuggable), pulseaudio, and various other travesties against decent, god fearing sys-admins.<p>There&#x27;s a bit more in there that actually has some merit, but I do want to call out the sheer brazen gall on display where the author dredges up how GPL wouldn&#x27;t negate the bad outcomes related to things like the infamous THERAC-25, cherry picking a scenario where the lay-user would be given the chance to once over the source before a quick procedure, but completely leaving out the thousands of other professional eyes that would have poured over that design to render it safe during deployment.<p>I can&#x27;t even finish it right now. I might come back later with a follow-on comment when the indignation and awe at this fellow have had time to dissipate.