Stallman Unsure Whether Firefox Is Truly Free 905
Slatterz writes "Among the theories Stallman bandies about in this Q&A are: Facebook may not share private data with the CIA, Firefox isn't really 'free software,' and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software. Agree or disagree?"
Pragmatism or idealism...? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure we're going to get debates about pragmatism versus idealism. Isn't idealism just pragmatism with an eye to the future? Both want to get the best. The pragmatist wants the best of what is available now, the idealist is prepared to sacrifice now for the best that it can be in the future.
Facebook and the CIA (Score:5, Interesting)
If the CIA needed access to the Facebook databases and were unable to get it (either through social, legal or technical measures), I would consider that to be a massive display of incompetence. If the world's most highly funded spying agency isn't capable of accessing Facebook accounts from a cooperative company, then it (the CIA) should be shut down, since it's clearly going to be of no use at all against more determined opponents.
Re:well, this part makes me wonder if I can share (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't see that as being a bad dream. Is there a necessity for software to be proprietary?
I would've thought a bad dream would be something like.. dreaming of everyone being balding monkeys and throwing chairs. *rollseyes*
Re:well, this part makes me wonder if I can share (Score:3, Interesting)
Is there a necessity for software to be proprietary?
It's necessary for there to be an economic incentive to develop software. Nobody is going to donate millions of man-hours to write the software for the F-22 out of the goodness of their heart. Nobody is going to donate the man-hours to write the software for my insurance agency or hospital.
I don't think open-source is inherently incompatible with that economic incentive but if Stallman thinks that open-source is the cure-all for every single problem that can be solved with software then he is just as much of a zealot as the Microsoft trolls that think all open-source software is communist and evil.
Re:People scoffed at my contention... (Score:5, Interesting)
No he isn't. He appears to support the idea of paid software development and paid services, but insists that the users of that developed software should have the right to copy, modify and redistribute it.
Anyway, I agree with him. Having worked for 2 years with a contracting company that was almost 100% Linux and open source, I can say that the open source software development and services arena is very profitable. We never had a customer complain that the solution we delivered was either based on open source, or that our changes would be open source due to the GPL or whatever. What customers cared about was a) did it work and b) did it not crash (the two are somewhat related). As long as we checked those boxes, they were very happy - you'd be surprised at the number of contractors who try to deliver overly fancy solutions but fail on those two basic points.
More software developers should ask themselves "What's the worst that could happen if my customers could modify and redistribute this software"? For proprietary software, it means you can no longer hold customers to ransom and insist on yearly revenue generating "updates". For developers who get paid for hours worked doing actual development and support, this is no problem. I prefer the latter - getting paid for actual work just seems more honest.
Re:well, this part makes me wonder if I can share (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody is asking them to. The developers that wrote the F22/insurance/hospital software would still get paid, because the software has to actually be written, and they'll get paid for modifications and support too. What they can't do is get their customer reliant on some bit of closed software, and then jack up the cost of that software a couple of years down the line when replacing it with something else is almost impossible.
What's the worst that could happen if hospitals actually used open source systems? That open standards would be developed and utilised, and that information interchange between systems would be many times easier? That patients might have some degree of control over their own data? That vendor lock-in, the type leading to the failure of the "£50 billion, largest civilian IT programme in the entire history of the world" [blogspot.com] might be avoided? I could support that.
I don't think Stallman's in reality... (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, many people have accused him of this, but reading his response how he came about to his free software ideals really doesn't strike me that he quite understands why software costs money. Kind of like how warez kiddies I knew in highschool didn't quite understand why those pirated copies of Photoshop weren't free to begin with. Coding on a PDP-10 in the 80's is great ... but now we're at an age where thousands upon thousands of software developers have to make a living *somehow.* Calling commercially closed source developed software a social problem is extreme. I couldn't imagine an age of software development where I could buy something, freely replicate it and expect the application developer to make money on it in other ways than dragging their heels on supporting it. How does he expect software developers to make a living?!
So What? (Score:2, Interesting)
You know what? So what if firefox is not completely free?
It is a superior piece of software - I would use it in preference of IE even if it were completely proprietary.
I would give Opera a more serious consideration if that were the case though.
Re:Pragmatism or idealism...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't idealism just pragmatism with an eye to the future?
Pretty much, yes. RMS's point - with which I agree entirely - is that it's impractical to give control of your data to someone else. If you go with proprietary software, that's exactly what you're doing. The other party may very well treat you respectfully, and it may even be in their best business interest to do so, but that says nothing about whether they'll stay in business or whether the giant corporation buying them will be so customer-oriented.
People talk about using proprietary solutions for their practicality. That might be true in the extreme short term, but in the long term that just doesn't make sense. Idealism is pragmatism. The two are inseparable.
Re:He doesn't say Firefox isn't really free softwa (Score:2, Interesting)
So software written in C# or VB is not free software?
How about applications written in Java before it was open source.
Heck say you used cc vs. gcc to compile your code.
Using non free modules is just like using a non-free compiler as you are building in code that you may not have the full source with.
I myself am a larger support in Open Specification vs. Open Source. (Yes you can have Open Source code which isn't Open Specification) as Open Specification is real free speech as you explain how the application works. Vs. just giving them the source no matter how sloppy or cryptic or incorporating platform particular commands (Eg. Saving Floats in binary format of the particular hardware, Different platforms and hardware will save this data in different format). An Open spec tells the person what is happening and allows you to create a new app that can do the same thing or better or communicate with the app.
Who was derived from whom? (Score:4, Interesting)
Richard, you're rewriting history. The licenses of open source software are more often derived from sources like the BSD and MIT licnses, which are at least as old as the GPL.
Firefox could stand to lose Stallman's blessing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who cares.... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd hardly call someone that still uses lynx an expert. He probably barely knows what facebook is, obviously someone has told him.
He's a guy living in the past and in a bubble. He's never had to do one day of REAL work. He's only ever worked at a university and he now works for the FSF.
Not only this but he is such a boring shell of a man, his life exists for the sole purpose of promoting freedom, he never talks about anything else. That's dangerous when you've become so insane about a topic, how are you suppose to see another persons point of view?
If anything Mark Shuttleworth is more relevant then Stallman. Why? Let's look at Firefox and the trademark license agreement. Shuttleworth went in there and negotiated with Mozilla to drop the license agreement for all linux distributions.
What would Stallman have done in that situation? He would have bitched and moaned for years about it without ever contacting Mozilla.
Re:well, this part makes me wonder if I can share (Score:3, Interesting)
What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments?
Don't confuse "paid" with "proprietary". When I've done contract work for businesses, they've all expressed roughly the same sentiment: It really doesn't matter who has access to the source code, so long as the software works.
In fact, the smarter niche companies will insist that they at least have access to the source code themselves, so that they can hire another contractor.
What about gaming?
What about it?
The tricky part is cheating in a multiplayer game. An open source Counter-Strike or Halo client would mean no end to aimbotting. An open source WoW client would mean no end to Glider and friends.
These are real problems -- understand that nothing I'm about to say completely resolves them.
The first consideration is, not all games automatically get a significant advantage out of giving players AI help. In fact, it might be interesting to have a game in which part of the challenge is writing/obtaining the perfect set of mods to be able to cheat the best you can.
But I would be saddened to see the death of first-person shooters.
Another consideration is, single-player games aren't really affected by this. To anyone who's ever suggested that no DRM would work better than DRM on games, well, once you have no DRM, there really isn't much advantage to keeping the source closed on a single-player game. In fact, there may be some advantage -- if the open source community does what it does best, and ports your game to their own pet platform, that means more sales for you without more work.
But I would miss multiplayer games, and multiplayer games are also part of how you address the problem of DRM. WoW doesn't need anti-piracy measures, because the only way to "pirate" the game and not pay a monthly fee is to set up your own pirate server -- and then, who are you going to play with?
Stallman has conceded one interesting point -- that he sees value in a game for which the software is open, but the artwork and design is not. This has since happened -- Quake 3 Arena is entirely open source, but the artwork, levels, etc are all still copyrighted. So you can use the software for whatever you want -- there are some amazing mods (more accurately, Total Conversions) using the Quake 3 engine, which can be downloaded entirely for free, because they don't use any of the Quake 3 data. But you still have to buy the game if you want to play Quake 3 Arena, and not OpenArena (which is horrible) or World of Padman (which is completely different).
It's also interesting in its inconsistency -- Stallman has no problem with copyright, or with any work of art being regarded as proprietary -- except in the case of software.
Oh, so to answer your question: There could indeed be a lot of gaming still going on. But we would be giving some things up. Gaming seems to be about the only place where the proprietary-ness of the software benefits the end-user, though.
Re:Facebook and the CIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah. My favorite spy-story of all time has to be CryptoAG and the NSA. CryptoAG is a Swiss company that manufactures secure communication products, and has been doing so since World War II. Suspicious characters use their services. But it was compromised from the start by the US Government. The story goes that the head of the NSA back in the fifties visits CryptoAG and says something like, "The US Government spends MILLIONS on secure communication software every year. How would you like to earn some of that business? And in a completely unrelated topic, it would sure be nice if we had some way to listen in on what those Communists are yammering on about so we could prevent them from taking over the world, wouldn't it?"
Yeah. CryptoAG products, trusted by dictators, business, and terrorists alike, was compromised for over three decades until the Iranian intelligence agency figured out someone was listening to their conversations and busted CryptoAG.
Re:Leave Stallman alone *sobs* (Score:2, Interesting)
And my "choices" are limited even more by the fact that I must take when they give me but I cannot take "nothing." I can't ask them to sell me the computer without an operating system, because then they wouldn't be able to "support it." (As though they can support it if it goes tits up and does have Windows installed one it).
So, what's worse? Getting stuck with (and paying for) an operating system I don't want, and not having the choice of which version of the operating system I don't want? Or being unable to have no operating system so I can run the software I want?
Playing what I want on the guitar sounds like a good alternative. And though I think Stallman is a marxist nut, I'll invite him over for free sandwiches. He can even bring a homeless guy.
Can we agree a small thing: (Score:2, Interesting)
Names and Brand Identity: Intellectual Property Everyone believes in.
I'm pretty annoyed by mindless rejection of everything Intellectual Property-related because some parts of the law aren't equitable, reasonable or decent. There's one poster to Slashdot (rms, is that you?) who goes by the name IDontBelieveInImaginaryProperty, with a link to EndSoftwarePatents.net. This individual has a name and an identity which aren't physical property (they may be correlated to a human being or a small shell script somewhere), but they're very much intellectual property. What would rms do if I passed myself off as rms, or supplied copies of any GNU software that was inferior product masquerading as the original?
Firefox - Iceweasel (Score:3, Interesting)
> iceweasel was kind of a dick move from developers that didn't want to live up to the same expectations as everybody else.
You are missing the point as to who the 'dick' here is. It's Moz Corp. Take the .src.rpm for firefox from Fedora and issue an rpm --rebuild on it. You can't redistribute the result of that command without entering into a trademark license agreement with Moz Corp. That isn't true for any other package in the Fedora repos, because for any other package such a requirement would be considered a bug. Any other package would get renamed or removed to comply with their requirement that all packages be redistributable, modifiable and not legally encumbered such that Fedora has a special right to distribute. It is way past time for Firefox to go from any free distribution. Debian finally did the Iceweasel rename, now it is Fedora's turn to do the right thing. RedHat can certainly keep the branded version in RHEL but if Fedora is going to stick to it's Free Software only stance it must rename.
Free Software Ethics Lesson (Score:4, Interesting)
Hello? Mods on crack!
iceweasel was kind of a dick move from developers that didn't want to live up to the same expectations as everybody else.
I'm not certain why you think it's a "dick move" to do something that you're allowed to do. But I AM certain that they are living up EXACTLY to the same expectations as everyone else.
Oh! I can field this one... As someone who once made a fairly shitty, uncourteous move myself...
See, back in the late 90s I made a fork of the game XEvil. XEvil v1 was GPL'ed, while XEvil v2 was not. I forked a late version of v1 and called it "XEvil Mutant Strain" - added some characters and weapons and stuff, put my name on it, etc. It even wound up on a CD release of Linux games.
So why was this a shitty thing to do? Basically, during all this, I wasn't thinking in terms of how to be courteous to the original author of the software. In the case of Mutant Strain it was like "I'm gonna fork this 'cause I don't approve of your new license" - followed by a lot of shoddy work, and promotion of said shoddy work, using the name XEvil and without being courteous or thankful for the original code I was working from. I didn't do enough to distinguish my project as a fork and I didn't do enough to recognize the original author.
So I can appreciate the perspective from which someone says it was a shitty move to call the fork IceWeasel. I never really thought of it like that before - mostly I just thought the name choice was kind of funnny. But the fact that the name choice is kind of a parody (especially given all the name changes Firefox was subject to early on) is kind of ungrateful in a way - almost like the people who chose the name wanted to express spite toward the Firefox folks for creating the condition in which they couldn't change the source to fit their distribution and still call it Firefox. I think a more appropriate attitude is continuing thanks for making Firefox source free in the first place, even if there are uncomfortable limitations.
Re:I Just Took A Huge Shit (Score:2, Interesting)
And what's the difference from them doing that with a GPLed program? Claiming patents on bits of it and suing you?
The GPL forbids them from distributing a derivative of your code AND doing that. They have to write their own damn code and that raises the bar a little.
The recent ugliness with the model train software involved exactly this scenario. These Kamind scumbags did exactly that. They stole code from an Artistic licensed project, added to it, slapped patents on the result and then tried to turn around and countersue JMRI devs for patent infringement when they objected to having their project jacked.
Re:Leave Stallman alone *sobs* (Score:1, Interesting)
Why would it be a problem, unless you intend to mislead people?
Re:Leave Stallman alone *sobs* (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, because people fighting for software which can be used however one sees fit is totally a problem. Making software work "for you" not "despite you" is totally a problem.
The problem definitely isn't with a piece of useful proprietary software becoming so large and all engulfing that no competition can usefully coexist. Thereby, creating a stagnant monocultured environment with a money swollen corporation killing all forms of competition using underhanded tactics because it has the power to do so. No, that totally isn't characteristic of any kind of forced servitude.
You know slaves had an opportunity to runaway also. But the environment they were in made doing so suicidal.
Re:Firefox - Iceweasel (Score:4, Interesting)
> All they ask, unlike some, is DON'T put my name on it. Is that so bad?
Which is why it is important that we give them EXACTLY what they demand. Iceweasel. If every distribution did it they would suddenly realize that what they thought they wanted wasn't what they actually wanted. Only then can the discussion of a more reasonable trademark policy begin. As a general rule, it is only when you make stupidity painful that people change.