With this environment, the one big thing Open/Free source has going against it is that nice guys finish last. This is a huge hurdle to overcome and so far the open/free source community is really fairing well. It's nice to see good guys win once in a while.

Don't just whine about poor internet privacy and freedom policies, do something about it.

Do you tell your partner?"

[bada-boom-tssss]
___
GNUTella: Because the client is the server.

The so-called ethics of free software are nothing new, just a retake of socialism applied to the software industry. And they have no real justification, just RMS's irrational hatred of the capitalist system as applied to software. This article specifically states this, saying the following:

"The only stated justification for the indictment of commercial software--apart from nostalgic reminiscences of how nice life was in the early days of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and how horrible it became when printer manufacturers started distributing the software in binary form, a tale that may elicit sympathy from the reader but hardly has any universal moral value (I too remember fondly when you could get access to US National Parks for free by just showing a foreign passport, but that doesn't mean the National Park Service has suddenly turned evil)--is that software is different from other wares since it can be reproduced so easily. But this does not stand a minute's scrutiny."

Yet again we see a cogent argument saying that the whole "free software" argument is based upon nothing more than some outdated and irrational views held by RMS, an individual who, like many "great" leaders, has become bitter over something, real or imagined.

I find it funny that so many people are willing to follow his every word proclaiming how free software and open source gives the user more choices despite the fact that his arguments itself are anti-choice and closed in nature. But this inherent hypocracy is overlooked in the frenzy to attack anything that doesn't conform to RMS's "free" ideal.

So RMS thinks its alright to break laws because he doesn't like them?

So, All Knowing One, are all laws perfect in your country?

And what if everyone who practiced civil disobediance, breaking the law to get arrested, instead felt the way you do?

We would end up with a place Archie Bunker would be proud of. Give it up.

Think about it: if civil disobediance is not breaking the law, then how do these people end up in jail?

Anyway, your position is the tired, old "I cannot attack any of RMS's substantive points, so instead I'll pull the classic take-him-out-of-context and nitpick an ethical dilemma he raises.

First, it is worthwhile to check on GNU's web site what their take on "piracy" is:

Publishers often refer to prohibited copying as ``piracy.'' In this way, they imply that illegal copying is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnaping and murdering the people on them.

If you don't believe that illegal copying is just like kidnaping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word ``piracy'' to describe it. Neutral terms such as ``prohibited copying'' or ``unauthorized copying'' are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as ``sharing information with your neighbor.''

Second, let us refer back to the original dilemma to show how Archie Bunker is taking RMS out of context. Now, Archie, if you are really so concerned about what RMS says, you will not mind this exerpt from the GNU web site:

As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary (18k characters) program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright. But underground, closet cooperation does not make for a good society. A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software.

Clearly, RMS is not telling anyone to steal; instead, he asks, why put yourself in the dilemma in the first place? You lose, Archie, just like on TV.

Most specifically, it's breaking a law so you will get arrested, either cause you think that specific law is unjust, or, like protests who deliberately step two feet past the police barricades at protests to get arrested, merely to get publicity.

-David T. C.
If fake email is 1@2.3, then real email is 3@1.2

Main Entry: prod·uct
Pronunciation: 'prä-(")d&kt
Function: noun
Etymology: in sense 1, from Middle English, from Medieval Latin
productum, from Latin, something produced, from neuter of
productus, past participle of producere; in other senses, from Latin
productum
Date: 15th century
1 : the number or expression resulting from the multiplication together
of two or more numbers or expressions
2 a : something produced b : something resulting from or necessarily
following from a set of conditions
3 : the amount, quantity, or total produced
4 : CONJUNCTION 5

No mention of being sold.
--
Patrick Doyle
"Why does everyone always overgeneralize?"

It has been a binding obligation on some Christians ever since. This obligation is not related to the Sabbath commandment, as you point out.

Simply ask if it is acceptable to engage in a hobby on your sabbath.

-jerdenn

This space for rant

IANAR (I am not a Rabbi) but...

I remeber something from one of Richard Feynman's autobiographical books where some extremely devout Orthodox Jews wanted to know if there was a spark released when you flip on a light switch; this spark would constitute "work" and was therefore taboo, whereas if there was no spark it would be OK. Feynman suggested putting a capacitor across the switch to suppress the spark, I think. By that rigid definition you should very carefully relax and remember not to breathe deep on the Sabbath (which you take to be Sunday). In fact, as programming is mainly mental work, you should not even think about it on Sunday; perhaps you should start knocking back whiskey first thing at sunup, just to forestall any sinful random work-oriented cogitations.

But I think the intent of the prohibition against working on the Sabbath was a practical matter; first, it would help keep people from working themselves to exhaustion, and second, it was a higher authority you could invoke when your boss demanded that you work non-stop (thus making this the first recorded wage-and-hour law, yeah!). This is similar, I believe, to the Mosaic prohibition against eating pork or shellfish - no refrigeration and a middle-Eastern climate makes eating these a risky business. In that sense, my interpretation would be, "have fun, but don't knock yourself out." But of course this sort of interpretation is powered by practical, secular considerations, and you being a theist, I understand that you might find them lacking.

The relevant scripture, if I am not mistaken, is Numbers 15:32 through 36:

And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day.
And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation.
And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him.
And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp.
And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.

Now that, to me, despite the authority of Moses and the LORD, seems quite extreme. Insanely so. (I am an atheist, after all.) But the point here is that this poor guy was probably not gathering those sticks at his boss's command, nor did he intend to trade them for shekels; he was probably trying to gather some firewood for himself and his family. So are you writing this software for some practical use, or instead purely for your own regalement? If the former, and if you insist on following the Old Testament literally, then I'd have to suggest that for consistency's sake you should give it up.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

I sure hope he didn't suggest that! It could not possibly work. Capacitors pass AC current, there would be current flowing even when the light is off. Surely Feynman knew this!

You know, the same thing occurred to me. I may not be a Nobel-winning physicist but I do know AC flows through a capacitor. So I went wading through my unbelievably cluttered bookshelves and found the book in question: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman," Bantam Books, 1986. And here on page 261 (I looked up "talmud" in the index) is the quote itself:

I even proposed a practical solution for eliminating the spark. "If that's what's bothering you, you can pit a condenser actross the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever - anywhere." But for some reason, they didn't like that idea either.

Maybe he meant "in series with the switch" instead, and I'd guess that would work as intended too, but it is an unexpected pleasure for dumb old me to have caught the great Nobel Laureate in an error!

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

If you view it as a practical issue, then an historical perspective may help.

Hunter/gatherers don't structure time as we do. They don't divide time into periods of work and rest. In fact, they don't make the distinctions that we do between work/play/rest/leisure. They just hang out on the veldt and do stuff. Some is interesting, some is boring; some takes muscles; some doesn't; but it's all just stuff. The only structure on their time is the days and the seasons, and those are immutable, so why worry about it?

Furthermore, hunter/gatherers tend to be nomadic (because the land won't support intensive use). Nomads can't accumulate more than they can carry. So there isn't really any point in working harder, or smarter: you can't take it with you, even in this life.

Anthropological evidence is that hunter/gathers only spend 4 to 6 hours per day doing things that we call work. The balance of their time is spent in sleep, socializing, creative, recreational and ritual activites.

All that changes with the invention of agriculture. Farmers are out there in the fields every day, working now for a harvest that is months away. The more land you farm, the more food you grow, so incremental time spent in the fields pays off later.

Agriculture supports more intensive use of the land, so people can stop wandering and start accumulating stuff, like surplus food, or tools, or housing. Specially ambitious and intense people start accumulating armies and castles.

So everyone is out there working hard, and accumulating stuff, and you can do it 16x7 if you like, and eventually you have to stop and ask: How much is enough? How hard do we work?

And the answer that many societies came up with, going 8000 years back to the invention of agriculture, is that we rest 1 day in N, where N is typically in the range of 4 to 10. Our value of 7 traces back to the Persians.

Religion is central to the organization of pre-industrial societies, so the calandar typically became a religous matter in those societies, with attendant ritual, ceremony, and claims of divine authority.

In our society, business has largely eclipsed religion as the institution that organizes time. People work to the clock; critical services run 24x7; factories run 2nd and 3rd shift; retail runs all weekend. And the people at the top--programmers, lawyers, consultants--can work as many hours as they like.

So we're back to the question that the early farmers faced: how hard do we work? How much is enough? And we have to have an answer. People who work all the time burn out, and the currency of the phrase burn out shows just how real and prevelant this problem is for us.

You can find your answer in different places. Some people manage the problem informally: they know their limits, and take time off when they need it. Some people are more comfortable with rules. You can make up your own rules, or you can adopt someone else's rules and follow them.

The ancient Hebrews had rules, and wrote them down; you can follow them if you like. Keep in mind that their rules were written long, long ago, in a wheat field far, far away. Trying to apply them literally in our society probably isn't useful. Claims of divine authority notwithstanding, their rules were written by people to serve people; the only reason for you to follow them is that they also serve you.

Trust me, I know. :) Meyer's sixth recommendation:

• Call the extremists' bluff by questioning their moral premises. Re-establish ethical priorities.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

of course you "know". it's written in your e-mail address, even! does it ever occur to *you* that you might not be the ultimate holder of truth, knowledge and common sense? your points of view might get a warmer welcome, and less down moderation, if you were just a little bit less cocky with them.

of course you "know". it's written in your e-mail address, even!

Hey, sue me -- when there are tens of millions of people with Hotmail accounts, "Zico" is a little hard to come by, and "ZicoKnows" is a lot catchier than the AOLesque "Zico2398." :) Seriously, I think half of my flames come from people just annoyed at my choice of email address. If you notice, though, my account here isn't "ZicoKnows," it's just "Zico." C'mon folks, it's just an email address.

does it ever occur to *you* that you might not be the ultimate holder of truth, knowledge and common sense?

Well, yeah -- if I thought I knew everything, then I wouldn't qualify my remarks with things like "I think" or "I've heard from others" or "this isn't coming from experience," which I did earlier today, or "if there's someone out there who can field these questions, please do," which I did just yesterday. See? If I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't flame on and pretend that I do. I'm definitely no role model, but if more people followed that one little example, the overall quality of posts in this forum would be greatly improved.

your points of view might get a warmer welcome, and less down moderation, if you were just a little bit less cocky with them.

Hey, I'd love to believe you, really, but it seems like a lot of posts around here get knocked down as flamebait or trolls when they don't conform to the politically correct view around here, no matter what the tone is. This and this are just two recent examples of that -- or do you think I sounded too cocky in them?

Cheers,
ZicoHopesThisReplyDidn'tSoundCocky@hotmail.com :)

-- A mother raising children is not considered "a worker." She is treated as if she has no input or productivity to contribute to the "real economy".

But in the case at hand the connection is close, as Dr. Stallman is the living
icon of the free software movement, widely admired, imitated and idolized
(almost like a sect leader) by his followers

Yes, exactly. And when you take away all the smoke and contradictions, what did he actually say: "Don't hate MS", "Don't hate proprietary software."

Well, if he objects to the emotional quality of some people, maybe he should just refer them to a psychotherapist...

If people have had bad experiences that turn into an irrational hatred, then pitching a rational argument at them is not really going to work... And until it's legislated that binary-only distributors can't travel on the same bus as Free-Source-Suprematists, then I see nothing immoral about a little dislike.

• I like Linux because it gave me a chance to run a great "U.S.-Department-of-Energy-and-the-Swiss-federal-government-funded" (dare I say free) rendering app, and the chance to learn some unix,
• and I like Macs because they have a pretty nice UI, they try to be simple, and don't rely heavily on shared libs, and they run my favourite 3D modeller (ok, it has since been ported to Wintel)
• and I dislike Windows for lots of reasons... some aesthetic, some technical, some due to it's reputation, and also because if I hear another person say that Windows is "industry standard and we don't need anything else" I'll scream!

But he has casually belittled the main issue of Intellectual Property

He attacked people's feelings, and faults... neither of which addresses the bigger question regarding intellectual property. Software can be easily copied, in the sence that if someone out there is using some extra space on their hard drive to store a copy, it is not costing me anything extra. Yes, he is right that it still costs something, but it doesn't cost me anything. And it could be useful to others, so why should I have the right to control it? The real ethical questions here are immense, and a real problem for society, especially now that society is Global.

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, so we could be more careful about claiming ownership simply because "I thought of it".

One dog barks at a shadow, and a thousand dogs take it for reality. -- Chinese proverb

This is incredibly ironic.

You're saying that you get moderated down a lot on slashdot by 'calling bluffs', and implying that the moderators are hiding a lot of truths from themselves and can't bear to have those truths pointed out to them.

But wait, look: You posted this with a +1 bonus. If you get moderated down so much for 'telling the truth', how did you aquire enough karma to post with that bonus?

So basically, your complaints about getting moderated down are just a bunch of petulant, disingenuous whining.

You're right, Meyer's article would get moderated down a great deal if posted as a comment here. Some of that moderation might be due to the fact that he's saying things many people here would disagree with. But most of it would be because the article is basically garbage. A big chunk of his argument boils down to "ESR likes guns, and RMS is rude to people who disagree with him, therefore open source software is unethical."

And on those relatively rare occasions when you do get moderated down, the reasons are usually similar - sometimes its because you challenge dogma, but mostly its because you've done a poor job of making any point. To claim otherwise is incredibly self-aggrandizing.

if(bigmoney){
printf("Go to hell %s!\n",&bigcorp);
} else {
rms->sing();
}

There's also a known bug in the random number generator - when used inside subvert_society() it generates larger values than normal. We're not sure why this is...

-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style. o-

-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style. o-

-o Disclaimer: My employer doesn't even agree with me about C indentation style. o-

Hey CompuWorld! How's it going, CompuWorld :) ? Nice mp3 thingy!

So what you are saying is that nobody should bother to write a criticism of something they don't like? The author of this piece has some excellent points to make on both sides of the argument and although he does seem to come down quite hard on RMS and the FSF notion of free software he has reasons which he states quite clearly.

I personally found this a very interesting article with a lot of thought-provoking points. I don't really have much of a stake in free software myself at the moment, and not being biased in one way or the other I found this a worthwhile read about an issue which a lot of /.ers seem to think is already decided.

And you'll be in luck soon - the UCITA will make it illegal to publish anything critical about software, so you won't be forced to listen to all of that negativity any more. Great, huh?

> > Bob Metcalfe, in a recent InfoWorld column, did
> > not hesitate to write that "Richard Stallman
> > is a communist". I do not actually think such comments
> > are particularly useful...

Then why the f*ck did you not hesitate to carefully quote such a "un-useful" comment, Meyer? Fact is, this f*cker Meyer is blatantly red-baiting Stallman, and what's worse, he did it in such a way as to deflect his own personal responsibility for red-baiting him by quoting another guy, and then wig-wagging his finger at him! Christ, tactics like that make Rush Limbaugh seem like an honorable debater.

Also note the obligatory slam in his article against the Soviet Union. Got to bring the old dead Soviet Union into any red-baiting discussion, just for background color (red), even if the subject is half the globe away from that nation and utterly unrelated to that regime. Yeah, yeah, you couldn't get a chicken in Brezhnev's Moscow, yeah, the GPU were bad bad bad, but I'm sick to death of this cliche, this one-sided story about how fanatically, consistently and irrationally awful the Russian Communists always were.

As long as some people are waving the word "Communist" around in the air like a slapjack, let's go ahead and talk about the old Soviet Union. For the entirety of the Soviet regime they had a total of maybe ten years max when they weren't either under active ground attack by merciless invading foreign armies or face-to-face with a coalition of enemy nations, devoted, in the fullest extent of their industrial capacity, to the literal genocide of the Russian race. I am using the words "literal" and "genocide" in their precise meanings. Hitler specifically intended to annihilate the entire Slavic race and he made no secret of his ambitions, instead published them worldwide in his 1924 book Mein Kampf. Go read it; it's online. You owe it to yourself to know history. Go read Toland "Rise and Fall"; the deliberate starvation of all Western Russia was a war goal acknowledged in the formal secret plans for Operation Barbarossa.

Then, no sooner did Russia practically singlehandedly cleanse this ungrateful world of that ultimate maniac Hitler, at a cost of a third of their adult population, than it faced a new enemy, their former ally, the U.S.A., in the person of Curtis LeMay and his "nation-killing," H-bomb-armed SAC. Did you know we buzzed Russian cities with strategic bombers on a regular basis throughout the fifties? Did you know that Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Did you know Nixon did it again in the Six-Day War? Did anybody reading this pay any attention at all when Reagan joked on camera about having just ordered an all-out attack against the SU?

The Soviet Union was under seige for seventy years. Now my country, the U.S.A., is the richest nation in the history of mankind, with no military enemies anywhere worth considering, and we've got two million people behind bars today. Scratch the first, fourth, fifth and seventh amendments for the "drug war"; go ask ESR about what happened to that second one. What do you think would happen to what's left of our so-called "freedoms" if the U.S.A. were under seige for one year, much less seventy years?

Damn, I know this rant I just wrote might have got a bit off topic. Sorry. Mod me down if you feel you must. But this endless mindless f*cking red-baiting drives me nuts. You know, this is on-topic here at /. - anybody reading this, if you advocate or use open-source/free/GNU software, these f*cking guys, they're red-baiting you.

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

So an argument is necessarily invalid if the line above it says "by Bernard Meyer" but it is (at least possibly) valid if the line above it says "by Ernest Brookner"? This makes no sense. Certainly, the history of someone can be used to provide perspective on other things that the person has done, but for anything to be given serious consideration, it must be considered in isolation.

Put differently: you are a drunkard. Someone tells you to stop drinking, that it will kill you soon. That person, however, is also drunk a lot. Does that mean that the advice is bad? No: alcoholism WILL harm you. The quality of the advice is independent of the person giving it.

Meyer wasn't criticizing a programming language; he was criticizing the people who had used that language.

He's saying that those who choose to use C are likely to program by the principles used in C -- after all, they chose to use C. That's hardly an unethical or evil thing to say. If someone chooses, and therefore presumably prefers, to program in a non-object-oriented language, chances are they will not be the best people to program in an object-oriented way.

Illustration of this is precisely in his response to ESR's gun advocacy. As seen from this (Eastern) shore of the Atlantic, of course, he's perfectly right that ESR's views on guns are unethical to the verge of sociopathy - but this is precisely because he's wrong to claim that there are moral absolutes, ethical prinicples which are culturally independent. There aren't. Ethical views are at least to some extent culturally determined, and ESRs must be judged within the context of the culture of which he forms a part.

Those people in the southern United States and in South Africa who in the early part of this century passed laws against 'miscegenation' did so for reasons which they viewed as moral - just as significantly moral as Meyer's (or Stallman's) view their arguments on free software.

Whether or not one views ESRs advocacy of gun-ownership as repellent (and I, being a normal European, naturally do), they are logically independent of his views on free software. Of course one could argue that because ESR's ethical judgement on guns is unsound, therefore his ethical judgement on free software must be viewed as suspect. But in this argument 'unsound' simply means 'different from mine', and, more probably, 'different from my unexamined social prejudices'.

However, the ad hominem argument against ESR falls for a more significant reason. Contrary to Meyer's assertion, ESR makes no claims regarding the ethicality or otherwise of free software, merely about its relative efficacy. Even if the argument that ESR was a poor judge of ethics succeeded, it has nothing to say about ESR as a judge of efficacy.

Which leaves, centrally, Meyer's attack on Stahlman. I found this vituperative, spiteful, and full of half truths and distortions which seemed to me deliberate. The third hand, partial and unverifiable account of the dinner party demonstrates spite.

For an example of half-truths, consider the passage in which Meyer states:

It also criticizes many providers of free software such as Apple... the Berkeley Unix Software distribution ... and Netscape for not observing the exact GNU definition of "free", or using license terms different from those of GNU.

This passage is, I believe, deliberately misleading. In the document to which Meyer refers, Stallman's only significant objection to the BSD licence is that if a software product makes use of many BSD-licensed modules from many different providers, the concatenation of the advertisement lines may becomes unwieldy; a simple, pragmatic objection, not, as Meyer implies, an ethical one.

What Meyer demonstrates is that his ethical judgement is different from Stallman's, and, separately, from ESR's. That's fine. He is (like everyone else) entitled to his ethical judgement, and he is entitled to try to persuade us to agree with him. Having read his argument, however, the conclusion I reach is that his (Meyer's) arguments are intellectually wanting, his conclusions untenable, and his own intellectual stature (on this evidence) slight.

I suspect (and hope) that he is by now ashamed of this piece. If he isn't, then I'm sorry fo him.

As an absolute, thats balderdash, and unfortunately your moderation belies the fact that very few moderators have a grounding in liberal thought.

There are a number of ethics that are a fixed aspect of human cultures. The family. Preservation of life. Do you know of a culture that does not value the family structure in some sense? Do you know of a culture that encourages random killing of its own?

It is nonsense to state relativism as a fact.

Hermiticism does not involve family. Preservation of life is not an absolute moral imperitive, either, as it is often morally acceptable to kill when defending your country or loved ones.

self gratification is the goal behind every human action. Then again, that's just an absolute... :)

First, there's two different senses of "absolute" you're mixing up -- "admits of no exceptions" and "true across cultures"; your examples speak only to the former, not the latter. Show me a society that doesn't place an extremely high value on life in general, even if (as seems plausible) all recognize that there are situations in which it is OK to kill someone else. And besides, the original poster was pointing out that it's unreasonable to simply *assume* moral relativism.

Second point. OK, there's a smiley there, but ...    There's just no way of construing that claim that doesn't make it completely vacuous or misleadingly false.

Old story about Abe Lincoln, who stopped a stagecoach he was travelling in to (IIRC) pull some piglets out of the mud to reunite them with their mother. He had been arguing for the claim that no one acts out of anything other than self interest with someone else in the stagecoach (one of the little details that makes it likely apocryphal, but what the hey). Lincoln's opponent said "there, you just did that unselfish act, Abe" to which Lincoln replied "That was the soul of selfishness. Don't you see, I couldn't have lived with myself if I hadn't helped those piglets!"

Lincoln's error lies in assuming that "this is a desire of mine" entails "this is a self-interested desire." He would have felt horrible precisely because he wished not to see the pigs suffer -- the object of his concern was the piglets.

"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.

Once again, name one culture where this doesn't hold - making an exception to notion of preserving life to defend one's home/family is universally held.

You've done nothing more than shoot down your own argument for relativism.

Preservation of life is not an absolute moral imperitive, either, as it is often morally acceptable to kill when defending your country or loved ones. Once again, name one culture where this doesn't hold - making an exception to notion of preserving life to defend one's home/family is universally held.

Quakers, Mennonites, Old Order Amish, early Christians. Bhuddists. That's five, there are plenty of others.

But these cultures intentionally avoid contact with others in order to avoid the issue altogether.

You're also beginning to skirt the definition of culture. Bhuddists, in particular, exist in many cultures that hold as a predominant attribute, the morals I describe. There are Bhuddists in the United States, and yet no one describes the United States as non-violent.

Of course there were the wubbawubba people that abstained from all sex... 'course they were extinct in one generation.

And hey, wolf packs don't randomly kill their own, they must be ethical!
Termite colonies too!

And I'm not exactly sure how you define "culture" and "its own", there are many tribes that share a common culture, but feel no compunction about killing each other, if you're defining "its own" as the people it's considered unacceptable (or undesirable) to kill, your argument is circular. For almost any other definition of members of a culture, I'm sure examples can be found. (presumably you're excluding euthenasia of deformed infants, female infants or even the elderly all of which have occured in some societies)

But yes, there are no existing cultures that have belief structures conducive to the extinction of the culture. If you can come up with a set of behaviors that are common across all human cultures, that cannot be found in ant colonies, I'll consider discussing them as "ethical absolutes". Ones shared by ants I'm just going to write off as "necessary to the survival of any species with a social group larger than the individual".

Unless you want to advance ants and termites as ethical creatures ;)

There are a number of ethics that are a fixed aspect of human cultures. The family. Preservation of life. Do you know of a culture that does not value the family structure in some sense? Do you know of a culture that encourages random killing of its own?

There's nothing ethical about valuing 'the family', unless the selfish gene is itself considered 'ethical'; furthermore, there are many cultures with notions of 'the family' very different from the modern Western one. As to encouraging random killings, there are tribes in New Guinea where to become accepted as an adult one first has to kill a member of another tribe.

But it doesn't require example to demonstrate that there are no moral absolutes; it's trivial to demonstrate this from first principles, via argumentum ad absurdum. If there were moral absolutes, where would they come from? How would we know them? And how would we distinguish them from cultural constructs?

Thank you, you're now stating my point as your argument - that there are certain values we carry in our genes (which once again defeats your own earlier argument).

As to encouraging random killings, there are tribes in New Guinea where to become accepted as an adult one first has to kill a member of another tribe.

Thats not random killing - its ritualized - and it focuses on killing someone from another tribe (not one's own, which I explicitly state). My example holds.

There's nothing ethical about valuing 'the family', unless the selfish gene is itself considered 'ethical'

Firstly, cut out the philosphy school lingo - you're using lingo you don't understand. I'd be happy to see you demonstrate your proof from "first principles" - you haven't even stated your axioms, so you have nowhere to prove anything from (well, you _tried_ to state axioms, but they were essentially conjecture).

As for the source of moral absolutes - look in your DNA. Its the most complex algorithm ever concocted - if it can construct a working human from raw materials, it certainly can dictate some simple ground rules for using the equipment.

Similarly just because chattel slavery was common in the ancient world doesn't mean it was ethically justified. Morality has, in some way, progressed. Apparently it hasn't progressed much past "don't cut people's heart out," but it's a start, anyway. The point is it's not a choice between a very strict set of moral rules and complete nihilism; there is a very useful grey area.

Moral relativism is an easy intellectual position to take because of it's extremity. It's a useful scientific position to take if you're an anthropologist. But as an moral system it ignores the vast common areas of morality shared across human cultures and it denies any moral sense.

--SolidGold
Everything you know is wrong. Or more accurately, inaccurate.

Last I heard laws prohibiting miscegenation (also known as 'amalgamation' if you start delving into history here) were around in the southeastern US since the late 1600's.

And you know, you probably don't pass laws until something happens.... I doubt that it was based on morality though. Even the morality of the people there at the time.

This having been said, I think that there are absolute as well as relative morals. But the absolutes are the more important of the two. I just wish more people would live up to 'em.
-- I support anonymous posting.

Speaking as a South African: No they didn't. They passed laws for economic and racial purity reasons and conveniently cloaked it in a guise of morality.

Interesting perspective. As for me, reading the ESR essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun was what finally convinced me to take a gun safety & use class and take up target shooting. It's a fun hobby, and once I've tried enough varieties of gun to know what I like or don't like shooting, I'll probably end up buying one. I also plan on getting a Concealed Carry Permit since in California that's the best way to reduce your chance of accidentally violating much of the vast thicket of obscure and contradictory gun laws.

Eric is inflammatory, but he's also right. John Lott is right too.

Yes. I think it's worth rereading Meyer's article with all the ad hominem attacks on RMS, ESR, and unspecified John Doe free software authors removed. It then says, roughly:

These nasty free software people are depriving me of my ability to profit! It shouldn't be allowed!

Which is a classic piece of protectionist twaddle.

Hiring managers should look on them with suspicion, he suggested. In spite of his weasel words about "human betterment", I find this to be little more than an expression of prejudice about C/C++ programmers, and I find it unethical in the extreme.

Isn't this a scream? I enjoy seeing OO industry figureheads' true views exposed.

Yes, we've learned from OO. (Although it's instructive to note how many practices existed well before OO's time, but which OO claims as its own invention.) But when blowhard Meyer's silly rules would keep you from hiring Donald E. Knuth (who loves C), something is really wrong.

Meyer's counter-response about C "not being suitable for large, flexible, extensible systems" doesn't seem to explain why virtually all mainstream operating systems are written in this language. Are the world's finest engineers really so stupid, or is there something to C's success? Meyer vaguely alludes to there being something rather positive about C, but he drops the topic like a hot potato.

Why is this ridiculous viewpoint advanced at all? Because the minute they admit that OO isn't always the best idea, they lose a little power to scare managers into mandating OO training courses, books, materials, consulting, etc. Those fees are the real reason for the existence of OO per se; virtually none of the techniques are new.

Meyer also suffers from overidentification of design philosophies with individual languages. Only dead languages have this luxury. That's why it's so funny that he mentions Modula and Pascal as languages supposedly less vulnerable to "C hacker syndrome." So we're going to put out ads for Modula-3 people now?
GNU OCTAL http://www.gnu.org/software/octal

I appreciate the various responses to my article. I can't really join the discussion and apologize for this (I am trying to finish a book) but would like to clarify a couple of points.

• 1. "Kzinti" writes that I "expressed the opinion that C (and presumably C++) programmers, having learned too many bad habits, shouldn't be considered for `real' OO development projects".
  Sorry, I wrote no such thing. Read what my book "Object Success" says on the matter and criticize it, but please don't attack me on something I didn't write. Especially when talking about ethics.

• 2. Some of the posts I saw accused my article of making ad hominem attacks on R. Stallman and E. Raymond.
  This is quite inaccurate -- a rhetorical device (and, to boot, ad hominem) to avoid facing the points of my article. The article cites numerous extracts from open-source and free software publications, and critically analyzes them. The topics of discussion are not the authors but their ideas.

• 3. I have also seen criticisms of the form "Stallman and Raymond are extremists, not representative of the free software community at large". (Some messages I received include worse words than "extremist".)
  That's quite possible. But when you discuss a movement whom can and should one discuss other than its most widely recognized and respected proponents, who also happens to be its most vocal and cogent? Who are the theoreticians of Free and Open Source software if not the people mentioned?

These comments by no means begin to address the wealth of observations published in this thread, and in the numerous e-mail messages that I am receiving (and which I probably won't be able to answer as I would like to). Let me simply add that I find much to agree with in the posted comments, including some of the more critical ones. I think that questioning the ethical basis of an approach that uses ethics as one of its fundamental justifications is healthy and indispensable; that's what I have tried to do.

-- Bertrand Meyer
Bertrand Meyer (speaking personally)

The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software.

His claim is wrong.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.ht ml

Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible -- just enough to cover the cost.

Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

No it does not. I could sell a Linux system with binaries on one CD and source on another, and charge $10,000 for it, and refuse to distribute any other way. As long as I do not prohibit redistribution I am not violating the GPL. I do NOT have to make anything available over the Internet! Red Hat does, but they do not have to. They include the source in their boxed sets, they could stop allowing people to download it from them and still be legal.

Would you like to buy some?

FINALLY! A high-rated post gets this RIGHT! If I had moderator access right now, I'd moderate you up even further. The GPL, I believe, explicitly says that a distributor can charge money for GPLed software. Of course, there are some restrictions (mostly relating to the distribution of code), but still...

Unfortunately for us, to most corporate interests, the idea of people being able to freely modify and redistribute their "product" tends to drive them away. Oh, well. Their loss.

I'm not sure what you are getting at. A lot of the developers of free software have been poor college students, now they have a chance they would not otherwise have. Red Hat was started from Bob Young's credit card, now it's a giant dev house bumping noses with micro$oft.

Participating in free software helps newbie programmers learn programming and cut their teeth, proving themselves in a practical way. It landed Linus a big job at Transmeta.

Hmmm looks to me like free software is helping little guys succeed more than ever before...

Hell is paved with good intentions.

I think the conventional form of this quote is The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. (Similar...)

Living nearby I prefer Shelly's description:

Hell is a city much like London.

(No, I dont know what this has to do with the article either...)

Point the Hubble Space Telescope at Your Favourite Object.

In an ideal world, there might be perfect identity between the legal and the moral.

I guess this is the position taken by proponents of Islamic law: the relligious law is the whole of the law.

I'd be interested to know if the readers of slashdot agree with this statement of Bertrand Meyer in the article.

Point the Hubble Space Telescope at Your Favourite Object.

Comparing Meyer to fanatical Islamic militants is exactly the sort of slander he criticized the free software community for. Now, I agree that he was pretty insulting and offtopic at times (e.g. his gun control rant) but don't attack a straw man like this.

I Am Not A Philosopher, but according to everything I know, the purpose of law _is_ to enforce ethics. Why is murdering illegal? Because the vast majority of society considers it unethical. Same thing goes for stealing, discrimination, etc. Even higher-level laws (e.g. don't litter) break down at some point to ethics. Therefore, yes, law is meant to be a reflection of ethics, and there is nothing "Islamic" about that. If you can find some other use for law, I'd like to know what it is.

What you quoted there is just common sense, and what any ethics professor will tell you.

[T]he purpose of law is to enforce ethics...

I questioned the "perfect identity" between law and ethics. Law and ethics are different things. The laws may be ethical, but they are not ethics.

And the laws may be un-ethical. Try to persuade the state of Texas (or any of the other nations, states and teritories that still practise the death penalty) that "you shall not kill".

Bertrand cites examples of racial laws as un-ethical. I'm sure you can find your own examples.

If you can find some other use for law, I'd like to know what it is.

This is a silly example, but I'm tired: In England it is the law that you must drive your car in the left side of the road.

This is not more or less ethcal than the more common law of driving cars in the right side. In fact, I can not find a single ethical argument for driving in either side.

The purpose of the law is to make life practical; to enable people to move from A to B with less effort and greater speed.

Less effort and greater speed are not ethical goals, I would suggest.

You can probably find other laws and regulations that are purely practical (and would be a better example than mine!).

Point the Hubble Space Telescope at Your Favourite Object.

It's hard to even imagine what a perfect world would be like. However, it seems to me that there'll always be a disconnect between the legal and the moral. The problem is that when you create legislation, you must be willing to enforce it. If you are going to enforce the legislation, it means you will be willing and able to impose penalties on those who violate it. If you are going to impose such penalties, you must have a clear standard that allows you to identify wrong-doers. The standard must not be subjective - you cannot expect people to abide by a law that is not clearly defined.

In a perfect world, perhaps there would be a lot more agreement about terms that are currently considered subjective (such as "offensive"). Thus, laws could be enacted that would otherwise be too subjective. I am not sure though: in a perfect world, does everyone agree on the definition of "offensive" (and other currently subjective terms)?

In our decidedly imperfect world, society's moral standards serve to keep people in line fairly well. There are positive and very negative aspects to this of course, since society's standards don't always make a lot of sense (e.g. people who are good-looking are favoured). However, if your peers judge that you are acting like an !%#-hole, or you are just plain too different from them, you will be isolated, and there are very real penalties for being isolated / marginalized in society.

"The nail that stands up gets pounded down." (Chinese proverb (I think))

Suppose the law were made by people who were informed and interested in protecting the public above other considerations. Wouldn't they simply codify what is right and wrong? Sure, this isn't an ideal world, so we have things like DMCA, but we can dream...

I think the following paragraph sums it up; Meyer writes:

ISE's own experience with free software has included both kinds. Recently, we have had more than our share of the second; we have had to cancel one major project, and reengineer a product completely, after wasting many person-months and disappointing customers, because of the deficiencies of two separate GNU products (the GCC compiler for Windows and the editor under GTK). In both cases the scenario was the same: fixes to well-known bugs being promised and promised again; everyone waiting for months and months, until it becomes clear that nothing will happen; in the end, having to write off all the affected developments. Since no one is in charge, and you didn't pay for the products, there is no one to blame.

Obviously, he doesn't understand that free software isn't a gift from God, it's a collaborative process. Rather than cancelling his projects, he should have fixed whatever he perceived to be wrong with those tools and submitted the fixes to the free software community. Whatever he thought was wrong couldn't have taken his people more than than a few months.

He says he is looking for someone to "blame". He gets that with commercial software. Other people, however, want to get a product out and are looking for an opportunity to fix things, and that's what open source software gives them.

My attitude towards open source software and proprietary, closed source software is that the proprietary software simply makes no sense in the long run in a free market. I believe that the cost structure for software is such that the only rational thing for end users is to collaborate and share development costs, cutting out the middlemen. There might be other vehicles for accomplishing that kind of collaboration, but open source software seems to work particularly well because of its low overhead and simple adoption.

To me, all the current software empires are short term aberrations and market failures that have no place in a free market. The high profits they manage to make ("disequillibrium wages") are themselves evidence for that view.

I think the sooner companies realize the basic facts about the economics of software, the better. In the long run, good, solid businesses to be in are software-related service businesses, hardware businesses that manage to increase their profits through software that is synergistic with what they sell, and entertainment/personal service businesses that use (free) software to drive customers to them. And I think, despite all the rhethoric, that's roughly what Stallman is saying as well.

My economic analysis might, of course, be wrong. But, then, who knows, it might be right, too.

I agree that being stuck with software that doesn't do what you want is a pain. But does having someone to blame get you out of your hole any faster? I know you can pay a software house (i.e. Oracle and friends) to give you the kind of support that Meyer would have liked in the cases he refers to, but how much is that compared to paying a contract programmer to fix a problem? Borland or Microsoft aren't even going to blink if you just went to Best Buy, bought their compiler and found out it was broken 10 months down the road. Do you have to site license for 25 seats before they care? 100 seats? Pay $10,000 per year for a support contract?

Frankly, I'd like to know. If it costs as much to get personal programming attention from a big corp as I think it does, I see a big business in the future for programmer houses doing contract-based improvements to free software.

And, for the economic theorists in the audience, you could actually have competition for software improvement contracts. Sure, the people who wrote it would be better at fixing it, but if they decide to be jerky and charge too much, some one else can charge less. Competition == lower prices for everyone. Now the software houses can't treat you like garbage because you aren't enslaved to them for software support.

Perhaps I'm just dreaming, but I think I can get paid just fine in a system like that.

Stan Seibert

Free Software advocates are very concerned about "forking," but I don't see the big deal. Emacs isn't any worse because JWZ forked XEmacs. In fact, the competition has improved it quite a bit. It adds a little extra work for the Emacs community, but it is work that apparently people are willing to do to be able to maintain their choice of text editor.

The same is true for the even more famous BSD forks. Is anyone worse off because their are three BSDs. Their market share might not look as good on paper because it is divided among three different OSes, but I would bet that the FreeBSD user that wants to run a BSD on his new Sparc is glad for NetBSD, and I would also bet that he is glad to have a "secure by default" variant for his firewall.

Forks happen, and if they people forking the software are good enough, we get a horserace. Competition is good for software, and as long as the source code is available everyone wins.

Ah, I see what you mean. That's another question altogether. Maintenance is clearly important, but it is the "masses" that are truly critical to Free Software projects.

Part of the fun of Free Software is that the success of a particular piece of software depends entirely on the users. We don't currently have 20 versions of Emacs because users don't like to be stranded. Just because the software is free doesn't mean that the users want to get stuck in some technological backwater.

For example, let's say that the maintainers of Apache all got way too much sun and decided that they would no longer support the English language but would instead standardize on Pig Latin. They could praise Pig Latin until they were blue in the face, and could write tons of code that would automatically translate your HTML to Pig Latin for you, but their users would still ignore them completely. Someone would get a recent copy of the CVS source before the Pig Latin decision and their would be a new version of Apache called Apache-No-Pigs within the week. The users would find bugs in Apache-No-Pigs instead of Apache, patches would flow towards Apache-No-Pigs instead of Apache, and all would be right with the world.

The biggest reason that Linus's word is law when it comes to the Linux kernel is that the people that disagree with Linus know that their version of Linux would have to be extraordinarily more useful than Linus's version for it to fly. And they would have maintain their advantage long enough for their version to get enough users to maintain itself. Linus has the support of the Linux community, and unless someone can come up with something much cooler he will continue to have that support. Linus's versions gets tested, Linus's version gets patched, and Linus's version sets the standard.

That is why people work so hard to get their source included in the kernel distribution. They know that if they can't make their software exciting enough that Linus will include it in Linux that they will be stuck maintaining their own version of Linux by themselves. Which, of course, would be a major hassle.

The same thing is true of gcc. If the contribution is good enough, then it will get in. If not, you can bet that no code that depends on it will make it in either :).

If you've got your original authors being 'jerky' then they may decide not to allow changes

That is a possability, but you'll have your fixed version. Your itch is scratched. You now have the option to post your fixes to the public. You can either fork the project yourself, or sombody else might incorperate your patch and a few of their own and fork it for you. Possably the original developer(s) will take that as a wake up call and come around, or the community will likely back the forked development (nobody likes a jerk) and the problem gets solved that way.

As a manager, I don't know if I would want to encourage that kind of mentality in my subordinates. But then again, I'm not in that position, so I don't know what other issues I'd be having to deal with.

Stan Seibert

I am convinced that this sort of a story is a myth. In the real world people get fired for being incompetent. Especially if they bungle an expensive software development project by choosing the wrong tools for the job.

After all, the CEO doesn't care that it's Microsoft's fault, he only cares that his software doesn't work, and his competitor's does.

Many years ago it was believed that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM." And then, very suddenly this motto became very, very untrue. Some of your competitors may lead you to believe that you are better off with commercial software because it gives you a finger to point, but in the real world that simply isn't true. If your job is on the line, make sure you pick the best tools for the job. If it appears to be a toss up, give precedence to software that you yourself can fix personally.

In fact, one of the good things about Free Software is that it is inexpensive to test. You can easily run preliminary tests while the software is still in the design phase. If the free software tools are good enough, then you're set. If not, you haven't really spent any money, and the hardware is still available for the proprietary tools. If the software works, the non-technical folks won't even ask what tools you used, and if it doesn't work, the fact that the project failed because of Microsoft will probably not save you.

I'm not convinced either that telling your boss that the problem will be fixed in 30 days by Microsoft will be okay if he wants the job done in 10 days. You'll be screwed either way. I suppose if you really like your job, at least you can spend nights and weekends fixing free software instead of sweating over whether some programmer far away is going to deliver on time. His pay doesn't depend on you, so why should he rush?

It sounds like a scary predicament to be in.

Stan Seibert

No. But it allows for accountability. Let's say your company wants to make a product that does Foo.

I can understand your point. In a corperate setting, not getting blamed does take precidence over actually doing something useful. The blame game can cut both ways though.

While you're waiting for the fabled MS-Bar2.1 to come out, your competition throws $10,000 (which will buy a great deal of beer) at those college kids and gets a fixed gBar. About the time MS tells you that the fabled MS-Bar2.1 is only a week away, the competition rolls out their gBar based product. Now the question is "Why did you bet the farm on a vendor that NEVER releases on time.

Accountability is nice if the objective is to ship blame out the door, but it's useless if you'd rather ship product.

Actually - I have had good experiences with this sort of thing, although you have to go back a ways for it. I used to use Zortech C++ (IIRC, the first native C++ compiler for x86), to write DOS and Windows 3.x apps - I found a wierd bug in the linker, emailed them, got a reply and a fix from Walter Bright, the guy who wrote the compiler (although not actually the linker!). I was very impressed. Of course, then they got absorbed by Symantec and started to suck a little. I stopped getting free/cheap updates, and they became a 'big company'.

For contrast, similar types of problems with MS Access (2.0 - around the same sort of time), were solved by reading the Compuserve forum for Access - all MS did when you called them was search the knowledgebase that I had already searched. [when Win95 first came out, the Access ADT would make setup disks using the DLLs from your installation. If you made them on a 95 machine, and then installed on a 3.x machine, it killed OLE completely on the target machine.]

How many compilers to Borland et al really sell, anyway? I have bought BC++ in the past, and found it good, but not really better/different than VC++... the main driving force in upgrading has been support for new executable types (win32 PE) or APIs (ATL).

-- "there's nowt so queer as folk"

The problem seems to be he is working from a set of preconcieved results as definite as the ones he claims for Eric and RS - who he immediately demolishes for their personal behavior (by anecdote for RS, though probably true, and because Eric is a self-confessed gun nut, and DARES to be pro-gun on his own, personal website, suddenly everything he has said about OSS is worthless....)
He claims there exists an Absolute base moral code, when in fact all such things are established by the society they exist in (his main example is that killing a innocent man is morally wrong - and indeed, most acceptable societies agree with him; however, it all depends on who gets to define "innocent". if I am "guilty" of holding certain beliefs, refusing to do certain things *I* find morally unacceptable, having certain deformities or genetic abnormalities, I may well be sentenced to death in some societies, who would believe they were doing what was morally right). Second, he states the ONLY reasons free software is free: that it was developed at public expense, that it was given away by a company, or that it was developed by someone with no other monetary concerns. (I am forced to assume here he got so distracted by Eric's gun essay that he forgot to read the OSS stuff on that page). Apache is the prime example here - it was developed by a group of people who, individually, needed to write a webserver, and decided one really good one between them would be easier than one mediocre one each.

ok, to get back to the plot. He then comes up with a mythical Closed Source product, so good that its manufacturer is willing to indemnify the users for loss due to its use, rather than the standard "loss limited to purchase price of goods" deal. Can I have one of those? All I can seem to find on MY shelves are products of the latter kind - whose bugs take months to fix, and often the newer, less bug-ridden package requires you repurchase, rather than get a free update. Most of the rest of this piece seems to be of the same quality - generate a straw-man that can be easily attacked, then attack it. I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website, and can't imagine having it in a nationally-distributed magazine.......
--
        -=DaveHowe=-

No - it doesn't look like you read the article very carefully. On the one hand he dislikes the free software movement because it doesn't directly reward coders (he doesn't think free is necessarily good), and then - as you rightly pointed out - he complains when fixes don't come for free, contradicting himself!

-- A mother raising children is not considered "a worker." She is treated as if she has no input or productivity to contribute to the "real economy".

he complains when fixes don't come for free,

If the developers choose to release their software free, that's their choice. But if they release their software and don't fix bugs, then it's not useful, reliable software - regardless of the price.
When all you want is software that does the job, then software that doesn't do it, isn't any good.
Pointing to the source is saying "Yeah our software is buggy, fix it yourself", when he wants to hear "We support our customers".

Releasing the source is often an excuse for not having to act professionally. I do it. I have plenty of code that I don't want to support, so I make it free and let people deal with it themselves. That attitude doesn't appeal to people who want software with support.

--
The views expressed in this email are entirely somebody else's

That would hold true for any legacy product.

The point is that in terms of reliabilty, neither free nor non-free programs have the advantage.
The /. reponse (as expected) is "yeah we've got bugs, but so do they!" which is hardly the kind of professional, reliable response he's looking for.

--
The views expressed in this email are entirely somebody else's

He wants a world where nothing is free

you do *not* stand about and snivel that the other developers haven't fixed the problem yet - they may have things they need to work more than whatever bugged you

fit the OSS product to fit your needs

he is working from a set of preconcieved results

Eric is a self-confessed gun nut, and DARES to be pro-gun on his own, personal website,

Free software is free [because] it was developed at public expense, .. given away by a company, or .. developed by someone with no other monetary concerns .. Apache

• Their company uses it and needs a bug-fix/enhancement. Company pays for it. Privately funded.
• Their uni uses it. Tax-payer funded.
• They use it non-commerially. They donate their time to fix/enhance it (for their own good). Donated.

mythical Closed Source product, so good ... Can I have one of those?

Even RMS has to juggle his values. He used proprietry system to develop GNU. He was in effect saying "I will give up my freedom in order to be able increase the freedom of others". A noble jesture, but the fact remains that he has to sacrifice some things to acheive his end goals. Two of my goals are to write good software, and to spend time doing things I enjoy. I will give up freedom of the source, if I think that if ultimately advances my goals.
I should have the right to sacrifice that freedom if I choose to. So therefore, the existence of non-free software only serves to offer me that choice. It never forces me to give up my "right" to the source, because it never forces me to use the software. It does offer me the option of giving up the source if I feel that the benefits it offers are worth it. Anytime RMS argues that the proprietry system is evil, he attempts to remove my right to make that choice.

generate a straw-man that can be easily attacked, then attack it

I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website

--
The views expressed in this email are entirely somebody else's

Why is that?

you (And Bertrand.) give the choice of freedom OR quality

Why is it then that OSS has a given track record of being of higher quality?

If OSS really were as great as its proponent claim, it would be used everywhere. It isn't. GZip is everywhere because it works well. BIND/Sendmail/qmail are everywhere because they work. Solaris, Oracle, DB2, Windows, Office, Photoshop are everywhere because they meet the needs of the users. Don't blindly believe that the OS product is always better than the closed one. It's not that simple.

Sometimes the free product is the best. Sometimes it's not. Anyone who tells you otherwise has their head up their arse. When there is a non-free product that is better than the free one, why is it unethical to use the non-free one?

--
The views expressed in this email are entirely somebody else's

The point in question was whether open-source software meets the hype about reliabilty. Any piece of software in which known bugs go unfixed, does not provide the level of reliability he seeks.
I am force to assume that he avoids Visual C (currently on release 6, with 7 in the pipeline) and MS Office then (now on release NINE!). Any large non-critical project will have bugs. OSS doesn't expect you to pay for them, and will often respond to bug reports with patches and/or workarounds in days - not usually the case for CSS manufacturers, who would prefer you purchased the "upgrade".

If I need to hire a C-compiler developer everytime I find a bug in gcc, then it's probably not a worthwhile investment for me, if I can simply buy a licence for a (non-free) compiler that suits my needs.
You don't - but you don't get to expect fixes to magically appear overnight, either. The whole point is that core-team bugfixes take about as long as a commercial development team does - quick fixes rely on someone hitting that bug, writing together a patch, and folding that back into the pool - the Core team may need to tidy it to avoid it breaking something else, but most of the hard work is done already.

In his mind a working piece of proprietry software is a better choice than an almost-working piece of free software.
and he is right - it is. Users will have to balance out their needs - they can pay money out to purchase a copy of software that has no known bugs (but will have little benefit if they are the ones that find it) or get free software that has known bugs, and either work around them or actively help the fixing process. A big development team shouldn't take the risk of working with known-buggy software, if they can't afford the extra man-days of workarounds and/or bughunting - it is a gamble that the cost of the workarounds will be less than the cost of the expensive commercial software. If he couldn't afford to lose that gamble, he shouldn't have made it.

ESR needs to separate his OSS "work" and his personal web-site more. When he hosts the much praised "The Cathedral and the Bazzar" on the same site as his gun pages, he links them into the same package in the eyes of the reader.
I suspect you are half-right - ESR's "random writings" page were originally just that - ESR's Advocacy of Guns, mixed with ESR's advocacy of OSS and his experiences with meditation, strange languages, and the Hacker Lore. Now that he is "officially" an OSS spokesman, they could well do with their own page. The choice to host them all together was good when they WERE just a bundle of his interests, but now the OSS is his "official" designation, he should consider it "work" not "play".

Apache proves his point. The original basis for Apache was Free Software written at Uni of Illinois (I think)
Pretty close - The apache group started out by collecting together the patches for a Public Domain HTTP server written there; the very first version called "apache" was simply a patched-to-date version. However, it was quickly re-written from scratch, and as far as I know, the current version does not contain code from the original. I will quote (slightly edited - you may wish to look at the Original):

In February of 1995, the most popular server software on the Web was the public domain HTTP daemon developed by Rob McCool at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. However, development of that httpd had stalled after Rob left NCSA in mid-1994, and many webmasters had developed their own extensions and bug fixes that were in need of a common distribution. A small group of these webmasters, contacted via private e-mail, gathered together for the purpose of coordinating their changes (in the form of "patches").
Using NCSA httpd 1.3 as a base, we added all of the published bug fixes and worthwhile enhancements we could find, tested the result on our own servers, and made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache server in April 1995. The early Apache server was a big hit, but we all knew that the codebase needed a general overhaul and redesign. During May-June 1995, Robert Thau designed a new server architecture (code-named Shambhala) which included a modular structure and API for better extensibility, pool-based memory allocation, and an adaptive pre-forking process model. The group switched to this new server base in July and added the features from 0.7.x, resulting in Apache 0.8.8 (and its brethren) in August.
After extensive beta testing, many ports to obscure platforms, a new set of documentation (by David Robinson), and the addition of many features in the form of our standard modules, Apache 1.0 was released on December 1, 1995.

That's it. That's the point. Someone's time/resources went into the patch. Whose? Why? The FSF/OSI/SPI (etc) suggest that the fruit of the funder's resources should be able to be used freely by everyone. Why is that the case? Justify your answer.
It's the same one that ESR gives - if you contribute a single patch to the shared pool, and receive just ONE patch in return, you have broken even; if you get TWO, you have made a profit. If your patch is so wonderful that you could make more from selling it than it would cost you to reproduce every patch you have received for free, then you have lost by adding it to the pool - the whole system only works on the basis that patches you contribute are worthless compared to the whole. What the FSF and kin say is, if you add a small increment of value to what you have received for free, then you should not profit from that portion of the work that you DIDN'T do - if you can make your own work function standing alone, then fine - but if it depends on the work of others and THEY gave freely, why should you profit?

Regardless, you just accepted his point. If such software existed, would you be willing to give up your "freedom" (the source) in order to use it? If so, then your value system is NOT the same as RMS's.
you are right - I am *not* the sort of zealot that RMS is. OSS is *potentially* better than CSS - If there is a OSS alternative, I will gladly work on it, contribute as much of my time as I feel is right, in the hope that it will eventually surpass the CSS product. But I will still be using the CSS product in the meantime - because it is BETTER.

That's because RMS and ESR set themselves up as straw-men.
I would argue the point about ESR - RMS was attacked because he can't consider any other position but Free software - to an extreme few other members of the OSS community would agree with. ESR was attacked for being Pro-Guns - What the hell has that got to do with it?

If OSS is so reliable, why do I get these bugs?
Because it isn't finished - OSS is a work in progress, released to the public. Mind you, I sometimes think MS products are the same, with the distinction you have to pay for them :+)

then does that mean a free product without warranty is morally better than a closed product with warranty?
No, if you think you will suffer losses on the failure of a piece of code, you had better either have 100% confidence in that code, or a legal right to sue for compensation. Problem is, most CSS explicitly denies you that right in shrinkwrap, no-liability-beyond-purchase-price licences that, now you have the DMCA, even restrict you from warning other users that a bug might destroy their businesses too. I invite you to demonstrate to me the morality in that....

>I would be ashamed to have a piece of this quality on my own website
And yet you posted this to slashdot.
Yes I did - if I make a public statement in a forum where there is little or no chance of user dissent (as Bertrand Meyer did in a national paper-based publication) then I am unaccountable; if I post my beliefs in a forum such as this, where you can immediately give your own opinions, prove me wrong publicly if you can, and the very next reader sees not just MY writings, but yours as well - that is a completely different matter. If BM had posted this to Slashdot, I would have disputed his points - but not disputed his morality in making them a pronouncement from the pulpit, as he has done.
--
        -=DaveHowe=-

Yes, in my opinion he does. He paints OSS software as untrustworthy, while giving no examples of CSS doing it better

His crowning glory is a project he had serious setbacks on due to (unspecified) bugs in the compiler. I don't know about you, but *I* have had serious setbacks time and again using Visual Basic and Visual C++

and he is right - it is.

It's the same one that ESR gives - if you contribute a single patch to the shared pool, and receive just ONE patch in return, you have broken even; if you get TWO, you have made a profit

ESR was attacked for being Pro-Guns

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

Because it isn't finished - OSS is a work in progress, released to the public.

--
The views expressed in this email are entirely somebody else's

Not me. I don't use VB :)
Great - can I have your job? :+)

This supports his point that on a reliability level, OSS and CSS come out the same. I didn't hear him arguing that CSS had less bugs, merely that the "OSS is more reliable" argument didn't hold in his experience.
Unfortunately, this IS a example of praise by omission - he states that, due to fixes that were promised for a OSS package and didn't arrive, his project had to be scrapped. WTF? What bug could be so bad that it forces the discard of months of man-hours of work, so insoluble that the Dev team for the package *and* his own personal programmers couldn't come up with a fix or a workaround, even given the full code for the compiler, and why was his code so compiler-specific that the code couldn't be ported to another Commerical compiler to complete the project?

and he is right - it is.
Yes, of course he is - but he is judging the whole of the OSS based on RMS and the fact Eric likes guns - That is like judging the entire Christian body on the attitudes of one Religious Zealot and a Deacon that likes to go shooting.
Personally, I believe that OSS is not automagically better than CSS by some innate nature, but feel that OSS is able to GET better faster and easier, as there is less incentive to hang onto patches to release them as a payware "upgrade"
I also believe that to release a package as CSS is an equally moral choice - but it is more moral to support an OSS project on principle if it is as good as, or has the potential to be better than, a CSS equivilent. If the CSS is the perfect $50 package BM gave as an example though, then the OSS package would need to be pretty good to beat it - but equally, if an existing product has bugs (and they ALL do) and the OSS package has bugs (and THEY all do) then you are more likely to get a bugfix for the OSS then the CSS - as a normal user. I don't doubt that exceptional customers can get the undivided attention of the CSS development team - but this obviously cuts into the amount of attention they could pay to the rest of us.

So, then from a users point of view, CSS is ethical. And if users are willing to chose a closed product over an open one, then I consider it ethical to produce CSS, and so the FSF argument that it is immoral to write closed software is shown to be false for me (since morality is to some extent subjective).
I would argue that OSS is no less ethical, at a minimum - and that given you gain the "additional" advantages of open source and free software (maintainability, freedom to choose your own support structure, inability to find yourself "orphaned" if the manufacturer should go bust or just drop the product), it should be considered more ethical to support it - the quality of the product being equal. To state that CSS has no moral value at all ranks alongside the "property is theft" declaration - neither has even the smallest basis, and is almost guaranteed to lose you support from normal people.

<snip "one gets you three" argument>
Which interacts with ethics, only in the realm of business ethics. Which means, that it is up to the owner of the resource to decide whether releasing the source to their product is the right thing.
That's what I said, yes :+)
In ESRs essays, he says that on one occasion, he told a querient that Opening his product's source would be the WRONG thing to do - he would gain nothing from a business perspective and would probably lose customers he already had. RMS would have ranted for twenty minutes on how he had stolen the money from his current user base and should immediately release the code. Many companies now take the middle road - sell their software commercially for as long as it is viable, then release it to the open source community - and that opens a whole new moral can of worms.

For an individual that's fine. For a corporate entity, the case can be made, and the representative of the corportation will make the decision. I'm not sure how it works with tax-payer funded software (ie universities). If the software was developed for an educational purpose, which is has served, then it should be release open-source, since that should deliver the most value back to the tax-payers.
However when professors start writing software on work time because they want to, should the tax-payer be funding it?
If it directly competes with his duties, then the University is entitled to see SOMETHING to compensate them for that loss - either monetary compensation, or prestige. It would be unusual for a professor NOT to research his own papers and publications on Paid time; Universities accept this, and indeed know that the prestige of their institution depends partly on the prestige of their staff, and that prestige depends on their output within their field. Such papers are freely cited by further papers once they are published, and a tree of documents can be built pointing from the latest, cutting edge discoveries right back to the earliest principles.
In a university setting, I can't see any reason why such should be limited to dry paper, if a Professor can give theory, Practice and Proof in one tidy bundle anyone can download and admire.

<Snip "pro-gun">
Yes but that's not why his arguments were straw-men. ERS's arguments are so easy to push over because they are ridiculous. eg:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
WTF? Just because his personal project was a personal itch doesn't mean every piece of software is. A lot of good software scratches someone else's itch. ESR takes the features of his project and applies them as universal axioms of software development. It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that OS advocates keep quoting it.
Yep, it is a good example of ESR taking his own personal values and mapping them onto the OSS movement as a whole - a bit similar to the way BM took HIS personal values as a universal moral baseline, and used them like a hammer :+)
However, BM didn't find this (I think largely because he didn't read any of the essays, his moral indignation over Gun Advocacy getting the better of him) so I can only repeat that BM made an unqualified, ad-hom attack on ESR.

It attempts to argue for open, collaborative development processes, but spends half of the essay talking about some useful software engineering methods. eg Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. Sure it's true, but it's as applicable to Cathedrals and Bazaars.
Indeed - but these are essays, So wander a bit. they are not political manifestos for Bazaar mode OR Cathedral mode programming, or for OSS in general; no doubt if he knew they would be eventually held up as the Icons of the OSS movement, he would have been a bit tider :+)
He is arguing for the sort of programming he would like to see - and quite a lot of OSS code is pretty shabby (so is CSS of course, but this is in the open where you can see it)

<Snip "work in progress">
This is all very well, but it's not what advocates argue. The argument is, "OSS is more reliable". "You can trust our code because its open". If it's buggy, then it's buggy. Most people don't care why, or how easy it is to fix, they just want to know when it will work. If OSS really can deliver better software, then great, but if it can't (and I don't believe that, on the whole, OSS is by definition better), then ESR (et al) should be honest about it.
I agree - OSS is massively overhyped at the moment; many of the advocates heaping glowing praise on OSS software couldn't code if their lives depended on it, they have made a political commitment and can't miss an opportunity to wave the flag. Add to that the penchant of reporters to "simplify" statements down to soundbites, and such misrepresentations become a little more expected.

Experienced coder says:
"OSS can be more reliable, because when a bug IS found, you aren't forced to wait for the owners to sell you an update, but can look in the code and fix it yourself. If you do the responsible thing and pass that fix back to the maintainers, you have just improved the product as a whole; if two thousand people do this, then you have had two thousand developers work on your code, and what CSS project can afford that? A project's improvement ramps up the more people that join."

Advocate hears this, and what *doesn't* go over his head is this:
When I see projects go wrong, I fix them. When thousands of other people see it go wrong, they fix it too. Eventually we will run out of bugs to fix, and everything will be perfect"
and thinks:
all I have to do is wait

Reporter hears Advocate's version, and finally writes:
OSS software is free, and patches are free; thousands of people are giving you this free, there will soon be no bugs left. Get this now before they wake up and start charging!
The reporter isn't going to write what the Coder said - even if he had heard it, it is far too Geekish. And just publishing "Project X is getting better faster for free than CSS product Y" isn't going to sell papers - he is a reporter, he has a duty to tell people the REAL meaning of his news, and if he jumps the gun a little, he will be eventually proved right - and will have got it in before $COMPETING_PAPER

The only real difference between this process for CSS and OSS is that CSS pay their Advocates, and call them marketing executives.... OSS get them (like everything else it seems :+) for free - and sometimes you DO get what you pay for.
--
        -=DaveHowe=-

What he doesn't get is that at the heart of free software is the contributions of lots of people. Users choose free software over commercial software, and users test that software and contribute bug fixes.

Proof please? Please prepare a breakdown of features in a major free software project (such as GCC or EMACS), and demonstrate that the "heart" of the project (let's define this as majority of features) is implemented by ordinary end-users and not the core development team (who are listed in the credits file). Please submit your response using lines of code, or major feature sets on a feature list, as indicators.

If you have no evidence, please retract your statement.

But, if you are familiar with the cost structure of commercial software development, the long term cost of a software project is often in the testing, maintenance, and bug fixes, not in the initial writing of the bulk of the code.

Of course, users also end up contributing lots of bug reports and suggestions for enhancements to commercial vendors. But that's only adding insult to injury, because they end up paying for intellectual property that they themselves, rather than the vendor, created.

the long term cost of a software project is often in the testing, maintenance, and bug fixes

I have yet to see testing, maintenance, and bug fixing from certain companies...

Overall, you are still a lot better off than with commercial software. If your need is pressing, you can pay the extra money and get the fix as soon as possible, an option you don't have with most commercial software (and if you do, you are at the mercy of a single company). If you go for a more leisurely maintenance contract, you'll still get the fix roughly at the same time as any commercial vendor would release an upgrade.

And no matter which maintenance option you choose, you won't be paying for your own fix over and over and over again. Once your problem has been solved, you'll get future upgrades for free.

Free software breaks the consumer/producer duality, instead of with money, you pay by getting involved. If you don't have the skill or time to get involved, you can pay a third party like RedHat to do the "getting involved" bit for you and in return you expect them to make sure that you get the service that you pay for.

Chilli

It should be pointed out, however, that the existence of a community of dedicated, well-intentioned and sincere defenders of a cause is unrelated to the ethical value of that cause.

...simply a reminder that no idea can be justified on the basis of the quality of its supporters. The observation works the other way too: bad people can defend good causes.

And later on...

Eric Raymond, another of the leaders of the free software movement (who prefers the term "open source") uses his Web page to proselytize for gun rights.

So:

• Richard Stallman doesn't have manners.
• Richard Stallman is the head of FSF.
• Eric Raymond is BAD because he plays with guns.
• Eric Raymond is a advocate of "Open Source"

• ... but no idea can be justified on the basis of the quality of its supporters

From this premises you can get to one of the following conclusions:

• Bertrand Meyer doen't think logical since it contradicts himself.
• Bertrand Meyer does think logical but he skews the article in order to blame Free Software for the failure of his company.
• Bertrand Meyer doesn't care about logic as long as he can get an article in this magazine.

Some notes:

• I am an European living in US and I am against weapons, incidentally by the same reasoning as Dr. Meyer.
• Dr. Meyer's language Eiffel was an interesting academic exercise but he had a MAJOR flaw (at least last time it checked it, two years ago): it didn't allow incremental compilations since the compiler have to decide which methods to make virtual and it had to scan the whole source of the project. Sorry Doc, this doesn't fly.

The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software.

-- A mother raising children is not considered "a worker." She is treated as if she has no input or productivity to contribute to the "real economy".

If Meyer thinks watching Stallman and a software developer at dinner is contentious, he should have been there when a friend of mine maneuvered RMS into a discussion on software patents with a patent attorney :-) While RMS dislikes software patents intensely (and I generally agree with him on the topic), he did agree that if software patents were for short periods of time, say 5 years or less, rather than the current near-infinity-in-Internet-years, he could live with them, because programmers could still do their work without too much interference.
And just because many of us in the community respect things RMS has done and many of the positions he's taken, that doesn't mean there's either anything resembling universal worship or liking his Whiny Righteous Anger Mode - there are times you put up with it because he has earned lots of Extra Slack points.

If Meyer wants to attack the free software movement by ad hominem attacks against its major players, we really do need to call on the Object Oriented Programming community to reject this person who not only believes that governments should radically outgun their subjects (in spite of the obvious contradiction between this and the last few millenia of experience watching armed governments make wars and oppress their citizens), but who clearly states that they should use the powers they've acquired to help control who has access to what software. (Needless to say, this paragraph is intended as a flame :-).

I've met ESR once or twice, back when I lived on the East Coast, before the Linux revolution happened. He had started doing the printed revised jargon dictionary, and was sharing booth space at the Tre nton Computer Fair with Nancy Lebovitz, the Calligraphic Button maker. Nice guy, and since nobody'd acquired the collection of used 9-track tapes he'd brought (in addition to the book), he decided to be non-attached to property and we frisbeed them into the dumpster.

Thanks! Bill Stewart

This isn't news: it was published before March.

Meyer evidently was paid for this article. Where did he say that and how much was it?

Meyer doesn't understand "free software"--he carefully points out that his definition of "free" is different from RMS's and the FSF's or Raymond's--then he can say the others are "extremists".

It would be interesting if Meyer explained whether or not he has a grudge against the Small Eiffel and other free Eiffel implementators--does he think that this "free" software is somehow unethical, and if so, why?

In spite of Meyer's emphasis on error-trapping and careful software, I found that the article itself refers discussion to a Forum at Software Development Magazine online--but I couldn't find the forum at the link given.

Most of his arguments are ad hominem--directed to personalities, and not logical arguments directed at philosophical ideas.

His arguments are unbalanced--it is not clear just why he thinks Free Software is important enough to spend so much time in this article discussing it. All he gives are negatives. Okay, "commercial" software is used by many people too--so what?

If I were ESR or RMS I would not dignify this article with a response. I don't choose the operating system I use because Linus is a pleasant guy to talk to, nor do I refuse to use Eiffel because Meyer rants about World War II too much.

He suggests that Free BSD and Linux are no good because a few experts looked at the source and found some errors in them. Meyer neglects to state the obvious: those errors can be found and fixed--what about all the errors in commercial software that can neither be found (except by blue screens of death) nor fixed by users?

Meyer evidently was paid for this article. Where did he say that and how much was it?

Why? Because he states opinions which you don't agree with? Personally I think he makes some good arguments, irrespective of whether or not I agree with them.

Meyer doesn't understand "free software"--he carefully points out that his definition of "free" is different from RMS's and the FSF's or Raymond's--then he can say the others are "extremists".

Well, if he understands it well enough to be able to point out the differences between his definition and the FSF's definition then I'd say he understands it. Or are you talking about whether or not he "gets it", which seems to mean a totally different thing.

In spite of Meyer's emphasis on error-trapping and careful software, I found that the article itself refers discussion to a Forum at Software Development Magazine online--but I couldn't find the forum at the link given.

And how does this invalidate his argument at all? This is little better than a personal attack - it says nothing about the points he made either way. Just because he makes a mistake his point about errors in code is wrong?

Most of his arguments are ad hominem--directed to personalities, and not logical arguments directed at philosophical ideas.

Since RMS is the foremost proponent and creator of the whole "free software" philosophy then arguing for or against his views is relevent. After all RMS does put himself foward as the spokesperson for free software. If he doesn't want his views to be criticised then he should step back from the position he has made for himself with the FSF.

His arguments are unbalanced--it is not clear just why he thinks Free Software is important enough to spend so much time in this article discussing it. All he gives are negatives. Okay, "commercial" software is used by many people too--so what?

Since the article is about the ethics of free software I think it fair that he devote a lot of space to it :) It wouldn't really be sensible to talk about hot grits or natialie portman would it? And he doesn't really attack the whole open source idea at all, more the way in which its proponents push the idea that commercial software is inherently a bad thing.

The article is about the ethics of free software after all, not the merits of it.

If I were ESR or RMS I would not dignify this article with a response. I don't choose the operating system I use because Linus is a pleasant guy to talk to, nor do I refuse to use Eiffel because Meyer rants about World War II too much.

Why not - if you seem to think this article is such a bad thing then surely they should respond to refute it? After all, not doing so might make people think that he was right...

He suggests that Free BSD and Linux are no good because a few experts looked at the source and found some errors in them. Meyer neglects to state the obvious: those errors can be found and fixed--what about all the errors in commercial software that can neither be found (except by blue screens of death) nor fixed by users?

No he doesn't, he says that free software is not necessarily any better than closed source software. This point is made separately from the issue of whether or not it can be fixed easily, which he talks about later.

Meyer evidently was paid for this article. Where did he say that and how much was it? Why?

Because he argues that Free Software writers should always detail the source of payment for their work--he doesn't here.

Well, if he understands it well enough to be able to point out the differences between his definition and the FSF's definition then I'd say he understands it. Or are you talking about whether or not he "gets it", which seems to mean a totally different thing.

I do think he argues against a straw man of his own manufacturing, and he wrongly attacks personalities instead of ideas.

if you seem to think this article is such a bad thing then surely they should respond to refute it? After all, not doing so might make people think that he was right...

No, I don't think Software Development magazine is the right forum for this discussion of ethics. Especially if it is reduced to personal attacks such as this.

As I said, Bertrand Meyer has the right to attack as savagely as he likes the development of Free Software such as Small Eiffel--he has the background and credentials to do so. That would indeed be interesting to readers of Software Develpment and Slashdot. Rants about Gun Control and World War II should be placed elsewhere. Ignoring them here isn't going to cause anyone to believe them true--it only treats them as the Trolls they deserve.

I have a few issues with this article

1. This is the big one: Mr. Meyer makes the classic "Free speech, not free beer" mistake. The FSF and the Free Software community in general have no problem with sellingsoftware. In fact, the FSF generates revenue through the sale of software.
2. Free software advocates do explain the rational basis for their code of ethics. The example of a car in which you are not allowed to "look under the hood" is used. Almost anyone, even people who know nothing about the workings of internal combustion engines, would agree that it would be wrong for a car company to make a car that doesn't let you look at the engine. We have a right to fix (or even "enhance") our cars, hire someone else to fix our cars, or help our neighbor by fixing his car.
3. He never backs up his claim that free software advocates think Microsoft is the "Great Satan" and tries to paint free software users as being jealous of Microsoft's success. Generally, in my experience, members of the free software community don't care about Microsoft any more than other proprietary software company. They avoid using Microsoft software as much as possible, resent the "embrace, extend, extinguigh" policy, and joke about Microsoft being evil, but very few people actually consider Microsoft evil.

would agree that it would be wrong for a car company to make a car that doesn't let you look at the engine.

Nitpicking again, I know, but

The categories identified here--donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded, taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored--seem to exhaust the economic possibilities...

I know people who have been unemployed, living off unemployment benefits or other state aid, who have contributed to free software as a way of learning new skills and proving them to potential employers. This possibility is not really covered by Bertrand's list, though it could be argued that it is similar to the situation at a University (except that there is no doubt about the ownership).

A similar problem is with people who live at home from their parents' income. Again it could be considered "privately funded".

Any other examples?

Point the Hubble Space Telescope at Your Favourite Object.

WTF do guns have to do with Free Software (specifically GNU)?

Well, obviously GNU is an anagram of gun. :)

This article strikes me as the work of a strongly partisan capitalist trying to intellectually savage a movement that doesn't fit his little worldview. To wit, his breakdown of free software into different categories, i.e. software written on company time vs. software written as recreation vs. software intentionally created by a company, et cetera. Once software is in the pool of free software, it's free software. How does it matter how it got there? This distinction strikes me as having about as much relevance as which river carried a particular drop of water into Lake Superior!

But that's not the worst of it. In the expository section, Meyer states that we shouldn't judge an ideology on the merits of its proponents, like we shouldn't despise the Autobahnen just because the Nazis built them. So why then does he expend the effort of many paragraphs and a few ancedotes (and even a little implicit Red-baiting) attacking Richard Stallman and Eric Raymond? (And attacking Raymond for his gun control views, no less!) It has little relevence to the free software concept, by Meyer's own admission. Sure, he does point out that he's attacking free software by attacking two of its proponents, but he lamely says (to paraphrase) "it's valid because they're such visible leaders." By that logic, closed-source, commercial software has inherent ethical flaws because Microsoft was/is a respected, highly visible leader in that field.

Oh yes, and I had to laugh at Meyer's odd little interjection that it's unethical for the Free Software Foundation to use the word "free" because it's so highly valued by many people. It's a completely unsupported argument, in an article that otherwise takes great pains to back all its positions with a great length of words. And where's the hue and cry over Microsoft's (or any car company's, or freakin' RC Cola's) use of the word "freedom?" At least the FSF states very clearly what it means by "free."

Anyway, I'll come back and read the rest of this article after I've had a nap. I'll even try to keep an open mind (I promise!), but it'll be hard because the first section of this article is brimming with that most famous of biological waste products.

"It is high time for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds to state publicly that they do not endorse the views of the gun lunatics, and that their cherished notion of freedom has nothing to do with the freedom to kill children and other innocents. That this has not happened is a sign of the distortion of the moral values of the free software movement."

What, pray tell, does gun control have to do with the free software movement?

If I were either RMS or Linus, I'd "state publicly" that I don't like having someone else tell me what my opinions are!

If anyone's up to writing a rebuttal to this guy's article, allow me to suggest the title, "The Ethics of Free Software Critics".
--

Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.

I was with him right up until he started his own rant against guns. At that point he lost his rationality, and he lost me. It's funny that someone writing against irrational and unsupported bias should himself present same.

Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief

You know, I've always wondered why open source software is always assumed to be free-gratuit, and why software sold for money has to be shipped bereft of source code. I suppose the argument is, if the developer ships his software with source code then users will be able to compile unauthorized copies. But obviously it is just as easy, no, far easier, to simply copy the binaries than to compile new binaries from source.

Conversely, suppose I am a software developer and I want to release an application with the usual license restricting the buyer, if he wants to install my application on N computers, to pay me for N licenses. If, like the great majority of commercial PC software, my program is not "protected" by some elaborate copy-protection scheme, then basically the only thing that prevents a buyer from distributing "bootleg" copies of my program is his respect for the license agreement, or at least his fear of being caught violating it. The U.S. software industry is doing quite well, despite such a flimsy protection for its products. Why couldn't I rely on the same thing to protect my copyright and my profits if I released programs with source code?

As a commercial product, software complete with source might, for some users at least, be a valuable convenience - one which might attract customers and win extra market share - if they had the ability to add site-specific hacks to my code, or if they could recompile it to work around bugs and security holes, or merely so they could see what is going on inside the program. In that last consideration, I'm thinking about end-users who generate data files in specific formats that are generated by proprietary programs, such as MS Word .DOC files or AutoCAD .DWG files. My employers have millions of dollars invested in AutoCAD .DWG files. Suppose Autodesk goes out of business five years from now, how are we supposed to get our information out of these files? As customers, we would be a lot happier if at least the .DWG format was specified somewhere, but it is not. So a competing CAD software vendor would have a selling point if he could say, "Our data format is openly documented, so your data can't be orphaned" - in fact, Bentley, which makes Microstation, does make such an argument in their sales pitch. And they'd have a yet better sales pitch if they could say, "Our software is open-source, so neither your data files nor your application itself can ever be completely orphaned. Even if the OS vendor somehow breaks something so our compiled code doesn't work any more," (but what OS vendor would ever do a screwed up thing like that? it's unthinkable, really ;-)) "you could still port our source code to the new OS of your choice."

When you add something to a GPL program, the copyright holders retain their rights to your "derivative work." Similarly, if I were to sell a commercial, licensed application complete with source code, I shouldn't lose my copyright to my proprietary program just because an end-user has modified it and made his own "derivative work" from it. So why does everyone take it for granted that open source == zero cost?

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

I think many people and companies would absolutely love having the source code for any commercial program they buy, for exactly these reasons.

But we also need to look at it from the commercial software company's perspective as well.

The employees in the company I work for write perl scripts all the time. I have probably written a couple of hundred myself in the last couple of years alone. Do you know how frustrating it is for somebody to come to you saying that some code you wrote doesn't work, only to find out after an hour of debugging that their changed to the code caused the bug?! It is a support nightmare!

A lot of users and enhancers of code will have the debugging skills to find their own bugs, but many will not...

kludger

On the other hand, I can't think of any fully functional copy-protection techniques in the closed-source world either, so I'm not sure how much that argument holds water. A lot of my friends are W4r3Z d00dZ, and they tell me the only software they know of that really seems to be uncrackable is Bulletproof FTP, and that only because the owner literally rewrites the encryption system every week and reposts the file without making it a new version number . . . so out of the dozens of cracks out there, the chances of getting the one that matches up with the version of the program you've got is slim at best. Though I'm not sure how true this is :)

Personally, my standard licensing technique is to LGPL all the algorithms involved and GPL the program itself. That way anyone who wants to can build a clone of my program. If it's better, they deserve to do anything they want with it, even sell it commercially. If it's not any better, they won't be able to sell it commercially. However, they won't be able to take my work and make money off it without doing some serious work of their own (i.e. building a GUI, or at the very least, a good CLI).

"Nowhere in the hundreds of pages of GNU and FSF literature is there any serious explanation of why it is legitimate, for example, to make a living selling cauliflowers, or lectures (as a professor does), or videotapes of your lectures, but criminal to peddle software that you have produced by working long hours, sweating your heart out, thinking brilliantly, and risking your livelihood and that of your family."

There really is little difference between selling software and cauliflower. The difference is that when you buy cauliflower at the grocery store, the grower doesn't ask you to accept an agreement that states you will not share the cauliflower with your neighbor, or modify it in any way such as cutting it, mixing it with other vegetables, or adding anyting to it (such as dip, cheese, etc...) , nor do they forbid you from growing the exact same cauliflower yourself, whereas these are the things commercial software companies do forbid you to do. You've paid for it, but you don't have the rights to use it however you want. The reason we have economic laws in our society is so that consumers are benefitted. How, I ask, are consumers benefitted when they rightfully pay money in exchange for goods, but are not able to use the goods however they see fit. So the ethical dilemma doesn't have to do with selling software for profit. It's not really an ethical dilemma at all. It's a matter of having the rights to your personal property.

There /IS/ a significant difference between the two goods. It is well known and documented in the economics literature as the notion of 'non-rivalry' and, whilst not many people realise it, it is part of the entire basis for some views of free software.

A cauliflower is a rival good: if I eat part of it then there is less left for everyone else. A piece of software is non-rival: me using it doesn't reduce the amount left for you to use. All literature, patents, television, streetlighting etc. is nonrival to a degree.

Market economies are not capable of handling non-rival goods efficiently (using the usual economist's definition of efficiency: an economy is efficient if you can't rearrange things to make at least one person better off without making anyone else worse off).

Consider some software which sells for 100USD and costs 5 USD to duplicate. Someone, somewhere, is probably prepared to pay 30USD, but no more. If they were given the software for, say, 20 USD then THEY are better off, the software company is better of (they make 25 USD) and no-one is worse off.

The only way that this can happen in all such cases is if the software sells for 5USD: its cost of distribution. However, that fails to provide sufficient incentives for people to write the correct quantity of software in the first place. Consequently the result is again inefficient: not enough software is produced.

Free software attacks this latter problem directly. If free software could supply all software which has a social value greater than its cost of production (ie, the value of people's given up leisure time) then the problem would be solved completely. I don't see this as likely and, therefore, believe that commercial software will always have a place even if it is never ideal. After all without the incentives in place there is no flow of information back to the developers about how needed particular software there is.

Personally, I think its sad to see so many free software advocates/non-advocates completely ignoring over a century of economic literature... [sigh]

The fact that Bill Gates possesses more wealth than serveral entire countries merits some moral condemnation, I believe. If people were not starving and dying of easily and cheaply preventable diseases at this very moment, extremes of inequality might be less outrageous - but, alas, people are starving and dying at this very moment.

Oooh, be careful with that one. Do you give every penny you make above and beyond your basic needs to charity? If you do not, you are guilty of the same moral failing you attribute to Bill Gates or any other wealthy person.

No, I don't expect you to understand.

-- A mother raising children is not considered "a worker." She is treated as if she has no input or productivity to contribute to the "real economy".

Eiffel failed to catch on widely, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. Rather than insulting more and more people, it would be good for Meyer to go back and see where he didn't meet the needs of his potential user community. Unlike what he claims, people in industry are very concerned with quality and methodology. It's just that his tools and methodology failed to meet their needs.

As for open source software, that does have something to do with the success of new tools and languages: most people who make these decisions are simply not going to build a product based on a language that comes from a small vendor. They would be betting many man-years of effort on the success of that one small vendor and be at the complete mercy of that company's future pricing policies and responsiveness.

The two realistic options anybody wanting to popularize a new language has are to open source a usable implementation or to work early towards creating a standard and getting multiple vendors to provide implementations. Eiffel did neither, and so it wasn't a very attractive choice (the fact that many people perceived it to contain some real technical blunders didn't help either). That is perhaps the first lesson would-be language vendors should understand.

In fact there are three small vendors today who sell Eiffel compilers and there is a GNU Eiffel compiler called SmallEiffel.

It's not clear at the moment whether the GNU Eiffel compiler has come too late.

...richie

I also think the Eiffel design contains some serious technical blunders. Within the Eiffel family, I'd say people are better off using GNU Sather.

Well, I disagree with you on a couple points.

I don't think that Eiffel has any design mistakes, however, I can easily see why people might not like some of Meyer's deliberate design decisions. Meyer has gone very far down a particular road (in terms of OO programming) and come up with something that I think is quite interesting. To really use Eiffel, however, you have to understand how all the parts fit together (and they fit quite tightly). If you buy into the language, the libraries, and the method, then Eiffel has tremendous power.

However, if you don't buy into even a small part of that, Eiffel won't work well for you. Unless all your developers are "on board" with the entire Eiffel paradigm, they're not going to have a good time in the project, nor are they going to produce good code. With Eiffel, it's almost all-or-nothing.

Java is OK, and in my opinion, better than C++. However, some of it's creators' deliberate design decisions don't sit well with me, and overall I don't like it much.

Sather, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be making much progress. The community around Sather is very small, and it is (again in my opinion) not suitable for production systems yet. However, it has some interesting ideas of it's own, and I hope to hear more about it in the future. And of course, some of Sather's deliberate design decisions (like contravariance) don't sit well with me. James

http://www.loria.fr/projets/SmallEiffel

...richie

If so, the article should have been written way before March 2000. Why do adherents to the "Church of RMS" dig for such snide remarks? Is it because they have no actual arguments behind their dogmatic hate for people making a living?

Why do adherents to the "Church of RMS" dig for such snide remarks?

Probably it's simply because (seemingly) almost everyone does nowadays. The Bulveristic[1] credo "Try to find some taint in your opponent before (or instead of) examining the logic of his arguments" in all of its variant forms(e.g. "Follow the money") seems to be ubiquitouis. It is, after all, much easier to cast aspersions on someone than to try to refute their arguments. It is also, as C. S. Lewis noted when slapping a name on this form of argument, "a truly democratic game in the sense that all can play it all day long, and that it gives no unfair privilege to the small and offensive minority who reason".

[1] See the C. S. Lewis collection "God in the Dock", the chapter titled(surprise, surprise) "Bulverism"

This is the danger of single-issue proponents: they lose all sense of perspective and start thinking that their perceived "moral" problem is the only one that counts.

This doesn't make sense. In this age and time you expect people to have one, or a few subjects that they specialize in, and deeply care about. Of course war and poverty do much more damage than proprietary software; but RMS's issue is software, not war. There are NGOs that specialize in humanitarian aid, and there's the FSF and other organizations that specialize in making Free Software. You don't ask a leader to have perspective, you ask him to be great in his field.

Same thing goes within the free software world, btw. You don't ask Miguel de Icaza to be fair towards KDE; you're just thankful he's making GNOME better.

Same thing goes within the free software world, btw. You don't ask Miguel de Icaza to be fair towards KDE; you're just thankful he's making GNOME better.

On the contrary - I expect exactly that. I expect that GNOME's 'betterness' to be based on its own merits - if it is then there is no need to be unfair to KDE. Such unfairness then becomes ethically repugnant

By the way - I am replying to this using orabidoo's own example. I have no knowledge of Miguel de Icaza's attitude towards the KDE project, and have no desire to malign his character

RMS's problem is that he is too honest, immediately getting to the heart of the matter and cutting no corners. You can feel the raw indignation, and no honest person could deny that considering the consequences of freedom can be uncomfortable. No wonder he irritates so many. Most people do not have this problem of being too honest.

Contrast this with, say, Bill Clinton, who probably could convince almost anyone of anything, and make them feel great in the process.

Thus, RMS is an easy target for Meyer.

Going back to your original point I think I'm still closer to agreeing with Meyer than you. Part of what Meyer was saying was that the whole "skewed ethical perspective" thing tends to result in people justifying things which they otherwise would not.

The clear case in point here is the issue of breaking software copyright. RMS believes that it is wrong not to copy software if it will help someone out. In other words he believes that the issue of Free Software is so important that it justifies breaking the law.

Meyer does not think so - neither do I. However whether you agree or not the point is that there is a relevance between RMS's "skewed ethical perspective" and the arguments surround Free Software.

Contrast this with what Meyer does to ESR - whose views on gun control have no real relevance to Free Software. Meyer tries to use them nonetheless to discredit him - which is very unfair.

RMS believes that it is wrong not to copy software if it will help someone out. In other words he believes that the issue of Free Software is so important that it justifies breaking the law.

I agree he wants to change the law - but I also think he supports breaking it.

In http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html RMS says

"As a computer user today, you may find yourself using a proprietary program. If your friend asks to make a copy, it would be wrong to refuse. Cooperation is more important than copyright."

In other words if someone asks me for a copy of Windows 2000 or Quake III or that $5million bespoke business application I'm using - then it's wrong not to give them a copy.

Ok so he goes on to say that in order to "live an upright life openly with pride" a person should use free software to avoid having to copy copyrighted software. However the message is clear -it's not only ok to break copyright, it's wrong not to if someone asks you.

At the end of the day the thing which continues to leave RMS at the extreme end of the argument, is the fact that he thinks there should be only one model for software development and distribution - an Open one. It is wrong to make proprietary software at all. There should only be Open/Free software.

This is where I fundamentally disagree with him. I see Open software as one of the possible models, a very good one for certain types of software. He sees it as the only way.

Not really. First, he includes "source code available" in his definition; this is a core and important point which differentiates his definition from "free beer". It's true that the definition does not include certain aspects of the GNU definition (unlimited redistribution, derivatives also GPLed), but all of its elements are part of the GNU definition.

Everyone here has been saying that "free speech" software has only to do with freedom, not money. This is not true. Yes, the GPL supposedly permits you to sell software, but it doesn't really. Everything you sell can be redistributed by the purchaser. In other words, it's entirely possible and likely that you sell one copy of your software and then the buyer puts it on an FTP server and you never sell another copy. If your software is distributed under a "free speech" license, it must by common sense also be "free beer". So all of his arguments against "free beer" software are equally valid against "free speech" software.

It is a common technique used often, oddly enough, by cults.

That's not true: the Leader told me it wasn't.

Actually, speaking of common techniques, using an extreme example of something and then damning by association is just as much of a ploy and logical fallacy as using an incorrect definition.

Is available from at least one source without payment Now, that's not officially part of any definition of Free Software, but it is a direct result of the Open-Source definition from point 1:

The license may not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software

So, as someone else pointed out, once you release it to someone under an OpenSource licence, they can potentially give it away free.
So, the software IS available from one source without payment, should that source choose to exercise their rights.

He should have expanded that point and made his reasoning clear, but since his definition of Free software includes "Available free", that makes all Free Software, FreeWare by nature, so all his arguments against freeware (which is what he mostly argues against), apply.

It just allows him to ignore the benefits of having source.

--
The views expressed in this email are entirely somebody else's

Not at all. Competition is when someone else creates a product to compete with yours. When someone simply duplicates your product, they have a huge advantage over you: you have spent huge amounts of time developing software, but now someone else who has not spent a second on your software can simply type "cp" and sell your software just as easily as you can.

You mention the idea of a monopoly often. A monopoly is not gained by being the only person to sell a piece of software, it's gained by being the only, or dominant, person to sell a certain type of software. Compare this to the world of books. If I write a book and publish it with copyright, you can't really say that I have a monopoly. A monopoly is if, say, I restrict anyone else from writing novels.

Since a customer can always grab the source and run with it, a vendor of free software can only maintain its market share if it completes bugfixes requested by users in a timely manner, incorporates changes they make, and in general, does what is in the best interest of the customer. Having the source open prevents the vendor from "sticking it" to a customer, and also prevents the customer from being "locked in" to proprietary standards. It seems to me that open source forces capitalism to do what it was intended...that is, whatever the customer wants/needs.

--Bob
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?

Capitalism is not about maintaining market share. It's about making money. If I have 99% market share but have not made a penny, my shareholders are not going to be happy.

The problem with open source is that it lacks a motivation for people to write their software in the first place. If someone wants only to have market share and customers (which is a goal in the current inflated stock market), then open source is great. If they want to make money, things are more problematic.

> For the record I don't think it is fair for anyone
> to ask that you release your work as public domain.

Not even if they ask real nice and say "please"? Maybe you meant "demand" instead of "ask".

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

The thing is Meyer misrepresents ESR and RMS's views. They never said trying to make money is wrong. In fact they say quite the opposite. (see www.gnu.org or www.tuxedo.org/~esr) He intentionally made his definition of free meaning free beer, then used that to attack our definition of free meaning free to improve are share with your neighbor.

(emphasis added by me)

When one must expend such copious amounts of time and effort to so explicitly (re)define common terms so that one's argument is defensible, one has already conceded that said argument cannot stand on its own merits. Why not say "the concepts which we put forth can be thought of in a similar vein to that of the concept of altruism" instead of trying to recompile the English language?

Language is an agent of shared thought. It is a tool of communication, and words have specific meanings. That's why we use them, because with the aid of words we can convey to Others what we are thinking Ourselves. Language is, to be sure, an Open Protocol, but it is nonetheless a standardized protocol, and redefining it at one's convenience to make a point is, IMNSHO, reprehensible.

Tha claim you make against Meyer is equally applicable to RMS and ESR.

Of course they can. If, as you argue (and I agree) freedom of speech refers to the right, inherent in mankind, to speak without interference, then clearly copyrights fly right out the window. What else are they but a restriction on free speech? (Yes Virginia, unrestricted free speech would include libel, slander, copyright infringements, etc.)

The way in which free speech applies to free software is that people can write any code they want. Even if it's the same as someone else's. It's not so much that it's free from the standpoint of the original author; it's free for everyone else. And human beings generally work better in communities, where people can use each other's strengths, than they do on their own.

The one exception to the free software idea though is that if you redistribute (which no one is making you do, though it's obviously a Good Thing for everyone) you have to GPL that software, rather than take from the free software community and never give back.
-- I support anonymous posting.

http://tlug.linux.or.jp/rms.html

Regards, Tommy

Upon looking at Stallman's own views, I still fail to see how licensing your work "deprives" people. Ford isn't "depriving" people of transportation by demanding that you pay money for one of their cars. If you cant afford it, that's your problem, not Ford's. How is this evil? The whole thing smells a little weird.

There is a huge difference between selling and licensing things. The key difference is that you pay Ford for an object, and you are in general then free to use that object as you see fit; Ford places no restrictions on its use. When one purchases licensed software, however, one is not free to use that object as one sees fit; e.g., if I puchase a copy of Windows, I cannot make copies and give it to others; I am restricted by the license.

The issue, as I see it, is not about money at all. As Richard Stallman often uses it, it is about the freedom to do what you want with what you have, without restricting other's freedom.

A software license agreement that is not "free" in the sense of Mr. Stallman or Mr. Raymond (they do have common ground) forbids you to alter the product and give it to someone else, even if you give them the sole copy for which you purchased a license. Furthermore, you cannot easily inspect the product to determine if its failure to perform is due to an error or deliberate design.

Personally, I think software liability should be enforced upon those who deliver software without the privilege of changing it. It's ok to make a living from your software, if you want, but you should take responsibility for its quality and manufacture, if you intend to represent it as a product that has value. If you don't so represent it, you shouldn't charge for it...

Perversely, I also think it's perfectly fair to restrict copying, if you follow those guidelines. The immorality I see is the one you find in RMS's printer story -- representation of value in a product (the printer) without responsibility to repair or replace a defective part (software), and provide for its repair and replacement should you yourself become unable. Many companies that create real products make agreements with other companies to provide those services for those products should they go out of business.
--

ssuming away reality, for the moment, if there were a magic device that you could pull your car into and have exact replicas made at no (or extremely minimal) cost to yourself, should that be permitted? is that right? is it OK for ford to invest millions to develope a new car only to have somebody spew out an infinite number of replicas of it?

I would argue that it OK to do such a thing. The morals in American society are pretty much based on the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you don't trample on the rights of others; the law is what prevents this trampling. There is nothing inherently wrong with replicating what you have; you are using your resources to share what you have. IMO, the fact that capitalism doesn't inherently give rights to everyone who contributed to something (and hence the originator/creator of ideas) never comes into play. I could go on an on about this (and I have), but I'll stop here for now; I'm currently writing an article fully explaining this argument.

Ford isn't "depriving" people of transportation by demanding that you pay money for one of their cars. If you can't afford it, that's your problem, not Ford's.

The difference with software is the "Network effect". The software that other people use affects the software that you can use. E.g. a lot of companies interchange information in Winword's .doc format. If I don't have compatible software I won't be able to communicate effectively with these companies.

So you see that Microsoft has more ability to "force" me to use their product than Ford does. Anyone who "owns" a popular communication standard has far more power than could have been envisaged when copyright law was invented. People are deprived of some ability to communicate with *third parties*.

--SolidGold
Everything you know is wrong. Or more accurately, inaccurate.

• The (Commercial) software industry (and other information-based industries) artificially impose restrictions on its consumers, while the restrictions faced by the consumer in other industries is natural. As an example, the only reason I can't provide a friend with a copy of Windows (besides my desire to not inflict pain on my friend) is that Microsoft said so, while there are many reasons why it is not practical for me to provide a friend with a copy of my new Ford Focus (acquiring raw materials, for example). This is basically the familiar tangible/intangible distinction that you identify as apples and oranges. It is this distiction that allows me to say that restrictive software (information) producers are depriving people, while tangible producers (who have natural restrictions in place and do not have to impose their own) are not depriving people.
• Meyer proposes that there is no such thing as free (beer) software due to such costs as bandwith and RAM. It should be pointed out, however, that free (beer) software does not necessarily require no resources to obtain (in fact, I would say that it must require resources to obtain (Like my physics prof. said, "There's no free lunch!")). A requirement of free (beer) software is, rather, that the transfer of resources from the consumer to the producer is optional.

Nice car analogy - because it's easy to show its flaws:

If Ford would license their cars, they could dictate to you how you use your (no, wait, it's only licensed - it would still be THEIR) car. You must not open it to look at the engine. You must not transport anyone else. You must not lend it to others. And if you could make a copy, you'd only be allowed to make a one for backup purposes, if you're really lucky (and able to circumvent the copy protection). Oh, and if it has a problem, you have to take it back to the manufacturer - you can't just ask a mechanic to fix it (or try fixing it yourself). And so on...

As has been pointed out already, it's not about "free" as in "no cost", it's all about "free" as in "what you're free to do" with it!

-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX :)

This is almost certainly not due to people's intention to deny you compensation for what you have done. Either they did not think your contribution was big enough to warrant any non-trivial charge, or, more likely, if what your program does is important to them, they didn't trust you enough to invest the time to learn using your product, and to lock in their data formats to your product, because they felt that you could not guarantee sufficient maintenance to meet their potentially evolving needs.

I believe that a small developer has for precisely this reason only a good chance to actually market a nontrivial product if it comes with a free license, i.e. a license that would enable the user to maintain, or have someone maintain the product for him should the need arise.

An unrelated comment: what seems to be often forgotten in the discussion is the following: FSF's rhetoric does not go against programmers working on proprietary code for a company that wants the code to be secret because they think that this will give their business a competitive advantage. Here the user of the software has a perfectly acceptable interest in non-distribution of the software, and is willing to pay the programmer for such a proprietary solution.

My guess is that most programmers acutally generate their income on work of this type, and relatively few work on software that is indented to be mass-marketed. The companies that mass-market are just a lot more visible, because they have lots of their man-power in public relations, accounting and market research, and rather less in actually developing their core products.

Two reasons why I think proprietary software is bad:

1. It forces competition, not cooperation. Even between KDE and Gnome, there's a lot of code and idea-sharing. With proprietary software, that's a no-no.
2. It somehow assumes that ideas are yours and yours only to exploit. A very strange notion which has been countered over and over again by the fact that important inventions typically are done by multiple people, independently. A great software idea isn't yours! It has been build up in hundreds of minds, you just applied some final thinking work! (a shitty idea typically is yours ;-))

Where did this guy learn ethics?

In fact no known moral law implies that purchase cost should even be related to production cost.

An example: ursury. [My aplogies to ./ readers who are not from a Judaeo - Christian moral background: I am, so forgive the limited range of sources for my examples, and please, PLEASE, add any from other cultures. That's the point of discussion, isn't it?]

I guess the references in the traditional texts are Lev 25:36-27, Deut 23:19-20, Ps 15:5, Ezek 18:8, 13, 17, Ezek 22:12.

The point is that there is a tradition where the moral/religious law implies a relationship between the cost and price.

I guess that this and similar rules are based on a general belief that you should not profit unreasonable at the expense of your fellow-man. It is the tenth commandment.

2535. The sensitive appetite leads us to desire pleasant things we do not have, e.g. the desire to eat when we are hungry, or to warm ourselves when we are cold. These desires are good in themselves; but often they exceed the limits of reaon and drive us to covert unjustly what is not ours and belongs to another or is owed to him.

2537. It is not a violation of this commandment to desire to obtain things that belongs to one's neighbour, provided this is done by just means. Traditional catechesis realistically mentions 'those who have a harder struggle against their criminal desires' and so who 'must be urged the more to keep this commandment':

...merchants who desire scarcity and and rising prices, who cannot bear not to be the only ones buying and selling so that they themselves can sell ore dearly and buy more cheaply; those who hope that their peers will be impoverished, in order to realize a profit either by selling to them or buying from them ... physicans who wish disease to spread; lawyers who are eager for many important cases and trials.

[Catechism of the Catholic Church]

Bertrand may not agree with this ethics, but he should say so instead of claiming that it does not exist.

Point the Hubble Space Telescope at Your Favourite Object.

You, my publisher, may offer me $100 for my latest novel, adding that it's really boring and you are doing me a favor, whereas I, having spent five years on it and being convinced that the result is--frankly--brilliant, scream that anything less than a million would be a moral outrage. Ethics won't bring a resolution here, only economics and the strength of our respective negotiating positions. But if I accept your proposal and the next day you sell the rights to Steven Spielberg for $10 million, many people will consider that you have done me wrong ethically.

Hm, yes, I missed that one. Well spotted!! He is not only confused in his ethics, he is also contradictory. You can make an obscene profit, as long as he is not loosing out on the cash.

Sad.

Point the Hubble Space Telescope at Your Favourite Object.

• Richard Stallman's views are extreme.
  
• Eric Raymond is a gun-nut.
  
• All software has bugs.
  
• Micros~1 is not the Great Satan.
  
• Do the right thing.

He says of the FSF:

These are extremely strong indictments, based on moral terms. They are morally unjustifiable.

The gradual imposition of a copyright (due largely in France to Beaumarchais, author of the Barber of Seville and the Marriage of Figaro as well as smuggler of arms to the American revolution) was a major moral correction, re-establishing the rights of the creators.

He also attacks the FSF by saying:

Extreme analogies are another dubious rhetorical device.

a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures would be in place preventing (for example) a disturbed white supremacist from buying a police gun without any background check at a gunshow, then going to a Jewish day camp in Los Angeles to shoot at everyone in sight (a tragedy that happened just a few weeks ago);

I actually find the whole attack on ESR's gon control views, and his demand that RMS and Linus distance themselves from his views very bizzare coming from someone who said:

The observation works the other way too: bad people can defend good causes. A corrupt and dishonest politician may sincerely support principles of democracy and freedom. His personal failings do not disqualify the ideas of democracy and freedom any more than the Nazi regime's impressive building of autobahnen disqualifies the merits of freeways

Not to say that the free software movement can't be critically examined and criticized. Just this isn't it...

• The source code is available for peer review.
• Portability.
• Limitless custom features can be added by users.

Forget demonizing "commercial" developers on moral grounds for a sec; any software publisher whose distributed software doesn't have those three features is a publisher that I simply refuse to take seriously.

Also, there's always the "scratch the itch" factor. If Adobe systems wants to charge n-hundred bucks for Photoshop, that's their choice, but eventually you'll run into a bunch of savvy GIMP hackers eager to brew a free alternative. A side effect of the process used in attracting developers and building a "free-speech" project of that scale in an open environment is that it also becomes "free beer". And Adobe, or whoever, now has to compete, benefiting not only GIMP users, but average folks buying Photoshop for a more reasonable price than before.

Interestingly enough, that also provides a valid reason to revile Microsoft. If Windows controls the desktop, and MS makes Windows nasty to code in, then it becomes harder to port say, the GIMP, to Windows, prolonging the stranglehold of overpriced, proprietary software.

Well, there goes most of that guy's essay!
--

Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.

(I added the third while I was writing and forgot to update the beginning of the post)
--

Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.

Oops! The first sentence should read, "One point I feel the author doesn't address adequately are three main 'pragmatic' (as opposed to idealistic) advantages of free software."

(I added the third while I was writing and forgot to update the beginning of the post)

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise .... surprise and fear .... fear and surprise .... Our two weapons are fear and surprise .... and ruthless efficiency .... Our three weapons are fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency .... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our four .... no ....

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise .... surprise and fear .... fear and surprise .... Our two weapons are fear and surprise .... and ruthless efficiency .... Our three weapons are fear, surprise and ruthless efficiency .... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our four .... no ....

ROTFLMAO!

Who says that Monty Python quotes don't have practical value?
--

Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.

But many principles are culture-independent. Killing an innocent person, for example, is not morally acceptable, regardless of your culture.

This is far from absolute. Killing an insane person in self defense is generally morally acceptable, even though the insane person is innocent. Killing an enemy soldier during wartime is also generally not considered immoral. Many feel that euthenasia should be legal.

Also, ...do not send tanks, troops and aviation to invade your neighboring country

If the neighboring country is committing atrocities against its own people, many would considered an invasion justified.

One point this illustrates is that there are very few moral absolutes. This calls into question the rest of the article, since it uses the idea of moral absolutes as part of the foundation for the rest of the article. Also, it's just plain worrisome when an article "The Ethics of Free Software" can't even define half of its subject matter. (It can't define the other half either, but that's covered in other threads.)

Recently ... we have had to cancel one major project, and reengineer a product completely, after wasting many person-months and disappointing customers, because of the deficiencies of two separate GNU products (the GCC compiler for Windows and the editor under GTK). In both cases the scenario was the same: fixes to well-known bugs being promised and promised again; everyone waiting for months and months, until it becomes clear that nothing will happen; in the end, having to write off all the affected developments. Since no one is in charge, and you didn't pay for the products, there is no one to blame.

So Meyer doesn't get it: if you want a specific feature in free software, you can implement it yourself or pay someone to implement it for you. (And if you want it on a schedule, you're going to have to do it that way -- after all, you didn't pay for the product, Bertrand (and would your experience really have been different if you had?). Admittedly, the developers shouldn't have promised what they wouldn't deliver -- but then again, we currently have only his side of the story, and he doesn't show himself in this article to be all that concerned with the truth. Wonderful irony, for an article on ethics.)

But Meyer did neither, and now the poor fellow feels embarrassed, and rather than admit he made a mistake or didn't understand free software, he painstakingly composes a learned-sounding but thoroughly misleading and unfair article attacking thousands of his fellow software developers. What a disappointment.

--
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins