goula.sh

📰 “Free Software”: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed

Author: r0ml.medium.com

Full Title: “Free Software”: An Idea Whose Time Has Passed

URL: https://r0ml.medium.com/free-software-an-idea-whose-time-has-passed-6570c1d8218a

Highlights from March 25th, 2021.

My interest in free or open source software has never been either political or industrial. My interest has always been educational. That is, access to the source code provided the opportunity to learn from it. So, in the same spirit as the Open Source / Free Software distinction, I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software where the intent of the programmer is educational (liberal as in education).
I think it is clear that the Free Software Foundation has failed to move the needle on the political issues relating to software. Those of us who are interested in issues of freedom and ethics and social justice related to software must explore alternative stratagems to achieve those objectives.
The first sign that free software is intellectually bankrupt is that the Free Software Foundation seems unable to develop new generations of leadership. Free societies are usually lukewarm to the practice of “dictators for life”. After around a decade, it is a healthy sign if new leadership emerges. It is a sign of growth and innovation. It is healthy. Seeing the same people in the same places pursuing the same failed tactics decade after decade is evidence of a lack of broader acceptance.
Rhetoric is a discipline that has been around for over two thousand years. We have two thousand years of scholarship that inform us that the phrase “software freedom” is meaningless gibberish. It can only sow confusion — and the confusion is only exacerbated by explaining that you used the words to mean something else entirely.
The inflexibility (or inarticulateness) that has failed to evolve the talking points to make them more effective is a failure of politics. To take my own pet peeve, it is unarguable that inanimate objects cannot have freedoms.
The Free Software coterie is fond of insisting that words mean what they say they mean, and that is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of language. Such linguistic naïveté is not an asset in pursuing political goals.
The difficulty is that the freedoms that the Free Software Foundation insists on giving software users are freedoms that most software users do not want, and the freedoms that they wish to restrict for software producers are freedoms that most software producers would rather retain.
It turns out that computer users mostly wanted freedom FROM source code, rather than the freedom to use the source code to modify their operating system. Two years later, the Free Software Foundation was founded to try to foist the source code on people who didn’t want it.
Protecting myself from bad actors is not my job. It is the government’s job.
Let me suggest that if one were concerned with bad actors, one wouldn’t drink purchased beer (or free beer). One would brew one’s own beer, because bad actors might have poisoned the beer.
The alternative, of course, is to believe that you could safely purchase beer, because it is the government’s job to keep you safe.
The “bad actor” conspiracy theorists need to believe that many commercial actors are evil and all government actors are ineffective. And although I believe that there is the occasional evil entrepreneur and the occasional ineffective bureaucrat, in general, we must live our lives as if people are trying to do what they believe to be the right thing.
The existing free software license specifically states that “should the program prove defective, I assume the cost of all necessary servicing, repair or correction”. The existing free software license specifically states that “in no event shall any party be liable to me for damages for losses sustained by me for using the program”. As it turns out, there are many jurisdictions in which the applicable law voids the entire disclaimer — you can’t limit your liability by disclaiming it.
As a software user, as a member of that group of people known as “the software”, for whom “software freedom” applies, the freedom that I would like is the freedom to seek recompense from people who create damage to me via software. I would prefer software insurance to “software freedom”.
Next point (I’ve lost track of the numbers): why does copyrighting software provide more freedom than patenting software? The stated intent of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United State Constitution, is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by striking a bargain: inventors would document their inventions in exchange for an exclusive right for a limited time. That “limited time” for copyright is the remaining life of the author plus 70 years. That “limited time” for patents is 20 years. It seems to me that there is more freedom sooner with a patent than a copyright.
If the Free Software Foundation has a legislative platform, I don’t know what it is. It seems to be an organization that focuses on litigation rather than legislation. It is against laws that others have proposed, rather than for laws that it has proposed.
The Free Software Foundation seems to be a collection of programmers who want to write software and talk about software and boycott software. It seems to be uninterested in proposing political solutions to issues it cares about — but willing to attack proposals that others have made that it disagrees with. As a political organization, it is profoundly ineffective, apparently by design.

Highlights from March 25th, 2021.

The Free Software clique is rooted in the deep past, and committed to endlessly rehashing the software controversies of the 1980’s — when mainframes were battling with minicomputers for supremacy. The leadership is morally and intellectually bankrupt. The organization is morally and intellectually bankrupt. The “movement” is morally and intellectually bankrupt.