Hello, this is Huka and I'm recording another interesting, at the
end of Hacker Public Radio and this one I want to talk about something that was a
fairly recent controversy and some thoughts that came out of it for me and
the controversy here started with a podcast called The Linux Action Show and I
don't know how many people are familiar with it. It has a certain level of
popularity and I listened to a episode that I was very interested in because the
guest on this episode was Richard M. Stallman, the famous RMS and it ended up
generating rather a lot of controversy because of some serious disagreements. So I'm
going to talk a little bit about what those disagreements were and then start
drawing some conclusions and talk about what that means in terms of licensing as a
whole because I think there are some fairly fundamental issues here. For
instance just today I was listening to yet another podcast that many people
on Hacker Public Radio are familiar with because about once a month they get
played and that's called The Sunday Morning Linux Review and I listened to
yesterday's run and the same issue came up again about licensing when there was a
rant by Matt Enders on YGPLV3 is you know horrible and will kill your
mother and things like that which by the way I wrote a very long response to him on
the website pointing out that well you know you didn't really think this thing
through very well. So I'm going to develop this a little bit more here and probably
with Matt Matt's a friend of mine and you know he'd be the first one to say that
he welcomes disagreement if it gets a good discussion going. So what was the
the problem that started all of this on the Linux action show? They had
Richard Stallman on. They get into a discussion and basically what happened was
that Brian Lunduk, one of the hosts and in full disclosure I'm going to say he's
one of those people that I just grit my teeth whenever he talks and so there's
probably a little bit of bias there but you know be that as it may at least I'm
warning you at a time and his problem was that he writes proprietary software.
Now I guess you know in a free world you're allowed to do that if you want the
problem was he kept trying to get Richard Stallman to somehow say well that's
okay and like my first thought was like dude have you ever heard Richard Stallman
talk. What on earth are you thinking? Richard Stallman considers proprietary
software evil. He thinks there shouldn't be any. He thinks and you know you
may agree or disagree with that premise. I happen to be somewhat in favor of it.
In fact I'm proud to be a member of the free software foundation. I support
that I think that what Stallman does is very important. So you know I don't know why
Lunduk had this strange idea that somehow Stallman was going to give his
blessing to this but in fact he didn't. He just said look you know proprietary
software is evil if you're writing proprietary software find something else to do.
All right that's that's what Stallman will say under those circumstances he's very
consistent you know at Lunduk cut it but you know that's how I feed my kids and then
he turned this into Richard Stallman wants to starve my babies which is not really
true and not particularly relevant. I mean basically what Lunduk
wanted was equivalent to talking to the Pope and trying to talk him in this saying you know
that 10 commandments thing totally optional you know no big deal one way or the other.
It just ain't gonna happen. So you know if you heard that Stallman is trying to kill Lunduk's
children you know that's that's real bad reporting on this what he basically said was
don't make a living writing proprietary software because if you do you are participating
in evil. All right so I mean the only question that at this point is do you agree with Stallman
that writing proprietary software is evil or not? You know if you disagree then obviously you
when Stallman are not on the same page but of course one of the things this gets turned into
is this whole Richard Stallman is against freedom because he's not supporting what I do
and that got me thinking that's that's a very let's say you know a fourth grader would
think about freedom that way. One hopes adults get a somewhat better idea of it than apparently
Mr. Lunduk has because that's not that's not understanding at all how freedom in that
sense works and you know for someone to say Richard Stallman is against freedom is kind of just
weird. So what's the real issue here? When you talk about freedom I think the real issue
is that freedom is never an absolute okay. If you're living in a society you have a certain amount
of freedom and that amount of freedom you have is circumscribed by the effect on other people okay.
Now in the United States we have a saying that comes from a Supreme Court
justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said you do not have the freedom to falsely shout fire
in a crowded theater. If the theater is crowded and you shout fire what's going to happen?
Well there's probably going to be a rush for the exits someone gets trampled you know people could
die and if you did that falsely just for kicks you say no you can't do that sort of thing that's
a limitation so there is freedom of speech in the United States but there are limits on that.
Another legal scholar put it a slightly different way you're right to swing your hand
ends where my nose begins okay. So if you take a look at legal cases that argue
these very often legal cases are about where you draw the line between two different freedoms.
And a line frequently has to be drawn just by the very nature of it.
So for someone to just say well I'm in favor of freedom or you're against freedom or
sorry it's a meaningless statement you have to define a lot more carefully what kind of freedom
you're talking about and in what context before you can make that kind of a statement.
So to talk meaningfully you have to say who's freedom and what circumstance
and when you do that someone is going to say but you're taking away my freedom to
well whatever. Yes we are and that's the point. Does my freedom to breathe clean air
trump your freedom to pollute or vice versa. That's the kind of conflict so freedom is always
about those kinds of conflicts. So in this case it was the freedom to make a living by writing
proprietary software versus the freedom of the software user to use software that gives us
the four freedoms. That's what the conflict was about and you know RMS never said he was in a
position to actually stop Lundu from doing it he just refused to say that it was legitimate.
So in essence the real thing is Lundu saying oh RMS called me names. All right get over it
but it's worth looking at this carefully because there is a real issue here that is worth
exploring and I think the issue is whether we should be more concerned with the freedom of the
software user or the freedom of the software producer and let's always understand their can
and frequently is a big conflict between those. Where is RMS? Side of the user. No question about
it RMS has devoted everything he's done to maintaining the software the freedom of the software
user. Plunduque was arguing for the freedom of the software producer. Right now because of how
these related you cannot maximize both of those things simultaneously. If users get all the freedom
there's nothing left for producers. If producers get all the freedom there's nothing left for
the users. That's the essential conflict here. So when you're taking a look at this you know think
about all rights reserved and now that's copyright but you get the idea. If all rights are
reserved to the producer there's really scarcely any rights left to the user and a lot of software
is done that way. When you get a software with an end user license agreement and says these are
the circumstances under which you are allowed to use this software. These are the purposes we will
let you use it for. Oh by the way you don't own your software. You're only licensing the right
to use it under conditions that we control. You have a situation where the scales have been tilted
very much towards the producer and the freedom of the user has been minimized about as much as
possible. That's not what free software is about as I understand it. It's not what free software
is about as the free software foundation describes it. It's not what the four freedoms are about.
And that's why I think licensing you know the question of licensing really comes up
because that's where we see where the line gets drawn. How is the software licensed?
So in proprietary software the rights of the user are as minimal as the companies can get away with.
I think that the evil really started with this idea that you don't own software you only
license it. That was the beginning of the end right there. They can revoke your license to
use this after any time they decide to violate the license. They can prevent you from selling it to
someone else when you were done. It was a very famous case about that that said no the software
producer can prevent you from doing in the United States and I realize every country has their own
legal system. I'm just going to say I only know what little I know because I'm not a lawyer what I
know is about the United States and there's something called the first sale doctrine and the first
sale doctrine means that we can have used bookstores. If I buy a book, I've read the book.
I'm done with it. I decide okay I don't really want to keep this on my shelf anymore. I have
the legal right under the first sale doctrine in the United States to go ahead and sell it to
someone else to maybe to sell it to a store that specializes in use books or sell it to another
individual. However I want to do it. That's a legal right and in the case of software we've had
legal decisions that say that does not apply with software there is no first sale doctrine
with software. So if you buy an expensive software package you use it you decide you know this isn't
really what I want or I don't need it anymore what have you. You're legally prohibited
from selling it to another person okay that's yeah that's evil okay so you know when when Richard
Stallman says proprietary software is evil this kind of things we're talking about okay
I think I think it is evil I think we should fight it and the answer that he and some others came
up with was the general public license currently in version three you know that was the my whole
disagreement with Matt Enders was about the GPL version three but the whole idea of the general
public license is to push the balance in the direction of the rights of the user and that is
defined by what are called the four freedoms freedom zero is to freedom to run the program for any
purpose right proprietary software says you're gonna run it for the purposes we have specifically
allowed you to do it. Freedom one the freedom to study how the program works and change it
so it does your computing as you wish which implies you have to have access to the source code
or you can't do any of this proprietary software does not allow that in fact you know they will
put in things it's a attempting to reverse engineer as a criminal offense and you'll be prosecuted
blah blah blah blah the freedom freedom number two the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help
your neighbor proprietary software absolutely you cannot do that and then freedom three yeah
were geeks zero one two three those are the four freedoms so freedom three the freedom to distribute copies
of your modified versions to others okay and so by doing this you give the whole community a chance
to benefit from your changes and again access to the source code is really a precondition to being
able to do any of this so let's think of these as opposite ends of the spectrum all right on the
one hand you have proprietary software think Microsoft Oracle Apple any of these places proprietary
all the rights are on the side of the software producer then think of free software in the
free software foundation for freedoms sense virtually all of the rights are in the hands of the
user right so these are the ends of a spectrum here what's in the middle that's where it starts
to get interesting in the middle are what are called quote less restrictive licenses
and people say this with the implication that oh these are even more free than the GPL
and that repeats the fallacy of thinking of freedom as an absolute without putting it into context
okay what is less restrictive is it is less restrictive on the part of the producers
it doesn't do anything in fact it takes freedom away from the users when you dig into what's
actually going on here so what the you know what the GPL is doing is it is restricting software
producers for the benefit of software users if you take those restrictions away what happens
well you start moving the balance back towards producers and you know that is going to change
this balance it classic example of this apple took important parts of BSD to form the basis of
their OSX operating system they could do that because BSD has a very unrestrictive license
so how did unrestricting apple work out well apple was thought that this was absolutely wonderful
they could do anything they wanted with this software and what did they do they created the most
tightly controlled locked down operating system imaginable they took away every bit of
user rights they possibly could and the BSD license said hey if you want to do that no big deal
go ahead take away everyone's freedom we don't care so when I hear people talk about we need less
restrictive licenses they say why who's benefit is that who we bone out very important legal
principle you know who benefits now you may be of the opinion that what's wrong with the software
market is that companies just don't have enough power these days you know on the planet I live on
I'm not seeing that so I thought it was very interesting I read in Linux format magazine which is one
of my favorite magazines I read an article recently with Michael Meeks now Michael Meeks is
one of the major people in the Libra office community prior to that he was in the open office community
and so we all know about how son was sold to Oracle and Oracle immediately tried to take control
of everything in essence pissed off a whole bunch of people and so the Libra office project was
created forked the code from open office the open document foundation was set up and you know
I thought that was important I gave them a few bucks to help get that then going as well
and they set up this project and one of the things that I think is very interesting is to look at
what's happened the Libra office project has been moving so much more rapidly than open office
ever did there's a lot of energy there the number of developers is increasing dramatically
more and more code is getting written bugs are getting fixed faster
well I mean that's I think we all see that that that I'm going to stipulate that should just be a matter
of fact but why is there so much more activity why is there so much more energy and
what Michael Meeks said in this interview was it's because we moved to the GPL
ah now Libra office is not the product of a company so they don't have the kind of incentives
that a company has to lock everything down and secure their own advantages and everything else
it's an open community project and what he was saying was you know the developers the
people who write the code do not like to be in a situation where the code they use gets taken over
by a company and locked up and the users rights are taken away they don't like that sort of thing
and the GPL prevents it and that was I think very important you know if I were a developer
and I've said before I'm not a developer but I think it makes sense if I was one and if I had
worked tired on software that I wanted people to use freely I'd want to know that it was in a
license that guaranteed that freedom through all derivative works and and that's what the GPL does
that's why I think the GPL is so important and I think that's why so many proprietary software
creators hate it so much they're just fine with something like the BSD license that says hey take
the code do whatever you want with it the GPL does not allow that now is that a big deal
you know if you don't like the terms don't use it I mean isn't that with proprietary
software people say to us all the time hey if you don't like the terms in the u-la don't use the
software you don't have to use Microsoft Office you don't have to use a W photo shop you don't have
to use any of these things if you want to use them you have to abide by the licensing okay
and and that of course is why stolen use licensing as his vehicle to preserve freedom here
you know when you hear these people talk about oh the GPL it's like this virus that
attach you know what they're saying is we would love to steal this and use it for our benefit
and this license gets in the way and I say wonderful that's exactly what we need so they talk
about cancer and communism and I want you to think when you hear that who's interests are they protecting
are they protecting yours think about that well that was my little rant on freedom and
license say I hope you'll find it interesting this is a hookah and I'm going to once again
mention as I have been that Ohio Linux Fest is open for soliciting talks various kinds and our
call for talks is right now we're looking for anything involving free open software of any kind not
just Linux could be BSD could be any other packages Apache esterisk you name it open hardware
we're very interested in anything involving open hardware um social implications of all of this
stuff might be interested in that we're looking for all levels of expertise we want some
talks that are at the beginner level we want talks through at the advanced level and everything in
between uh we're looking for men and women young and old uh the more variety the better
and the more talks the missions we get the better job we can do of putting out a roster of high
quality talks at the end of September when we have our 2012 uh Ohio Linux Fest so I
encourage you if you have anything that that you think we would be interested in or that you
just want to have an opportunity to talk about please submit uh and I've I've got the URL in the
show notes and um I've also put URLs for all the other things we talked about in this particular
episode in the show notes so I encourage you to take a look at that and with that this is a hookah
signing off and don't forget to support free software you have been listening to Hector Public Radio
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