Re: Economics and the GPL

On Mon, 10 Jun 2002, Anthony Taylor wrote:

> First, you have to realize RMS does not intend to take away freedom, 
> contrary to the rhetoric spouting up around here like Old Faithful.  He 
> simply does not want his source code to find its way into commercial, 
> proprietary products, because he believes these products infringe on his 
> right to modify what is his.  He encourages others to join his cause 
> because there are others like him who believe we are better off with the 
> free flow of information, even if we can't get rich off what we enjoy 
> doing in the first place.

It's not that simple.  This isn't just about HIS code.  He doesn't want ANY 
code to be proprietary.  That includes yours and mine, not just his.  But 
he knows that he doesn't have any legal means to keep others from making 
proprietary code, so the GPL is his tool to enforce compliance, and the GPL 
codebase is the incentive to entice us to submit to the GPL.  If Stallman 
could abolish all copyright protection on software by fiat, he would do so.

> This is an ethical, not political, issue for him.  It has become a 
> political issue because of the patent and copyright climate in the US 
> and the EU; consumer and author's rights are being traded for corporate 
> rights, to the point where people are arrested for creating code to play 
> DVDs on operating systems that have no DVD software available.  In fact, 
> the more I see of the current political climate, the more sure of RMS' 
> ideology I become.  Although I agree with the ethics involved, I believe 
> in the GPL as a political tool, a method of usurping control from the 
> corporations and returning it to the individuals, where it belongs.  But 
> that's me, Anti-Corporation Taylor.

Stallman, the FSF and the GPL have been political from day one.  Stallman 
considers proprietary software IMMORAL, and like millions of Fundamentalist 
Christians, he'd love to legislate his morality on the rest of us.  What 
good is a moral code if you can't FORCE it on your immoral neighbors, eh?

Corporate abuse of power is a serious issue, but an irrelevant one here.

> Secondly, if you critisize the GPL, critisize it for the true flaws, and 
> avoid rhetoric like, "It'll destroy the industry!"  First, there's no 
> indication the GPL is going to ruin the industry, even if it becomes the 
> dominant license; for me, it's already made it better.

There's reason to think a GPL monopoly could be just as dangerous as a 
Microsoft monopoly, and nobody has proven that it won't be.

> Most GPL apologists will think the same way: it's already helped.

If a little is a good thing, lots more must be that much better?  Go ahead 
and test that philosophy on your next medication.  Oh, you overdosed?  But 
that first dose helped!  How could more be bad?

> No, instead focus on the flaws such as: it does not give back to other 
> free software licenses, like X11 and BSD, though it takes from them 
> freely; it is in a legal limbo until it has been tested in court, and may 
> not even hold; it addresses mostly old-style programming, when a library 
> was a library and a program, a program, and does not take into account 
> the evolving realities of distributed-service computing; and there are 
> some quibbles with definitions in the LGPL that can change the entire 
> meaning of the license (like, where does a module begin, and where does 
> it end?  What constitutes a "whole work?").

These things have been debated before.  Besides, any perceived weaknesses 
will simply lead to an even more restrictive GPL v3 to fix those problems.

The fundamental flaw is with the very approach in the first place, and its 
inability to provide a viable economic model to support development work.

Thomas Jefferson originally wanted the Constitution not to allow monopolies 
such as copyrights and patents.  James Madison convinced him that LIMITED 
monopolies were necessary to provide an incentive to creation.  They didn't 
want "one generation to bind the next", which was why the original duration 
of copyright was 14/28 years.  They would consider "life + 70 years" to be 
ridiculous, yet that's what we have.  Why?  Because of the very thing that 
Madison thought we were safe from -- the corruption of a powerful few...

> Vague worries about its impact on the future industry come off like Ed 
> Yourden's Y2K fear-mongering.  Plus, both sides are indefensible, and 
> this will not lead to a productive discussion, but will only devolve 
> into name-calling.

Yourden may be overstated the case, but there was just cause for concern 
over shoddy programming practices leading to potential Y2K problems, given 
how little error-handling most real-world code does.  Who knows?  Maybe 
there would have been some high-profile failures without the fear-mongering 
he did -- and then there'd be recriminations for "not warning us", just as 
there now are about September 11th.

Before September 11th, if someone made a big deal about the possibility of 
airliners being hijacked and flown into buildings, they might well have 
been considered crackpots too.  Then again, it might have gotten airlines 
to shore up their security, just in case.  And then September 11th might 
not have happened, and everyone would continue to call this hypothetical 
fear-mongerer a crackpot for raising so much fear about something that 
wasn't going to happen anyhow -- and nobody would realize he had saved the 
thousands of lives that were actually lost on September 11th.

Now everyone's playing the blame game and we've got Congressional inquiries 
into the failure of intelligence agencies to prevent September 11th from 
happening.  If nobody had warned about Y2K and the dire predictions had 
instead come true, do you doubt that a similar blame game would have 
followed after the Y2K disasters?

> Finally, be open-minded, but do not expect the same from your debate 
> opponent.  Most heatedly-active GPL apologists are similar in nature to 
> their anti-GPL counterparts: bullishly closed-minded, opinionated, quite 
> paranoid, and will refuse to debate real issues, but instead focus on 
> the points that cannot be disproved.

Perhaps that's because the provable points are quickly resolved? ;-)

But I agree.  I think it's human nature to normally echo what you already 
believe than to engage your brain and reconsider your beliefs.  Stronger 
beliefs are even harder to get someone to question.  Stallman's beliefs 
seem to be entirely beyond question...

Deven