Re: Concerning uniliateral decision making with respect to the coreutils package

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> writes:
> Russ Allbery [13/Jul 10:59am -07] wrote:
>> Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes:

>> While this is also true, this argument has been abused repeatedly by
>> the Free Software Foundation and others to excuse and dismiss obvious
>> technical and social problems. I have heard "you should use our
>> inferior software and put up with our obnoxious development culture
>> because we're copyleft" so many times now, and I for one am no longer
>> susceptible to that argument.

>> If you don't want people to use a non-copyleft alternative, may I
>> suggest writing better software?

> The way you've phrased this, you could substitute "free" for "copyleft"
> and have an argument against using bothering to use free software in
> general. Obviously that's not what you think!

One could make that substitution only by not understanding my point.

Free software provides me with features inherent in its status of free
software that non-free software does not. It is therefore difficult to
argue that free software is clearly inferior to any non-free software
because, whatever other merits it has, it grants me those features
(freedoms), and those matter to me.

There are cases where the non-free software is sufficiently better that I
can't justify using the free software despite those freedoms, but the free
software has, for people like me who care about those freedoms, a
substantial inherent advantage due to its licensing.

This is not true of copyleft software specifically, as distinct from the
category of free software in general. Copyleft software does not give me,
as a software user, anything of immediate value over BSD-licensed
software. In fact, it's objectively worse in several small ways because
there is a long, tedious legal document that I have to read and follow
that limits my freedom to change and redistribute the software as I choose
by, for example, prohibiting me from removing sometimes-annoying output
from commands.

This is why I say that it's only a tool and a tactic, and why the same
argument does not apply to free software in general. Copyleft does not
give me any freedoms; copyleft is irrelevant to the four freedoms outlined
by the FSF.

What copyleft promises instead is *potential* protection against a
*possible* problem that may lead to a *future* version of the software
becoming less free (but has no effect on the free software sitting
immediately in front of me). This is not nothing; this is a potential
benefit, and therefore the tool has some use. In some cases, I think the
argument for that potential and possibility is strong. In (many) other
cases, I think it is quite weak.

I therefore make tactical decisions based on my understanding of a
specific situation, and choose to use that tool or not as it seems to fit
the situation. I can do that without ethical qualms because copyleft is
irrelevant to the ethical principle of free software. BSD-licensed
software is also free software. Copyleft is a political and legal tactic
aimed at preventing a specific set of potential problems. Opinions differ
over whether it is a good one, but regardless of one's opinion on that, I
think it's obvious that choosing not to use a tool because one thinks it's
ineffective is not an ethical compromise.

And yet, that seems to be what Simon has been arguing, and I think that
argument is erroneous.

> My point is that it seems worth substantiating why you think we should
> have different standards for what loss of functionality we should be
> willing to accept for the sake of contributing to copyleft software,
> than what we should be willing to accept for the sake of using free
> software.

Because copyleft software offers no inherent ethical advantages or user
freedom over non-copyleft software, while imposing a cost.

The argument in its favor is that it is an insurance policy, which is
fine, but there is no ethical mandate to buy this specific type of limited
and situation-specific insurance. I personally therefore think there
should be a higher standard applied to choosing copyleft in this limited
sense: The insurance has to be worth the cost. If the cost is using
significantly inferior copyleft software instead of significantly superior
BSD-licensed software, I think there are situations in which that is an
unwise decision and tradeoff to make.

Obviously, other people are fully allowed to make decisions I think are
unwise. But insofar as Debian needs to make a decision (which, I once
again stress, is not the case today with coreutils since the copyleft
software is currently superior), and insofar as I have a say in that
decision, that is the basis for how I will vote.

When chosing a license for one's own work, the cost of the insurance is
not egregious, and it annoys me more than it annoys others, so I
understand the position of people who always adopt the insurance. But this
is a tactical decision, not an ethical one.