The main point of ESR seems to be that it is economically bad for companies to close the source of their product, which is not very true considering apple has very good success rate with both MAC and iPhone. He has not give examples of his "study" about companies which lost because of closing the source of some open source software. If lawyers and corporate bosses are afraid of GPL, let them be. How can you justify removing of GPL just because lawyers and corporate bosses who never contributed anything to free community are afraid of it?
Quite. And the observation that the rise free software movement has been strongly associated with copyleft licences suggests that what ESR has no basis in reality.
I don't really understand esr. I can't reconcile the elevated discourse of The Cathedral & the Bazaar and The Art of UNIX Programming with the constant self-praise and trolling in his blog and elsewhere. He's just too smart to be that way.
My instinct is to disagree with anyone who speaks in those tones, until I take time to really dissect what he said (and then disagree on better principles!).
It was fascinating to learn about your personal preferences for a tone of a discourse and I'll patiently wait until you decide to dissect the argument.
Meanwhile, ESR's point is an excellent one.
MIT license has proven to help a project to achieve commercial critical mass, and GPL is becoming an anachronism. Most of recent open source software that managed to build up market- and mind-share quickly was put out under MIT license.
GPL-like licenses are becoming an off-putting factor nowadays simply because you expect to be offered a 'double-licensing' option somewhere down the line. Why would people invest in a project when they are only allowed to play with it, but never to use in a commercial environment? (Until you pay for a commercial license that is).
RMS has been proven right. Software wants to be free, so it does not need chains attached to it, even when they are meant for its own protection.
If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open project will maintain dominance.
So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will naturally prevail anyway.
But what about the advantage Microsoft gained from basically grabbing a BSD-licensed TCP stack for WinNT? Apparently they recoded most of that stuff since then, but it was probably a great help at the time. All you need to defeat esr's argument is one or two cases where it was proven wrong.
In my opinion, the GPL is not just a legal document but a cultural artifact. When you see a GPL notice, you can feel warm fuzzy feelings of sharing certain beliefs with the authors about freedom and sharing. You can feel the peace that comes with source code.
To paraphrase you, why should I invest my own free time in a project that could be subverted from bringing freedom to its users?
Market- and mind-share are not everyone's measure of success. And I'm not prepared to have you redefine software freedom in the name of RMS today, alright? :)
Microsoft has not became dominant because they got a freebee or two from BSD. This is exactly the point - try imagine some evil company today grabbing Apache code-base and starting a commercial branch of it. So what? They will fail against Apache proper, as ESR points out.
Let me try to argue not from ideological (closed source being immoral etc.) but from the economic point of view. We are talking about commoditization of software here.
There are two types of software - one that contains competitive advantage for the business, and one that is a commodity. And software has a tendency to migrate from the first bucket to the second very fast. And by the way, 'commodity' is not a bad word. Software may be very smart and complicated, but it would not be unique in what it does.
For example, if you have written the first social network software -- you have something unique and you'd be mad to open source it straight away (or you'd be very passionate about software freedom, like RMS :) . But when there appear tens of social network apps floating around, you should act like ning and give away your software for free. Why?
This seems to be the rational choice for commodity software. To become king of commodities you have to compete on price. 'Free' is the ultimate winner price. And MIT license is the ultimate free license (less restrictions than GPL).
When your free application grabs large enough slice of market share (mind share) it will start paying for itself in many ways. It 'develops and tests itself', it provides free marketing for you etc. And you are free to build another unique value-adding application on top of this commodity layer.
So, for example, 37signals are very happy with RoR being free and under MIT license. They are using it for their in-house proprietary webapps, while it is being developed and tested now to the large extend by the community. I am sure 37signals would be ecstatic if Microsoft decided to 'grab' Ruby on Rails and integrate it into their next OS.
Startups and enterprises that use RoR are themselves an important potential market for 37signals. Likewise, enterprise shops using Eclipse are a big potential market for IBM's consulting business as well as their hardware.
> If I understand his argument correctly, esr is claiming that companies can't profit from grabbing a handful of open source software and building their own product around it. The open source development model is so superior that said company will be left in the dust with their handful of code, while the open project will maintain dominance. So why scare anyone away with restrictive licenses when open source will naturally prevail anyway.
That's my understanding of ESR's argument too. One counterexample is Apple's OS X. Another counterexample, in a different way, is mySQL which offers both GPL and proprietary licences; if MySQL used the BSD license, their business model wouldn't work.
I think it's good that there are different open source licenses. People writing open source software can then choose a license that's appropriate for what they want to achieve with the software. It would be stupid if there were only BSD-style licenses, or only copyleft licenses.
I don't think that the project can be 'subverted' from bringing freedom to users. A fork of it might be made "un-free", as in your Microsoft example. But Microsoft did a lot of their own work, and the original project is still around - completely free.
That's a good point, but I think RMS' insight was that software exists in an ecosystem. No program is an island.
Let's say I develop a very useful system under a free software model. Work that undercuts the monopoly of the unfree software producers, who fight you tooth and nail for years. They lose, but then they do the standard countermove -- taking the work and doing an Embrace & Extend. They provide a system which is subtly incompatible to all their users, which aims to capture all the benefits of your new idea while wresting control of its future development.
This is the situation that RMS was fighting in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't just Microsoft; most users of any computing platform were in thrall to one dominant company or the other, be it Sun or IBM or what have you, who pulled similar tricks.
Linus Torvalds has said over and over that GPLing Linux was the smartest move he ever made. It created a situation where rival companies could trust each other, since each contribution would always go towards growing the Linux ecosystem for everyone. No one company would ever capture all the benefits for themselves. This has worked so well that Linus continues to use GPL for his newer projects like git.
Personally, I trust Linus more than ESR when it comes to understanding software. Linus is a true pragmatist with real experience running major software projects that are disruptive to the existing order.
ESR portrays himself as both a great programmer and a pragmatist, but the evidence is largely confined to his own writings. I leave it up to others to decide if fetchmail is on the same level as git or emacs. And if you look at his other writings, he's explicitly political. He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens. (As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name.) I say this not to imply he has some evil agenda - he's trying to describe the world how he sees it, and he regards appeals to "responsibility" as an Atlas-Shruggy tyranny of the mediocre. However, much like Ayn Rand, he overstates the case when he alludes to his own work as being definitive, or even academically significant. I don't know of any empirical studies that back up his political ideas, and in this excerpt at least he is not citing any.
> He is the sort of libertarian who is actively against the idea that freedom should come with responsibilities to other citizens.
That's not true. He merely believes that they have a different set of responsibilities than you'd like.
> As the featured speaker at a gathering of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, he ridiculed their name.
CPSR have a politics-laden definition of "Social Responsibility" which he doesn't agree with. Is their meaning sacred or is one allowed to criticize and even ridicule?
It may not be the last word ESR has to say on rights and responsibilities, but I think I accurately conveyed his views. I'm not even arguing that they are wrong, although I think they are. My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations. He sees that as a road to tyranny or stagnation, consistent with Ayn Rand and her intellectual descendants.
The GPL is about building a web of such responsibilities, explicitly to force closed-source firms to abandon their tactics and become part of a community. I get the sense that ESR finds such tactics distasteful because of his political beliefs. Which is fine! He's not alone in that.
The problem is that he's still claiming the GPL has held us all back by alluding to economic studies, which I'm not sure even exist. The GPL seems to have done really well by every empirical measure I know of, and it shows no signs of strangling capitalism or anything.
> My point was perhaps unclear, but I think ESR has a philosophical problem with the idea of a society governed by an ethos of mutual responsibility and obligations.
Whether or not your point is unclear or incorrect, it's pretty much irrelevant to whether ESR is correct about GPL.
Reminder: good people aren't necessarily correct on a given point and bad people aren't necessarily wrong on a given point. In fact, good/bad is pretty much uncorrelated with correct/wrong.
"and the original project is still around - completely free"
Also more or less irrelevant when compared to its competition. As much as I respect the BSD stack and folks - they rock - the BSD operating systems are a market flop.
All but FreeBSD are proprietary (I doubt OpenSolaris commands a meaningful market-share for now) and the combined market share of FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD is dwarfed by Linux's, which is dwarfed by OSX's.
OSX has some parts that are BSD-free, parts that are GPL-free, other parts that are open-source and the rest is the most heavily guarded proprietary stuff in this industry. The fact it is hugely more successful than the combined presence of its competitors bears testimony to the fact that basing your OS on the work of others without giving much back is a winning strategy while contributing to products that can be used in such way is pretty dumb from a business point of view.
Markets are pretty good at identifying opportunities and the fact there is no Red Hat on the BSD space should suffice as evidence ESR is wrong in this one.
Apple certainly "gives back" substantial amounts of code. Perhaps not as much as you and I want but your statement is a misrepresentation of fact. The amount of open-source goodness Apple has added to WebKit (née KHTML) alone is ridiculous.
KHTML is LGPL. WebKit, according to Wikipedia, has WebCore and JavascriptCore licensed under LGPL and the whole WebKit under BSD, which strikes me as slightly odd because, IIRC, LGPL could not be just re-licensed under BSD unless the re-licensing party owned all the copyrights of the parts and I am quite sure Apple does not own all of it.
WebCore and JavaScriptCore are primarily written in C++ and all code within them is virally licensed under LGPL. Apple did not change the license. Some portions of WebCore and JavaScriptCore if compiled independently would be licensed under BSD. WebKit is a thin shell over the above-mentioned two. On OSX WebKit's primarily implemented in Obj. C. On Windows it's primarily implemented in COM/C++. WebKit if compiled independently would have a BSD license but when compiled with WebCore and JavaScriptCore has an LGPL license virally.
So, the combo WebKit with WebCore and JavascriptCore is LGPL, not BSD.
The only reason to contribute to a BSD project is when you dominate the segment, like Apple does with WebKit browsers, and you want more companies to feed around your ecosystem increasing its value for you.
Don't assume Steve Jobs does it out of his good heart. The OPENSTEP OS was one of the more closed (as in "doesn't play well with others") Unix variants of its time.
I think that the first is a closed, proprietary product based mainly on BSD-style code and the other are services centered around the evolution of a free GPL-like product that remains free speaks for itself.
I probably wasn't very clear. I'm not trying to say the technology is bad; simply that success in the market is due to the marketing and not to the technology. Others who are selling the same or similar technology haven't had the same market success as either Apple or Red Hat.
Of course, marketing is important. Apple also has very sexy hardware on its side, something RH doesn't. People basically buy Macs and they happen to come with OSX just like people buy Dell and that happens to come with Vista by default.
You have to actively choose anything else if you want to run it.
especially:
"I had to put CLISP under GPL because libreadline.a was something I wanted to use and I didn't want to write myself. libgmp.a is similar in this respect, and it may therefore help putting some new packages under GPL.
Building libgmp.a was just too hard work. Other people shouldn't get it for free."
Those arguing against the points in the OP seem to be following a goal of making Free software successful at the expense of commercial software. That strikes me as wrong (both in terms of efficiency and in terms of ethics).
We want Free software to succeed. If it succeeds at the same time that other commercial endeavors succeed, then that makes the software ecosystem richer, and gives us a broader set of tools and ideas to employ.
There is no such dichotomy between free-as-in-speech and commercial software. Red Hat pretty much sell free-as-in-speech software and make a healthy amount of money from support contracts attached to it.
While the strategy to commoditize your product's complements is clever, doing so can be dangerous if you use a license that allows your competitors to take your work and run against you. When doing so, one should be careful to use licenses that can't be turned against _you_.
All MIT/BSD licenses can. All *GPLs, MPLs can't. The choice is clear.
You must be kidding, right? I have 2700+ Linux boxes in our 4 data-centers and I am quite sure we are not playing with those machines. We also have a whole lot of GPL and GPL-ish software deployed on those servers (as well as BSD, Apache and MIT-ish stuff).
I am also pretty much sure our business depends on it.
So, would you please stop spreading this kind of FUD?
>would you please stop spreading this kind of FUD?
And would you please stop using labels.
In the original article there is an arguments that GPL makes corporate clients reluctant to use the software. This may be inaccurate, but this is a fact of life.
We are talking about merits of MIT license vs GPL, not about proprietary vs. open source. On the last issue the debate has been closed some time ago, and open source won.
Are you guys actually arguing that CatB was better sourced than this article? It wasn't. It was just one relatively unknown guy's impression of what he thought made free software work, with a similarly self-congratulatory tone.
If you thought fame went to ESR's head, you're wrong; he was always like that.
Yes, I am arguing that it was a good article and did a good job of describing what was going on. ESR certainly has his flaws, but that paper really was a well-done summary of how this stuff works and why, much better than anything else that was out there at the time (I remember reading it in 1998, I think it was).
I don't think he's done much since then that was worth writing home about, but that doesn't take anything away from that particular accomplishment.
Ok, I went back and reread some of that essay and I have to withdraw some of my criticisms. You are right and I was wrong.
CatB, although anecdotal, is trying to make a coherent case from evidence, and the author's ego is kept relatively in check. His later writings became more like opinion pieces, and are constantly self-referential. My irritation with those must have carried over to the original.
I don't think courts need to enforce contracts anymore. If someone doesn't live up to their word, others will find out and refuse to trust the bastard. Dishonesty is a losing strategy in the long run, and no one is likely to try it.
Furthermore, customers get scared off by contracts that they don't understand, because they could be held to some obnoxious clause that's hidden in there. Enforcing contracts is inefficient, and we should stop doing it.
Wow you completely missed the point. I work at a startup that sells 100% open source products. We use a mixture of BSD, LGPL, GPL and EPL licenses depending on products. I have to say that BSD makes a lot more sense when you are selling to businesses. We have never had anyone take code closed on us, but we have found much more acceptance in B2B sales with using a BSD license rather than a GPL license. For us, it is a matter of survival to not use the GPL. And then the main code base moves forward with our paid developers doing about 70% of the work and the community doing 30%.
On the other hand, if your primary concern is starting a project with no intention to sell it, I would go with the GPL to prevent a company from shanking your idea. But as an open source company, BSD is the way to go if you are selling to business.
The reputation aspect doesn't really hold water, as a person's reputation doesn't travel that far, even in this global economy.
It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career, but he's a high profile individual that many people know on sight.
If I started ripping people off, there's nothing to say I couldn't easily mitigate any negative PR by changing names (or on the internet, just changing handles). In more local endeavors, I could make a mint, ruin my name, and just move to another state (or if pressed, another country.)
Contract law still bears an important role in accountability, IMHO.
It's real easy to see how a negative hit to someone like Bernie Madoff ruins his career...
Yeah, about $65 billion too late.
It's not even a question about reputation scaling -- which (as you say) it does not do, which it hasn't ever done, since even in 10,000 BC you could travel to a place beyond the range of your reputation. (Maybe the Internet will change that. The jury is still out on whether it can, as well as on whether the negative consequences of that are too great and we'll have to take steps to ensure that the Internet can't destroy your reputation worldwide. Reputation isn't all smiles and balloons. You can destroy innocent lives with reputation. Happens all the time.)
Reputation just doesn't work in all sorts of situations. Madoff is a prime example, but anyone who uses Twitter, reads The Four Hour Workweek or spends twenty minutes watching TV commercials can find thousands of additional examples. Reputation is easily faked. It is easily bought. It is too readily extrapolated from one narrow field of endeavor to another. It is biased toward members of your family, and toward people who resemble members of your family. It relies on past results to predict future results, and thereby mispredicts events that occur on a longer time scale than the acquisition of a reputation. It works by implicitly assuming its own effectiveness and breaks down in edge cases. ("Why would Mr. Jones feed me Kool-Aid laced with poison? Just think what that would do to his reputation!")
Most importantly, reputation is just a predictive tool. When it fails, it leaves you with no recourse: That is not its job. I can use my accountant's reputation to predict whether he will steal my money. But if he does steal my money, reputation is now useless as a tool for getting my money back. That's what a contract is for. The primary purpose of a contract isn't promoting trust; it promotes trust because its primary purpose is to give me recourse after trust breaks down. I can try to take my money back from my account -- and if that doesn't work I can attempt to take it out of his insurance company, his auditors, or even people he has previously paid (look up clawback in the dictionary -- my accountant just explained it to me).
Also, even court enforcement of contracts has its limits - you just go outside the borders of a country, and they can't (easily) make you fulfill your contract.
That said, I am all for court enforcement of contracts. In fact, I wish that the courts would respect, if not enforce, far more contracts than they do.
As I understand, the idea is that market and open source are friendly forces and actually support each other in the long run. The GPL may prevent open-source software from being market-friendly.
Actually, when it comes to contracts that don't involve reasonable consideration (in the contractual sense), you might have a point, despite the sarcasm. Consider EULAs. The contract of sale is independent of the EULA contract which some consider a "duress of goods."
I'd certainly be in support of not enforcing contracts that can't be broken down into simple statements that a 10 year old couldn't understand. It'd prevent a lot of the problems you see rolling around about now regarding investments people "didn't understand" and the like.
Well, it worked. Despite the fact that his argument has no merit and even less relevance (a license debate, in 2009?), here we are: talking about Eric S. Raymond, someone who hasn't committed a line of code to any public repository in ages.
This line of argument has been part of Raymond's strategy for years. When last we saw it, he was arguing that vendors should be allowed to embed binary blobs into the running Linux kernel, because it didn't really matter if we could read driver code --- Linux just needed good device support, so people would accept it.
We get it, Raymond. Nobody's paying attention to you. Here, we'll all fix that now. Feel better?
One of the things he mentions is that all GPL does is provide a mechanism to allow companies to also charge for the code. I disagree with that. I worked at a start-up that wanted to open source its code. Without the GPL, there would be no way it could do that, as a larger competitor could pick up the code base and out-market the company.
The GPL is what made it possible for that company to consider open sourcing its product. I'm sure there are other small companies like that as well. It seems like removing the GPL would only be beneficial to large companies (and, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the GPL, but I see its value).
I take issue with his argument that the free market punishes those who take code close sourced. The fundamental problem with open-source development is that it's always designed by committee. In most cases, this produces cleaner, faster, more robust code, but it's not true in every case. Open-source code has this tendency to get the basics right before improving the user experience, but if the standards and basics are fuzzy, the product never gets polished. Take OpenOffice - by trying to both copy MS and improve MS, it's no wonder the entire thing is a big bloated mess.
Some others have mentioned Apple as a counter-example, and I think they're dead on. By allowing BSD to be close-source forked, the market provided the economic incentive to allow Apple to run with it. They could then close a lot of the difficulties in an OS (arbitrary hardware setups, unwillingness to couple strongly to applications, etc.), and they've made an incredible product out of it. Philosophically, open-source would never make anything like OS X, because of the amount of vertical integration.
There isn't always incentive to move a project back to closed-source, and it's hard to argue that it's a long term strategy, but you can't say that the market universally crushes projects that aren't open-source.
I don't find his argument particularly convincing. He's assuming that the market can see that something that was open is now closed. And while that might be true for an end user application, it's not at all true for libraries and frameworks that are folded into closed applications.
I'm the author of an LGPL-ed library. It sees a modest amount of use and my goal in choosing that license is that any changes made to that library be shared back with the rest of the community. It's not GPL-ed, so you don't have to share your application code, but if you change my library, you do have to share your changes/improvements. If you don't want to share, then don't use my library. Simple, right?
Well, every few months I get a note from someone who has noticed an application that doesn't meet this simple test. And I have to send them a dunning notice about the license violation. How many applications are there that I don't get notes about? And absent a license, does anyone seriously think that the mass market would give up "desirable application X" because its creators were bad actors vis-a-vis some embedded library?
This was the basis of the "open source" split from "free software".
His examples are interesting, but of course don't apply to projects that were closed in the first place (adobe/google/microsoft/oracle/ibm - anyone making serious money from selling software). And for closed source projects, dropping the GPL would also change the game as a whole in other ways, perhaps unexpected.
Exactly, I remember these arguments then, the bottom line is the open source "movement" was all about promoting the superior development model. RMS, Eben Moglen, and others warned against this. I also recall thinking this was just some folks looking to monetize their GNU/Linux work.
The arguments about scale are interesting. For an IBM the GPL is just fine, they have the size to compete against anyone with value added services on top of Linux. For smaller, open source projects I've seen them prefer apache 2.0, I speculate because it encourages commercial growth. When you're IBM someone has to grow pretty big to pose a threat. For their other closed products they continue to enjoy great revenues. They can put the resources into keeping them best of breed.
At the end of the day I believe the GPL best serves the rights of individual programmers and a moral argument can be made that software, just like mathematics, should be free. Notice that mathematics is also largely a collaborative effort, it's very seldom done well by isolated individuals.
IBM uses the GPL as a weapon. Linux growth hurts Microsoft and provides them a platform push their own products without Microsoft's involvement.
Ordinarily however, IBM considers it's greatest asset it IP, and they see 'GPLing' their software as a threat to their IP. They are actually rather ambivalent towards the FOSS ideology.
Assume you accept his argument that the open source process is such an advantage and that the market is efficient enough to punish companies who use open source code but don't reciprocate. Why then isn't the market efficient enough to punish those companies who have an irrational fear of the GPL (and therefore refuse to take advantage of the majority of open source code)?
This appears to be his only stated problem with the GPL, and I thought the GPL is anti-business meme would have died long ago given the continued success of Linux.
The Ruby and Rails communities realized this years ago. Almost all open source in those communities is MIT or BSD licensed. You can usually spot a newbie or license zealot by the use of GPL.
Here, here. I've always committed original code to the public domain and have been glad to see greater use of less restrictive licenses. Whatever havoc near-term miscreants create, sharealike is not easily thwarted; transparency and trust have proven brawny allies.
Ignoring the economic argument, I'm happy to see that there's mass-market-ish consideration of opening up the licenses.
BSD is more inline with original hacker culture (IMHO, obviously). The GPL forces you to believe what I believe to use my code. Dropping it to get rid of viral fears is a very good idea. The more use the code has, the better off we all are -- there are enough other good reasons than force for people to share changes and contributions.
What is the difference between Raymond's proposed non-restrictive open source software licensing plan and unleashing software into the public domain? It seems like the authors of such software would have absolutely no control over their software under these licenses, effectively forfeiting their intellectual property rights.
Well, if you release in public domain you lose any right, AFAIK. Someone could step over, take your code and have intellectual property over it. You don't forfeit your property of the code with BSD licensing. IANAL, of course.
Someone can't make public domain software unpublic. They can take it and do what they please, but they can't change the terms of use for others.
AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just "assume ownership" of it.
> AFAIK, generally US Government developed software is generally public domain (unless it's classified or something) and I doubt that means someone can just "assume ownership" of it.
They can't assume ownership of exactly what the US govt released, but they can create a derived work and own that.
Some famous rants like "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." The irony is most big bazaar projects switched to a cathedral model, in particular the Linux kernel. (I'm not against or in favor of this.)
It seemed as if the Slashdot crowd, et al, held him personally responsible for the dot com crash, coming as it did shortly after he talked about how weird it was to be rich (of course he lost it due to dropping stock prices, I think).
> Effectively putting them under proprietary control, proprietary licensing and
> then tried to make a business model out of that. They generally fail.
It sucks if you see people being charged for your free code by some scumbag freeloader and the users end up with an inferior program. People with that mentality don't mind spam-vertising to push their scams.
I used to be pro-BSD/MIT licenses, now I'm pro GPL again.
GPL is the glue that binds the community. Without that everything will fall apart. And ERS wanna go that way. So bad. I'm really disappointed of his view.
I think ESR has an excellent point, and interpret his saying that to mean that it is not mandatory to release under the GPL if it hinders what you are doing, because actual market conditions have proven that the closed source model can't compete in many ways, thus it is not as large a threat as it can be perceived to be.
