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.
