Seems entirely built around the straw man argument that Free Software doesn't want to interoperate with standards created by proprietary companies.
I'm not sure you could be any more wrong about something, unless you were actively trying to do so. Even then it would take effort and a certain twisted kind of mad genius. Just seems to come naturally to Matt Asay though, he can churn this nonsense out week after week.
There's no strawman, the author simply misuses some terms.
To put it simply, the OP advocates that open source should be more like BSD and less like Debian. Including NVIDIA drivers in your distribution is in a sense a
matter of "adhering to standards" and also something many OSS developers feel strongly against. The author argues that more is accomplished by giving users what they want, even when that means you have to work with and include propriatary software.
I'm not familiar with the author though, so I may be giving him too much credit.
I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on the phrase from Matt Asay's piece where he quotes Jason Perlow as saying:
"But some people ... will use only free and open source software
for the sake of ideological reasons alone"
The part I'm curious about is the ending "for the sake of ideological reasons alone." To me, "ideology" refers to the values that drive us-- the reasons we do things. Certainly, Stallman is driven by ideology, but isn't Eric Raymond as well? Aren't we all?
I understand that there are non-ideological reasons for things-- like you started crying because you learned your dog had died. You're having an immediate, emotional reaction; there's no rational thought involved. But I don't understand the distinction between "pragmatism" and "ideology" in the realm of rational thought, like choosing software licenses. In my experience, when someone asks me to be "pragmatic," it is the same as someone asking me to do something that seems like a bad idea.
They're usually requests like, "Let's just copy a little bit of this code off Sourceforge and act like it's ours. They won't mind. Come on, be pragmatic." Or maybe, "If you would release that code under the BSD license, we could use it in our proprietary commercial applications. Come on, be pragmatic."
I'd love it if someone could give me a better way to think about the difference between pragmatism and ideology, or help me understand why I continually disagree with other people about this sort of thing. My best guess is that people who ask me to be "pragmatic" are just full of crap, or at least some of them are, but I'm also open to the possibility that I'm just misunderstanding the world.
Okay, so holding to uncompromising moral principles isn't particularly compatible with real-world success. This is neither new nor limited to Free Software; you either compromise in order to get along, or you retreat with like-minded folks and live your own way (cf. Amish communities, hippie communes, &c.)
Not everyone agrees with Stallman's ethical standards, and it's not even hard to argue that strategic compromises could better achieve the long-term goals of the FSF (in fact, they've been known to make exactly those sorts of compromises).
But it really bothers me when people criticize Stallman for being out of touch, or imply that it's "hatred of Microsoft" or whatever motivating him, while sometimes seeming to promote compromise as a virtue in and of itself. Are these people willfully ignoring the explicit philosophical/ethical framework behind the FSF? Are they opposed to the ethical stance but unwilling to say so directly? Is it inconceivable to them that someone could actually dedicate their lives to a moral cause?
I suppose the obvious cynical answer is "they're trolling GNU/Fanboys in order to rack up more website hits", but I try not to assume acting in bad faith as my first explanation.
I've been working with open-source software for 15 years. Very early on it was clear to me that GPL is not very compatible with commercial enterprises, for exactly the reasons specified in the article.
It is a waste of time having to evaluate or code around the ability to use/ship GPL software with your own commercial stack. A waste of time.
OTOH, all my MIT/BSD code happily works perfectly without a thought or worry about legal ramifications. MYSQL is for me the canonical example of the crap that goes on with GPL software.
All of the open-source software I produce is MIT/BSD style.
I don't have any problem with FSF wanting there to be tons of GPL software. It's just not useful for me. There are clearly some social goods from GPL software -- knowing it has to be virally free is useful to that stack of software. It just doesn't play nice enough with non-FREE software to be very useful to commercial interests.
Your response is interesting to me. I agree with almost everything you wrote, but all of the open-source software I produce is GPL'd.
I think the difference is that you want your software to be useful to commercial interests, while I don't. I've gotten a lot of benefit from what you call the GPL "stack of software," and I'd rather advance that than the commercial stack that I (mostly) can't afford to use.
GPL is not very compatible with commercial enterprises that sell software, I think you mean.
It's perfectly compatible with commercial enterprises that only need to use software that lets them get on with their actual business. In fact, it has certain strategic advantages in this case; after all, the explicit purpose of the GPL is to maximize freedom for end users, not developers.
What the author means is that software maintainers need to embrace compromise instead of Stallmanesque freedom. The first he calls open source, the second Free.
I know it is somewhat jargony, but FLOSS, meaning Free (Libre) and Open Source Software, is what "Free software" means. I think that makes clear that OSS is FLOSS without the "FL." The problem (often mentioned) is that "free" is overloaded in English.
I'm not sure you could be any more wrong about something, unless you were actively trying to do so. Even then it would take effort and a certain twisted kind of mad genius. Just seems to come naturally to Matt Asay though, he can churn this nonsense out week after week.