Hi all,

On Thu, May 17, 2001 at 12:49:50PM +0200, Frank Heckenbach wrote:

josX wrote:

...

<snip> I stand proven.

Err, did you actually read the article? It advocates *more* business friendly Linux systems. Or did you suddenly change your mind?

I think what josX means is that putting to much emphasis on the business side of free software produces types like the original author who can only think in terms of business. Focusing on a compatibility between the GNU GPL and commercial applications will _not_ make people think about why software/information/people wants to be free but how they can make money out of it. From this it's only a small step to drop the notion of free software as in GNU/Linux in favor of the well being of the "Linux community", whatever that may be.

Of course the original author has no clue what free software is all about. But the FSFE should avoid any statements which further this kind of thinking. And I repeat: by stating the compatibility between free software and commercial use the FSFE is doing exactly this.

"And, whether we think it does or not, the Linux community needs businesses to support it."

Well, this is of course bullshit. Again this sheds light on the way some people (not the FSF(E), of course) use some kind of "Linux community" to argue for their own commercial gain.

"an alleged system of unprofitability does nothing but harms the entire community."

same thing

Regards Lutz

Thinking that Free Software was about being non-commercial is a misunderstanding that a lot of people have (including the author of the article). It is a misunderstanding, however.

Free Software is not about being against commercialization, it is about being for freedom.

Well, yes. But, my $0.02 on that, most people I know are, when speaking about "commercial" software, indeed speaking about closed-source, non-free software products, same as most of those, while demanding more "professional" applications / programs for GNU/Linux, they actually want more of right this "commercial" software. So probably it's not only about misunderstanding the fact that GNU/Linux is not non- (or even anti-commercial) but only about being for freedom, but it's same misunderstanding (yet what most people probably think) that commercial software is per definitionem proprietary, non-free. Seeing *this* sort of definition, I certainly hope that GNU/Linux *is* non-commercial and will be for all eternity. Perhaps, before trying to show people that free software is not about being non-commercial, we should show them a more appropriate definition of "commercial" in the field of computers / software. Probably this would put an end to both of those misunderstandings...

Regards, Kristian

-- Kristian Rink -->GNU/Linux Networking, Server, Security<-- papier : 0180 5052 5560 8162 -- sprache : 0174 5360871 icq : 107186898 (Kawazu) -- irc : #metal on IRCNet (Kawazu) virtual: http://www.secondnature.de

Kristian A. Rink wrote:

...

Thinking that Free Software was about being non-commercial is a misunderstanding that a lot of people have (including the author of the article). It is a misunderstanding, however.

...

Free Software is not about being against commercialization, it is about being for freedom.

Well, yes. But, my $0.02 on that, most people I know are, when speaking about "commercial" software, indeed speaking about closed-source, non-free software products, same as most of those, while demanding more "professional" applications / programs for GNU/Linux, they actually want more of right this "commercial" software. So probably it's not only about misunderstanding the fact that GNU/Linux is not non- (or even anti-commercial) but only about being for freedom, but it's same misunderstanding (yet what most people probably think) that commercial software is per definitionem proprietary, non-free. Seeing *this* sort of definition, I certainly hope that GNU/Linux *is* non-commercial and will be for all eternity. Perhaps, before trying to show people that free software is not about being non-commercial, we should show them a more appropriate definition of "commercial" in the field of computers / software. Probably this would put an end to both of those misunderstandings...

I think so. Explaining people what "commercial" means and doesn't mean is (and has been) also a task of the FSF(E).

You might argue that it's not worth trying to make people change their "definitions", but then remember that most people associate "free software" with "freeware", i.e. usually with free beer, no source, no support software, and we'll also have to make them change this "definition" since we don't want to talk about "open source".

Frank

Kristian A. Rink wrote:

And Frank Heckenbach frank@g-n-u.de gave word to the following thoughts:

...

You might argue that it's not worth trying to make people change their "definitions", but then remember that most people associate "free software" with "freeware", i.e. usually with free beer, no source, no support software, and we'll also have to make them change this "definition" since we don't want to talk about "open source".

I agree whole-heartedly on that... Bad thing I see is that, right now, right here, obviously one of the main arguments to make people move over to use GNU/Linux that is used in press and media sometimes is the fact that it's pretty inexpensive to, for example, get a fully operational server working while relying on GNU/Linux software. That's where most of the computer-related press and even (which even more disappoints me) an annoyingly big part of the Linux (not GNU) followers I had the chance to talk to, lately, in the end yet get back to the fact of seeing GNU/Linux the "free as in free beer" way. This is horrifying to me, seems there's a lot of work left for us to even get quite a lot of the Linux folks to fully and whole-heartedly support not just open-source but *free* software.

I think that's an important issue and here's a good place to discuss it. It has probably often been discussed elsewhere, and those who have pariticipated in such discussions can probably provide some useful information here. I don't have the perfect answer, I'll just try to give some thoughts.

I think it's important here to (try to) see things from the (potential) users' point of view. Of course, this view differs widely between hobby users, users that use a computer to do parts of their job (text processing etc.) and those whose job is about computer (sys admins etc.).

So, when we consider the "average hobby user", what are the most obvious advantages of free software? Apparently price and stability (which has long been the major advantage of GNU/Linux in public opinion) are high on the list.

As we know, these are only by-products of freedom. But how can we make the four freedoms understandable to hobby users? The easiest one is probably the freedom to distribute copies -- which practically for most people is in fact a price issue. Most computer users will never get in touch with software containing secrets or such which has limited distribution for such reasons, so while they cannot (legally) copy their proprietary software for a friend, they can go to the shop and buy him a copy. And if they get a new computer or build a network and want to copy their programs on each machine (legally), again it's only a matter of price.

Another thing that could be mentioned here is obsolescence of programs. I don't know how many users are really affected by it, but it might be a few. If a proprietary program has not just its development discontinued, but also the older versions don't run anymore (e.g. because they're not compatible to the new "OS" version or some new hardware, or because they were not y2k safe or anything), and users are forced to get used to a different program, that's often not a nice experience. Even worse if substantial amounts of data have been created with the old programs which cannot (or only lossy) be transferred to the new program.

For free software we can point out that a program won't disappear because the original maker has no interest in fixing a small bug -- someone else will do it. The fact that data formats and protocols are usually very compatible between different free programs and standard conformant, is more an effect of freedom, or rather openness (like stability and price) -- though this doesn't make it a bad thing and doesn't mean we shouldn't point it out as well.

Another freedom is the freedom to use the program for any purpose. This is probably harder to explain to the many people who have never read the licenses they're supposed to have agreed to, and therefore don't even know what they may not do with their proprietary software. And if we tell them about it, this may make us look negative because (in their eyes) we see problems which are just hypothetical to them.

But it seems like the proprietary companies are coming to help us here. ;-)

- The DVD region codes and other limitations might be the clearest case of use restriction as seen by the average customer. Other efforts of the audio/video industry go in the same direction. While that's not directly about software, parallels are easy to make.

- I've read that the next version of windoze will require mandatory user registration, either by phone (which will be quite an inconvenience to many people, I think), or over the net (which transfers unknown amounts of information about the user's system, encrypted).

- If something like UCITA ever becomes law in Europe (though I hope it won't) which allows companies to remotely remove "illegal" programs (even if there's only a suspicion, AFAIK) and effectively gives them more power over your computer than the police has (who needs a statement from a judge to raid your home and confiscate things), I think this will make quite a few people rather upset (unless they're totally dumbed down by then, and the proprietary companies are doing good work on this front)-:.

There are probably many more cases of effectively (to the end user who doesn't read licenses) restricted usage. Maybe the release of the next windoze will be a good time to start some pro-freedom compaigns as a contrast ...

The other two freedoms (study the program; make improvements and distribute them) overlap with your next point:

Anyhow, second thing which I am quite often experiencing here is the fact to try to provide people not yet related to GNU/Linux and the GNU idea itself with information about where is the difference between "freeware" and "free software". I mean, how to explain this sort of "freedom" to someone who's not even aware of what "source code" actually is? I'd really need some argumentation help, in this point. :)

Yes, that's difficult. Let's face it, most computer users will never learn C (or any other equally or more complex language) to a degree so they can even roughly understand the source code of a typical program (what's that? ;-).

Here's just some ideas:

- They can make "trivial" changes, e.g. correct some misspelled messages, replace them with a text they like more, change a menu order, a key binding etc. -- Some programs allow such configuration at runtime, but not in all (I think even most) cases. Searching for a text string in the source code and changing it is probably not too difficult for any user, and telling them that they can actually do this is surely (positively) surprising to them.

- They can ask someone else to do changes for them. Most users won't hire a professional programmer for cost reasons (at least not today; maybe in the future when requests can be pooled to get each one a lower price, and when effective micro-payment systems exist). But they can ask a programming friend in exchange for a favour, or ask in newsgroups etc. I think most people know what the chances are to get, say, M$ to implement a feature they want, so we can make a constrast here.

- When they get a change (by the ways described in the previous paragraphs or just by searching on the web) as a source diff, they can be somewhat more secure that it isn't malicious. Of course, a good cracker can easily hide a trojan from the eyes of a normal user, but chances for this are still smaller in a small source diff than when loading a new executable from the web (and in the worst case, access to the source makes it easier to recognize and fight the trojan).

- Portability. Most windoze users are probably firmly used to the idea that programs are written for one specific system. By telling them that (most) free programs are not written for Linux (or any other single system), but run on "basically any system" (perhaps even on windoze with cygwin or mingw) we can make the point that freedom also means choice (i.e., not only the choice between several free programs, but also that the choice of OS and other unrelated programs is not affected by an application program). (BTW, that's another good reason to emphasize GNU more than Linux ...)

There's also CPU portability. While most users probably won't ever use a Sparc, MIPS or Alpha workstation, the change to 64 bit CPUs will come, and we can demonstrate that we don't have to rely on inefficient 32 bit emulations to run our old programs (or 16 bit emulations on a 32 bit processor, for that matter ;-), or to wait for the authors to rewrite their programs for the new processor, we can just the existing programs using the full power of the processor.

(Yes, this is a little idealized -- I know that in practice there are some 64 bit problems, and autoconf is not a magic cure. But for "end users", that's not relevant here, I think, because before they get to try it, such problems will have been fixed by others. And the main point, that it's relatively easy to fix such a bug, as compared to rewriting the program for another system, remains valid.)

Frank

|| On Sat, 19 May 2001 12:55:00 +0200 || Stefan Meretz stefan.meretz@hbv.org wrote:

sm> But it is a important difference saying "free Software is about sm> being for commercialization of free software" or saying "free sm> Software is about being for freedom (not only) of sm> software". That's the point.

By stating that one thing is compatible with another, you do not say anything about what either one of them is about.

Lutz statement was about compatibility, not content.

As Bernhard has shown at the beginning of this thread, the FSF has always emphasized the compatibility of Free Software with commercialization. Richard Stallman himself has repeatedly told people to make as much money as they possibly can with Free Software because this will eventually lead to more Free Software.

Also it should be clear by now that being against commercialization is being against freedom in the sense of Free Software.

Regards, Georg

On Sun, May 20, 2001 at 12:36:06PM +0200, Stefan Meretz wrote:

Ok, Free Software is compatible. But my point is: What comes first? You want to tell me, that commercialization and free software is identical?

b) Software can be proprietory or free. c) Work can be done volenteeringly or for money.

Two different questions on orthogonal planes.

My position is: freedom comes first, and I think, this _is_ the position of FSF as I can read it on gnu.org.

First of all the FSF does not mix the two levels. So there is no ranking order between answers of both levels, we are talking about b):

And the answer is: Software must have the necessary freedoms.

The FSF document quoted:

...

...

Strictly speaking, ``selling'' means trading goods for money. Selling a copy of a free program is legitimate, and we encourage it. <<

I already gave you these quotes before to show you that the FSF encourages you to answer the c) question for yourself.

...

Also it should be clear by now that being against commercialization is being against freedom in the sense of Free Software.

I completely disagree, but there is no need to fit our positions. If I understand Werner Koch right: It is not a topic of FSF(E).

We will always tell people that they do have the freedom to try and make as much money as they want with Free Software. We also will tell them that we will fight for the freedom to work on Free Software without money involved. The FSFE will not answer the c) question for you.

Bernhard

Sorry, Stefan, but again: ;-)

Sorry, Georg, but again:

...

Richard Stallman himself has repeatedly told people to make as much money as they possibly can with Free Software because this will eventually lead to more Free Software.

Do you have a ref? I searched for that on gnu.org, but I can't find it.

http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/selling.html:

: Actually we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge : as much as they wish or can.

(This reference has been given in this list at least three times already.)

Frank