But not this week. It's time here to get a neat little ribbon and wrap up some of the "my license can beat up your license" discussions that started two weeks ago and continued last week. This week, we get a little more philosophical before climbing out of the issue.
Going deep
I started the subject by explaining what I saw as problems in the BSD
license, and tried later to figure out why BSD model supporters hate the
GNU General
Public License. A number of good reasons have been advanced, including a
thoughtful talkback that's worth your time to read. The writer correctly notes
that the nature of the two licenses pretty well means that technology
can move from BSD software to GPL'd code but not back in the other
direction.
Now, as I understand it, the primary goal of BSD coders is to have their code used, and how it's used is less important. But this one-way flow must nonetheless be irksome to those who have seen Linux far surpass the longer-running BSD model in public mind share.
One could also see it in a different way. While BSD folk write code just to "get it out there," and the open source movement (at least as expressed by Eric Raymond) advocates that its use makes economic sense, the GNU rationale is based mainly on righteousness. While others seem to value the merits of free software on practical merits or even pure self-interest, the people behind GNU say, when it comes down to it, this is a simple matter of right and wrong.
The definition of sharing
The GNU cause has its own Manifesto,
whose core can be crystallized in two sentences found within:
"...the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others."From whence comes such a Golden Rule? The general belief in "sharing is good, hoarding is bad" as a truism owes more to religion or spirituality than to any logic or observation. After all, Richard Stallman wasn't the first to decry the hoarding of private property as a social ill -- the concept is well-explained in Karl Marx's 1846 work, The German Ideology. Many of the problems identified in Marx's work are echoed in much of the writings related to GNU philosophy. For instance, Marx stated that hoarding private property was against the good of the people, and this is exactly what Stallman says about the hoarding of software.
(Now, let's not go off on a tangent here. I'm not red baiting. Nor am I suggesting that Stallman or anyone else in the GNU Project has any tolerance for what has passed as communism for the last hundred years or so. But I do believe that some of the core beliefs at the heart of the GNU philosophy owe more than a little to the ground Marx covered. Go and read the books themselves if you don't believe me.)
As for any kind of explanation -- rational, spiritual or otherwise -- of why people ought to share, it's just taken as a given. Go to the GNU link on Motivation and you'll see a single piece on what the motivation is not. No mention of what it is.
And as for this core belief that sharing is inherently Good, I know more than a few Objectivists who would object fundamentally (pardon the pun). There's a significant philosophical mind set here that holds "rational individualism" as the highest goal and considers enlightened selfishness a virtue.
As you might imagine, my Objectivist friends -- whose pressure will get me to actually make it through Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged one day -- are all fans of BSD. Mind you, at least part of the open source ideology -- with which the GNU folk disagree -- is that even the use of GPL code has an appeal to practical self-interest.
Icon bashing
Last week I asked you to have a look at an article titled The
Ethics of Free Software by Bertrand Meyer. It's a weighty piece -- it
printed out on 29 pages -- and it might have made for a good rebuttal of
the GNU righteousness had it not obsessed with personalities rather
than philosophies. The piece came to the conclusion that there's room for
all approaches, but that commercial developers should bear none of the
shame to which Stallman would assign their hoarding.
Meyer's piece can be reasonably dismissed because it's simply too self-contradictory, and for all its length, its conclusions are amazingly superficial. In his zeal to defend commercial developers from "slander" at the hands of free software advocates, Meyer stoops to linking the ethics of the whole free software and open source movements to Stallman's personality or Raymond's well-known affection for firearms.
Worst of all, he uses one of the worst possible historical comparisons one can put in an Internet document. It used to be a Usenet convention to dredge up Hitler's name to get a rise out of one's foes in debate. The convention now is to close down a discussion when the name is brought up, simply because it means the conversation has moved past any rational point. Well, you get to the end of Meyer's chapter two and there are the Nazis: case closed. Too bad, too, for it will be indeed interesting to see someone write a real Objectivist spin on the issues surrounding free software and GNU.
Then again, now that I've mentioned the N-word myself, I suppose my thread is exhausted too. All I can ask is that you think about the issues from as many sides as you can find, challenge assumptions, be comfortable with your position, but also be tolerant of others'.
And, I promise, next week we'll lighten up.
Are you tired of debates about licenses? Let us know in the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum. Or write to Evan directly at evan@starnix.com.
