How did the ideology of libre/free software get so politicized?
I’ve noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.
I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy. How network software is configured in systems that other people don’t control, it doesn’t matter if it’s open source when people have no knowledge of other networks configuration.
On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.
It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way. Unless someone is both a network engineer and does infosec or something similiar, they’re not in a position to understand fully appreciate how network protocols matter more than a license and code availability.
Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?
This is an deeply uninformed rant about how their exact politics are what is “apolitical.” I’ve seen this exact nonsense on literally every FOSS related forum I’ve been on in the last 20 years.
But isn’t it such a weird coincidence that “apolitical” always happens to be the same as “whatever is best for moneyed interests?” Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?
Pure ideology
The position that others should have the freedom to read, use, and adapt source code is inherently a political one. It was never not political.
It shouldn’t be surprising that people within the FOSS movement have political disagreements about precisely what that freedom should entail.
want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned
I personally haven’t run into this, though I have seen people immediately hop into a conversation to say, “You shouldn’t use X! It’s proprietary!” Worst-case scenario, I’ve seen social shaming for using proprietary software. Which I think is to some degree OK? Encouraging and advertising proprietary software is unethical, and I think it’s fine to annoy people into not advertising things like Discord. That’s not censorship, it’s just how relationships work, it’s how people associate.
don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.
Again, I haven’t run into this. I have seen people defend even garbage libre software on the basis that half-broken free code is better (ethically) than wonderful non-free code — which is true!
My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
It only hurts the people that use the proprietary software that was made; now they don’t have control over their PC, and are at the mercy of the developer. Really, all they can do is cross their fingers and hope the dev is friendly and not up to anything unscrupulous. Speaking of which…
I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy
Not inherently, obviously! No one actually thinks that free software is a magical silver bullet that vanquishes any possibility of malware, spyware, or anything of the sort. The argument is that these sorts of things are, compared to proprietary software, significantly easier to identify and remedy.
For instance, let’s say you find through some network analysis that a program phones home with suspiciously large payloads. You can’t actually see the contents of the packets as they’re encrypted in some weird format you can’t make heads or tails of. With a proprietary program, you’ve hit a brick wall that’s very hard to climb — you can’t find out what the program is sending, not easily. Your only hope is some back-breaking reverse-engineering work, which probably isn’t feasible unless you’re a professional security researcher. With a libre program, though, you could snoop through the code for anything net-related, and discover much more easily that it’s sending your private keys to the project’s server. Heck, with the libre program you could even remove the malware code and use the program again!
One is leaps and bounds more amicable to privacy and security.
Thank you for countering me point by point, I fully respect. Even if you say that I’m wrong, I must always respect someone who argues point by point, and doesn’t do the usual internet trash of “You sound stupid, you don’t know anything”.
I have seen in Trisquel Linux forums, they get irritated or offended for mentioning something that is not 100% open source. For example, if someone obviously new posts “I want to stop using Windows, will Trisquel help me to only use free software from now on?”, to which the replies will be “Yes, but please don’t mention that software in the forum here, we don’t like that kind of promotion”. I read that and my thought is “Dumbass, they were explaining their current situation and what background they are coming from in pursuit of trying to find guidance, they were not promoting anything.”
At a certain point, people have to address the way the world is, not the way they want everything to be running. I would love to live in an exclusively BSD world with a heavy majority towards OpenBSD, along side FreeBSD to to run on all other systems. But in the mean time, since people who do all production work with various proprietary program, we have to live along side them.
My view is until free software can match the quality of a $100 million movie project as proprietary software vendors, libre software does not exist any any conversation with those people. A movie editor that makes a million dollars doing all of the editing work production does not care about software.
I think that’s what I find puzzling, is how to libre/free software advocates not see that for people who get paid for their production work on computer all day, open source software is not an option. I am not going to criticize someone who uses various Adobe programs or Pro Tools for being able to produce better quality work in less time, and there is no libre software alternative for what those programs do.
Trisquel is sadly the kind of software that would attract those kinds of users. It’s all about being completely free and open source. No driver blobs or anything even slightly proprietary. I appreciate the stance and how they’re doing it but people who go that far in their software choices tend to be quite serious and almost radical when it comes to their choices. Some of them also feel superior to people who haven’t been able to make the switch to free software. It’s also sad that the way they react will probably chase away more potential converts than it actually helps.
The people who heavily push the libre/free software exclusionary attitude have very much turned people off with the attitude. I suspect that there have been a few that went back to Windows dueto the fanaticism.
I come from BSD, and outside of maybe Slackware and Gentoo, Linux people are not the technical people they think they are. As a collective whole, I find Linux users in general who are not paid Linux servers admins have more opinion than knowledge.
I deal with it in person and online, when Linux users hype the benefits of Linux over Mac and Windows, if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.
I do wonder what is the real world, face to face, social skills of people who only use Linux-libre exclusively and won’t touch anything it. Given the posts on Trisquel forums, I get the impression that a few of them are not functioning in a healthy and socially observant manner.
if I start talking about OpenBSD and FreeBSD, they shutdown or are put off by it, have nothing to say about Linux vs BSD.
Maybe they shutdown because they dont know enough about OpenBSD or FreeBSD to have an opinion?
I used FreeBSD a while ago just to try it out. That little devil guy was too hard to resist. Besides the fact that the community is tiny what would you be discussing? That its like using linux but harder :) ?
To discuss peop’e’s skill and what productive things they use it for, take about make config options for world, kernel, ports, pf rules, do they use a hypervisor, LLVM/Clang, use it as a build server, basically what you call being harder I can real skills experience, not opinions.
Are you saying, when you talk to people who use Linux, they can’t explain what they use it for? Or are you doing some weird gate-keeping because you’ve complied a kernel before?
To your last point, yea sure, you get lots of experience building software from scratch, configuring everything manually, etc etc. But doing things manually for no other reason than to do it that way is a huge waste of time (eg Gentoo and your BSD oses–although don’t port and pgk sorta do it for you now?)
There are plenty of opinionated Linux gurus out there with experience and skills. The more experienced ones would probably get a chuckle at compiling software from source or debating make config options…when they can just use a package manager or a flatpak and get their job done in 20 seconds.
I don’t mean it in a gatekeeping way. Since the BSD’s do not have a GUI installer, none of them come with a desktop, you have to manually enable software installation, you edit your own startup daemons, it’s more of an exact precision. We like to see each other’s .conf files to see how they run their system.
There is binary pkgs and system updates, but compiling ports and comping the whole operatig system allows for different configuration options. I don’t likebinary updates because they can be removed, but re-compiling the whole operating system while using it to run other things helps the patches all get mixed in with the other code so it’s one solid fully covered systen, rather than installing and uninstalled patches. Code can stripped out, run in a different way, target the build for a different system. For example it’s possible to build for different hardware than what a system is currently running on and export BSD over the network to another system to run.
There’s native virtualization like jails on FreeBSD to run a FreeBSD installation within FreeBSD, or QEMU on OpenBSD.
I’m not gatekeeping, it’s about technical skills and abilities, and sharing how each person runs the guts of the system. It comes from the original UNIX culture of sharing code and commands with each, sharing commonality with others who maintain networks and making suggestions about their system text files configuration.
Regarding Trisquel Linux. These guys are trying to make a totally Free (Free as in Freedom) Linux distribution. That is still very hard even to this day. I think you have no idea how hard it is to have say a totally Free laptop. This is for many reasons. So you do kind of insult them by pushing Windows on them. If you do not care about this then use Debian or Ubuntu. I have used Linux for over 25, but I do not use totally Free software because it is not very easy and the trade-offs are difficult. On the other hand I totally support the FSF and their mission. We need people doing the really hard things too.
BSD. Apple OSX is based on one of the BSDs, maybe FreeBSD. They basically took it made proprietary software out of it and gave very little back. These sorts of licenses encourage that behavior which is basically free loading. If you think that is OK in terms of software you write then your fine. I am not sure I do. Thankfully Linux is protected from that or it would have already happened.
A worse situation is GitHub. Lot of projects on there do not even state a license which means they are proprietary. So not FOSS. So though people worship GitHub it is not exactly Free Software friendly.
If you want to focus on license, I’m curious to ask, if people in all different countries take GPL software and make it propreitary, what happens in each country around the world about software licenses? It’s a difference in culture and tradition between the ISC/BSD crowd and the GPL crowd. I am an ISC person. I only care about source code and the license is irrelevent.
For example, did you know in some countries the bulk of the population only use a pirated copies of Windows, people don’t actualy buy Windows, and venders sell systems with pirated copies of Windows. Microsoft has no legal recourse in several countries so the population pirates Windows. What would the courts do for GPL?
Are lawyers in every country going to try to sue, when there are places that don’t have laws about software copyright?
Compliance with GPL is on a voluntary basis. If I set up servers in a country that does not recognize software licenses, steal GPL code and make it closed source, the license is worthless. The license is only effective in countries where corporations can buy influence.
People have turned license into an idol when has no affect on people that really don’t care. SSH is licenced under ISC or BSD, Apple uses it and gives nothing to OpenBSD for SSH. The OpenBSD project is continuing on perfectly fine and SSH is the built-in default in all operating systems, even though most don’t donate to OpenBSD.
Mac is based on FreeBSD 4 from 15 years ago, it is unrecognizable today compared to FreeBSD 14.
GPL compliance is not voluntary. Legal validity has been proven many times. Specific jurisdictions that would require a lawyer in that jurisdiction to give an opinion. The FSF though did look at general treatment of copyrighted works around the world when writing GPLv3. Keep in mind too, that what people do versus what is technically legal varies widely. More then that, global corporations or corporations that are part of a global supply chain will probably have to comply with the rules in the most restrictive jurisdiction. The copyright owners can choose to sue at any time if they find out about a violation. It is of course more likely to occur when a pattern of abuse is found.
I will say something that may appear counter to what I said. One advantage of permissive licenses is that they are more flexible and compatible over time. Also certain licenses become the thing in certain communities. It also depends on who you want to use your code or library. Most corporations will not use code that is any more restrictive then LGPL. So though GPL and LGPL are interesting if they work, they do not always make sense. It is also why GPL and LGPL should be applied as version 3 or later, not just version 3 so the license can be modified to remain compatible. The other option is to assign your copyright to the FSF so they can make any modifications.
I fully reject FSF ad everything they do. I am strogly against Stallman and everything he believe.
You admit software license only matters in countries that corporations can buy political influence.
GPLv3 is about ideology forcing people into submssion and some people have turned it into a religion by putting their faith in a license rather than focusing on social structure. It’s about leeching, not protecting. By you advocating for GPLv3+ you are saying freedom can only be protected by tyranny as opposed to working on changing the culture.
That’s why I always enjoy working with hackers but I dispise crackers.
Hacking is the root of BSD and hacking helped turn OpenBSD into the most secure operating system. It was done through culture, not a license and punching people in the head to comply with the license. That’s what GPL whackjob retards don’t understand, is the cultural difference.
“Shut up and hack”, meaning stop complaining and show your work to make the source code better. If you have not submitted a diff, your opinion is pointless.
Wow! Why are you so threatened by the 4 freedoms? No one is telling you what to do with your own code. It is rather astounding to be condemning the FSF for an agenda when you clearly have one of your own.
As far as companies and other actors buying power, that is everywhere. IP laws well that more depends on if the country wants to exploit IP or freeload on other people’s stuff. I cannot say I feel strongly either way.
FSF is a cult looking for adherents to voluntarily submit their ideology of Marxist tyranny.
I believe in freedom so much that I support the right to develop proprietary software and also ooen source software. While I may choose to run OpenBSD and FreeBSD, I am ok to help fix a Windows problem.
You a lying by calling them “4 freedoms” similiar to how Islamists, not muslims, but Islamists that say there is freedom in Islam but also advocate for destroying any person who go against Islam.
Stallman and FSF are leeches, not innovators.
If you have not submitted a diff, your opinion is pointless.
Please submit your diffs for our consideration so we can decide whether to take your opinions seriously.
Everything is political, all is opinion.
I’d say anything can become political, but not everything is.
That’s a better wording for it.
if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
In my opinion, the point of many open source licensing models is not to protect the author, it’s to ensure that useful modifications to the code are able to be incorporated back into the original software. The licenses accomplish this by requiring those who fork/modify the original code to make their code/modifications public.
This improves the source code and makes it better for everyone.
You can’t take an open source project protected by a GPL license, make improvements, pretend that you did all the work yourself (i.e. not acknowledge the source project on which yours is based), and then attempt to monetize the original code + your improvement.
For example, take Truth Social. Not understand (and/or caring) about the license attached to the Mastodon project, they forked the code, made changes, and then did not acknowledge that they did so. Mastodon had to threaten to sue before they acknowledged that they’d built their platform on open source software.
It’s not about protection of a single developer or even a group. It’s about cooperation to build on the work of others in a fair way.
Open source licensing is responsible for a lot of really useful things that are integral to the daily lives of billions of people. The Linux kernel alone is a massive example. Without that license, there would be no Android, or SteamDeck. Without the BSD license, they would be no OSX/macOS. Without GPL, there would be no AdBlock, no uBlock Origin, no Git, no MySQL, no Ansible, no ProtonMail, and millions of other projects. Most internet servers would probably still be running Windows.
Most of these licenses explicitly say that you can even sell products based on the code - all you have to do is acknowledge the source project, and make your own source code public and available under the same license.
Here’s what Linus Torvalds said about people making money from Linux back in 1993:
The fact that others make money by selling Linux is something that I find mostly amusing, and something which does my ego no end of good. Frankly, I wouldnt want to bother personally, so if somebody else does it, it doesnt hurt me. Its also quite legal by the copyright, and so far I havent seen any major developer stand up and say he doesnt like his code being sold, so I dont see the problem.
I’ve noticed advocates for exclusively for libre software and actively discourage simple open source software for not going far enough, also want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned, and don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.
I mean, proprietary software isn’t popular with people who strongly advocate for free and open source software. At the same time, lots of companies criticize FOSS. Shall we talk about that too? Either way, they have no obligation to cater to you.
I thoroughly enjoy the code purity of what is labelled as libre software, for license I only like the ISC license for freedom. My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.
It may or may not harm you, it depends. It will probably harm the user. Namely; some software is inherently monopolistic. For example, operating systems are monopolistic because targeting more than one is hard for many applications and so we target the few most popular. If you create an OS with a permissive license and it becomes popular, whoever manages to create the most popular fork of it has the power to close the source, drop compatibility and form a monopoly because application developers want to target the most popular fork and users want to run those applications so will use the most popular fork. Whether the owner of the fork did most of the work on the OS or not, they get to reap the rewards of the monopoly. How is that fair or beneficial to anyone in this situation except the owner of the monopolistic fork? How are people supposed to reliably share a standard with each other if the draw bridge can be raised any time major popularity is achieved? The problem here is, only proprietary forks have the ability to do this. You have to actively deny or limit proprietary forks to stop this situation. It depends on the application but the choice of license can have huge implications.
I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy.
Yes there are examples of this and we fork those projects to not include tracking for those who care enough about it. Can you do that with proprietary software?
On the principal of freedom, I do support the right to develop proprietary software. The fact that it exists does not harm anyone who chooses not to use proprietary software.
How does the existence of FOSS infringe on your right to create proprietary software? If you mean that people at the FSF disagree with you, that’s just a disagreement. Maybe their personal view is extreme and against your personal liberties but that’s not the same as software freedom.
It seems the die hard libre software crowd, not open source people but the ones who want to live in an only GPLv3+ world can start to live in ther own world, their own bubble, and become disconnected losing perspective that which software other people use is not something that should affect your day in any way.
As is their right. I mean, it only gets difficult if someone exclusively uses FOSS and you only accept contact via iMessage. Though, if you disagree that much, maybe you shouldn’t be in contact.
Maybe you’ve just found the folks at the FSF have some extreme views? Please consider, what would it say if Richard Stallman waltzed into a presentation holding an iPad? They kind of have to take the most extreme view, they’d be pretty shoddy advocates otherwise.
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is he actually saying recommending because yeah thats like going onto a windows magazine and saying get a mac or a linux one and saying use windows.
I watch Security Now. Steve who will always be a Windows guy ocasionally rants about MS practices that are anti user. He even releases free and FOSS stuff too at times though he does develop and sell commercial software. Leo sometimes reminds him that is why he likes Linux, basically no MS issues.
I read this on Daring Fireball the other day:
Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:
-Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;-Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and-When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the formerA lot of the hardcore advocates of free software get, understandably, upset when they see masses of people spout FREE software! or opensource software…then not give a flying fuck about what that actually means. The quote above is pretty accurate imo.
I think half of the people using free(as in libre, not gratis) software are doing it because its free (as in cost). Not because they care about the “four essential freedoms”: (0) to run the program, (1) to study and change the program in source code form, (2) to redistribute exact copies, and (3) to distribute modified versions. Because, well, see the quote above. Most wouldn’t even know where to start. They just want to use the software…and not pay for it. They aren’t opposed to closed, non-free software.
So if you truly believe in the philosophy behind free software, you’ll start getting pretty opinionated as you see people co-opt, distort, and disregard key tenants of your philosophy. Even looking at some of the responses to this post, you can see people misusing the definition of free and/or not being precise with their language (which for something like this, can completely change the meaning).
This is a fantastic article: https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
It gives a good short history of how we got here.
I agree wih the quotes, thank for that.
As I said, users of libre software have more opinion than how-to tech skill knowledge.
As Theo de Raadt has spoken on, people only want to use the software, not study it.
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In the end it is all about user freedom. So you can do what you want. But if you develop closed software I do not want to have to use it. This consideration is less importent when the FOSS options are considerable. On the otherhand I have lived in times where it was not like that. This is always the fear.
What people do as a group matters… and people are always doing stupid things in terms of user freedom. Great example is Firefox and Chrome. People are idiots for using Chrome based browsers from an ad company. This affects me becase now websites prioritize Chrome compatibility. Essentially this makes the web an arm of Google.
Not really answering your question, but FSF’s criteria here are straight up insane to me. Apparently, just mentioning “open source” is unethical, as well as ever letting anyone write “Linux” instead of “GNU/Linux”.
Lol, I love that the only repository that meets their guidelines is their own.
If you know anything about Stallman, this makes perfect sense.
He’s the embodiment of “you’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”*
One way to look at it: If you believe in 50% of what they do you should support them. If you believe in 90% you should be on the board. I think this was orginally said about the ACLU, but it equally applies to the FSF.
Lot of people that hate the FSF are people and companies that tried to miss-appropriate FOSS code that was not theirs. These companies would sure try to sue you if you used their stuff, but are often upset and intractable when the FSF knocks on their door. So a lot of this is a double standard.
I will gladly admit that I don’t use BSD nearly as much as Linux and know far less about it but I think Apple forking and close-sourcing a version of BSD is a pretty good example of what you said doesn’t happen in BSD.
With all that being said, that’s what the BSD license allows for and so there’s no issue with anyone doing so.
Interestingly, Apple as well as the 2 others I mentioned that ship BSD based operating systems sell hardware meant to cooperate nicely with the software that they “give away”. Red Hat and other commercial Linucies? Linuxes? Linnii? often have a support or software license agreement that makes them money.
If you want to talk about anything to do with BSD, you can’t do it with a Linux mindset using Linux terminology if you don’t want to lead with your prejudices and ignorance as soon as you start talking.
As a first step starting point, there is no such think as a BSD distribution or “distro”. TrueNAS and pfSense are not and have never been a distribution.
I’m not going to give you all of the info or explain what they are, I’ll leave it at that for you to choose to dismiss it and stay ignorant or read and learn, expand your thinking, and stop crossing one operating system with a different operating system.
