On 2006/02/18, at 14:01, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 18:58, Joel Rees wrote:
It does dump hundreds of copies of the COPYING file with
it's redefinition of 'freedom' and implicit political
statement on your hard drive. They are pretty much inseparable.
You're reversing a logical dependency, and, no, the GPL does not
attempt to alter the definition of freedom, even though it advocates
sets of tradeoffs that are not in vogue in the current eco-political
climate.
You don't make something free by adding restrictions.
It's the oldest, most trite and over-used example in the philosophy,
but how do you keep a kite in the air? If you let go of the string,
how long does it fly?
That said, what is this about adding restrictions? I don't know of
any source that has ever been under, for instance, a BSD/MIT-style
license that is now under GPL retro-actively.
You
don't make something better by restricting how it can be
improved.
One of the essential tasks a mechanical engineer must repeatedly
perform is figuring out how to free up motion in a desired direction
by, get this, restricting motion in another direction that nobody
cares about. Nobody cared about the code before it was built except a
bunch of geeks. The target market is _still_ people who are willing
to trade a little work for a lot of freedom from (you know this)
restrictive EULAs and the various kinds of malware that world breeds
like, well, mold in the fridge (or virii in overworked sinuses in
spring).
You don't increase sharing by restricting how
sharing can be done.
No one is restricting anything. This is the license that incubated
Linux. Nothing has changed.
I'll repeat the allegory about friction, in the hopes that it will
help you see some reality here, and I'll even dress it out a bit.
First, pumping a bicycle against the wind is hard work. In the real
world, sometimes the wind is in your face and sometimes the wind is
behind you. There is no way of getting rid of the wind except for
taking the air away, and how do you pump in a vacuum? Other kinds of
friction are troublesome, too. But if you take away all the friction
of the bearings, those bearings just pop right out. In order to keep
the bearings there you pay for it in a relatively tiny bit of
friction. The friction of the tires on the road is another thing that
sucks your energy, but if you take that away, you can't even get
started, and it's a good thing, because you would be unable to brake
or steer if you could get started. (Have you ever biked on ice?) You
don't think you like friction, but you need a little of it. Likewise,
gravity. You don't like pumping uphill, but if you always coast
downhill, you eventually end up at the bottom of the hill. If you do
away with gravity, you find yourself without anything to hold your
tires on the road.
Actually, that isn't an allegory. Freedom has restrictions or it is
useless.
Traditional EULAs are like joints without bearings, say a wheel
straight on an axle. You have to prime it with a lot of grease
(money) or the wheel doesn't turn. Money is the grease. In the case
of metal or polished wood, leather binding (assurances, usage
restrictions) will do away with the need for grease, but leather
wears out.
Copyleft agreements are like bearings. They greatly reduce the need
for grease and leather straps. Why? Simply that the author and the
user are on equal footing. There's a mutual assurance in there, but
it is not a leather strap. It's about the minimum assurance that can
exist between two people who are going to cooperate. If you shift the
balance either way, then the author and the user are no longer on
equal footing, and friction in one direction or another increases.
Free licenses without copyleft are like mag-lev. They take a lot of
energy, but significantly reduce friction. Useful for large trains
and maybe elevators. This is why the BSDs tend to require a lot of
charismatic energy from the project leaders, and a lot of
administrative effort when it's necessary to update the system or the
packages. But you don't use mag-lev on an ordinary desktop or
workstation. But I'm not going to leave my sister on the other side
of the ocean trying to figure out how to update a freebsd or openbsd
box.
(You note that Apple uses a (very) weak copyleft, and that's why
updates are relatively painless. You also note that Apple has a lot
of money to pay their engineers and that Steve has a level of
charisma in the same league as Theo.)
Public domain is like free-fall, you throw the thing, and if it
lands, it doesn't move very much. If it doesn't land, it's way out of
the range of ordinary living. That's part of the reason fig-FORTH
didn't go much of anywhere.
Linus chose copyleft, and copyleft is a major part of the reason
Linux gained the acceptance it has, as opposed to, say, Minix and the
BSDs.
What you are asking is for the authors of Linux to give that up, to
shift the balance of power off towards the user and away from the
authors. But that is not necessary, all that is necessary, since the
LGPL can operate at the boundary between drivers and the kernel if
the drivers are designed well, is for the hardware makers to quit
listening to people who claim that the GPL is equivalent to
communism, pick up the GPL and LGPL and read the licenses from the
point of view of engineers.
Some hardware manufacturers are doing so. Others are even going
farther and seeing if they can exist in a world where they put their
customers on the same standing as themselves.
Actually, all the argument we are going through here now is
irrelevant. The way of the future is for supply side and demand side
to treat each other as equals. It will happen, no matter how much
anyone fights it now.
--
Joel Rees
imitation computer scientist
random philosopher extraordinaire
