>I've stated some of my views about other political issues, about activities that are or aren't unjust. Your views might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.
>The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.
>How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing any usage restrictions whatsoever in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, soft, straight piece of spaghetti.
His words are just as valid about this license as they are about the various "ethical open source" licenses that have proliferated in recent years, whether they be of the "don't let Amazon host our code" variety or the "totally not a thinly veiled vehicle for injecting social justice politics into software" sort.
Stallman is right but also he betrays his liberal leanings in that he accepts that it is okay for private profit makers to exploit whatever resources you produce. If licenses were only useful for personal, school, or research without a specific license from the publisher, that's not the end of the world and comports with the value system of the publisher. Removing the means of production from the marketplace is an anarchist/socialist idea.
However, for something as fundamental as an operating system (so long as it is a commodity), it does make sense to have a liberalized base of restrictions on use.
Injecting social justice politics is fine. Politics are present everywhere. People should express their opinions and live their lives in accordance with them. The US in particular has an obsession with pretending there is such a thing as apolitical when it comes to economic activity.
>Stallman is right but also he betrays his liberal leanings in that he accepts that it is okay for private profit makers to exploit whatever resources you produce. If licenses were only useful for personal, school, or research without a specific license from the publisher, that's not the end of the world and comports with the value system of the publisher. Removing the means of production from the marketplace is an anarchist/socialist idea.
Which leads to fun situations where you have to determine what is or isn't "commercial use." Truly free and open licenses make that a non-issue, meaning software using them are more likely to become widely adopted, which is the entire point of the FOSS movement.
>Injecting social justice politics is fine. Politics are present everywhere. People should express their opinions and live their lives in accordance with them.
People are free to believe whatever they like, but creating (largely legally unenforceable) licenses to do so only hurts the adoption of free software (and helps large commercial entities developing proprietary software). See, for example, Bruce Perens's comments on the Berkeley SPICE license, which explicitly disallowed use by the police of South Africa. Even after Apartheid ended the police of South Africa were barred from use:
I would agree with that. I guess that's the actual struggle: get people to agree that preserving the ecosystem as a whole is more important than anything else. I love free software but I 100% can understand differing perspectives.
Commercial use is pretty easy to understand though: are you making money in excess of costs and are not non-profit? Commercial use.
I suppose there are cases where a non-profit can violate the spirit of the law. That's for the courts to decide or you can make it clear by saying non-profits are okay no matter what.
Ignoring the ambiguity of commercial use for which CC-BY-NC licenses have long been criticised for, there are very obvious reasons why they don't work for software.
Let's say we have a non-commercial photo-editing application, call it NCIMP. You're a hobbyist photographer, so your buddy wants to pay you to take wedding photos for him. That's a commercial use, right? Better get that commercial license... which you might not be able to get if there are hundreds of contributors to NCIMP and they don't have any organisation to whom they're assigning copyright.
So from the end user perspective, either you're paying an organisation for a commercial license, in which case it's not that different from just getting a license for Photoshop (sure, you'd have to pirate Photoshop to get it for free, but they only really go after commercial users for copyright infringement anyway and they mainly rely on employees to snitch), or you've sunk time into learning how to use a photo-editing application to develop skills you can't even accept compensation for... At which point, you may as well just have learned how to use Photoshop to begin with; if you're starting to learn photography even as a hobby, why choose to either limit yourself to never being able to take a photography gig or have to relearn new software for the same task? Even if you don't plan on doing any paid work, it doesn't make sense to use it unless the software is much better, which it probably won't be if it's being developed by exclusively hobbyist photographers who themselves can't use it for any professional work.
I wonder if it would make sense to have a setup similar to music where commercial users of software pay a fee to an organization that distributes money to the producers.
Music and books have a lot of similarities to software in that the cost of copying is nearly free and people want to use stuff everywhere.
There are fundamental differences between music/books and software.
Music and books aren't maintained and don't require it. An old song or an old book doesn't change. You can create new songs and new books based on old songs and old books, but they're different things. In contrast, software is in a never-ending battle against irrelevancy. You could use an old version of a piece of software, but then you can't open new versions of the file format for the same piece of software. You can always enjoy an old song or book, but old software will become less and less useful over time.
Songs and books typically have a limited and closed number of contributors. If people remix works, they remix an original, or a cover - the authorship chain is much shorter than what we see with software, which can in contrast involve hundreds of authors. If you want a license type involving a commercial license, you're going to have to need some sort of copyright assignment - and at that point, you've just created a corporation that sells commercial licenses for software. If you don't do this, anyone who wants to use it for commercial purposes will then have to track down a couple hundred authors and ask each of them for a commercial license. What if one of the refuses no matter what the price is? And then we end up in the second case, where the software can only ever end up used by amateurs.
Of course you can have a software project run by only a handful of people - but then they either have to refuse any and all outside contributions, or they have to require copyright assignment.
These sorts of problems can exist with the GPL if your business is selling GPL exceptions (e.g. Qt), but you don't have to do that to make money off of GPL software. And whereas a consumer of GPL software has zero reason to care about whether the software is GPL or BSD or MIT or whatever because they're probably not modifying and distributing it (and hence zero reason to ever require an exception), a consumer of software requiring noncommercial use will inevitably have to pay attention to this sort of stuff and require an exception for something as simple as turning a hobby into a side gig.
> I wonder if it would make sense to have a setup similar to music where commercial users of software pay a fee to an organization that distributes money to the producers.
Based on what we see in the music industry I suggest we don't do this.
>I've stated some of my views about other political issues, about activities that are or aren't unjust. Your views might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.
>The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.
>How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing any usage restrictions whatsoever in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, soft, straight piece of spaghetti.
His words are just as valid about this license as they are about the various "ethical open source" licenses that have proliferated in recent years, whether they be of the "don't let Amazon host our code" variety or the "totally not a thinly veiled vehicle for injecting social justice politics into software" sort.