Re: Please don't refer to Emacs as "open source"

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Deliberately removing opensourcesurveys.
>
> Richard Stallman writes:
>
>  > GNU Emacs is part of the GNU Project, a project with the goal of
>  > liberating the users from proprietary software.
>
> The problem you face, of course, is that "the users" are already free
> to choose to use free software for almost all purposes, but they
> stubbornly refuse to do so.  Instead, they by and large *choose*
> proprietary software.  I understand your frustration with that simple
> fact, but that frustration doesn't give you a license to put pressure
> on outsiders or to tell project members who they may or may not
> cooperate with.

I think you misunderstand the goal of free software.  The whole point is
to give people the power of choice.  Choosing to cripple themselves is a
valid choice.  You can try making it harder to get stuck in a bad choice
without return, and you can educate them about the consequences of their
choice.  But you can't take their choice.

Should it be legal to sell yourself into slavery?  There are some
choices you can take that effectively become indistinguishable from this
result, often through economic realities.  Education can help finding a
way out from such predicaments.

Free software offers a message of empowerment.  It is important that
people know about this message, in order not to be bereft of choice.

>  > That's a free software goal which the discourse of "open source"
>  > does not recognize.
>
> That's at best nonsense.  Even your bete noir Eric Raymond in private
> espouses the spread of software freedom as such as the main goal
> motivating his behavior -- he's not interested in improving business
> profits, particularly, though he doesn't oppose that.  Certainly the
> OSI avoids talking about "freedom" in the presence of limited
> dictatorships (aka "corporate IT organizations") in hopes of getting
> them to consent to freedom under the guise of efficiency.

That's like convincing GDR citizens of the virtues of a Western style
democracy by pointing out the availability of bananas on store shelves.
It worked, but is nothing to be particularly proud of.  In particular
since the economic viability of the banana availability depends on
dictatorships, both outright as well as economical, elsewhere.

You'll always find somebody willing to advertise some positive
sideeffects under whatever label.  But sideeffects, which have the
advantage of being actual tangible goods in contrast to ideals, tend to
fluctuate wildly.

The horse is what is pulling the carriage, but if you let the horse
decide where the carriage is to go, it will not be able to feed itself.

We have a lot of open source projects _failing_ or ailing in commercial
surroundings, when measured with commercial metrics.  That is because
our economy is _tuned_ towards proprietariness.  This is a failure of
the economy, not of free software.  It is a sign of hope that free
software can hold its stand in a hostile environment, but that does not
make an environment hostile to freedom of software users a good idea.

The message of the "Open Source philosophers" is that free software
failed to achieve its goals, and that Open Source is the way out.  They
don't understand why the FSF is still around, why people still support
its projects, and why Open Source projects fail and get bought out.

They leave free software in their wake, and that is good.  And some of
that free software would not have come into being without them.

But making a road takes more than having generous haphazards splashings
of asphalt everywhere, even though the splashings may actually be turned
into something useful.

> But I personally don't like that pragmatism, and that is true of
> *most* of my acquaintances who style themselves "open source
> advocates".  We openly advocate both freedom for users and developers,
> and efficiency and quality for businesses.  The discourse of open
> source does admit the goal of liberation; it's just not the single
> overriding goal.

If you want to get to warmer pastures on the Northern hemisphere, the
most efficient way is to go is South.  Straight.  Yes, it will work to
follow the sun whenever it is visible, actually quite great when you are
quite near to the start of your journey.  But the farther you get, the
more wasteful your path gets with regard to your goal.

Running after software maintainability and development models will yield
increasingly more erratic results the more free software becomes part of
the available toolset.

> I believe there is similar acknowledgment of the contribution of the
> free software movement to the technologies associated with distributed
> development, many of which have been most actively developed and used
> in free software projects (which wouldn't exist without the movement).
> And *that* is a real hook for the academic researcher, as I explained.

The point of freedom is not be a better hook.  In practice, that often
turns out to be the way how freedom propagates, but it is actually a
pity to trade it as a marketable good.

-- 
David Kastrup