Re: “Free Software”: An idea whose time has passed?

[Jean Louis]

* Danny Spitzberg <stationaery@gmail.com> [2021-03-26 17:55]:
>    Interesting perspective, worth engaging with. It covers everything from
>    the term free/libre and beer, to Microsoft and IEC 62304, to not
>    getting credit and reactionary attitudes.
> 
> 
> 
> “Free Software”: An idea whose time has passed
> 
>    [1]Robert M. Lefkowitz
> 
>    Almost forty years ago, in 1985, the idea of “Free Software” was born.
>    That is not to say that the idea of sharing software with colleagues
>    and making source code available was born. Ten years before the GNU
>    Manifesto and the Free Software Foundation, I worked at a cloud
>    services company (only we called it “timesharing” back then), and in
>    order to encourage people to use our offerings and pay us for renting
>    computer time and disk space and network bandwidth, we curated a
>    collection of software libraries that customers could freely use. We
>    called it the Public Library, of course. The software therein
>    was public software. The idea of public software was software that
>    anybody could freely use. What happened in 1985 was the birth of the
>    idea that creation of software was a political act. And that when the
>    creation of software was motivated by politics, it should be
>    called free software to differentiate it from software created for
>    other reasons. This became clear to be when I attended my first
>    O’Reilly Open Source Conference, where I watched Miguel de Icaza debate
>    Richard Stallman — and the question on the table was whether or not
>    there was a difference between “free software” and “open source
>    software”. The conclusion was that there was no detectable difference
>    from examining the software or the license or any artifact. The
>    difference was the intent of the programmer. If the intent was
>    political (i.e. a concern for freedom), then the result was free
>    software. If the intent was industrial, the result was open source
>    software. I use the term industrial because the motivation of the open
>    source crowd is to use what they believe to be a superior method of
>    producing software.

Maybe at that time there was no difference, today there are many
differences and exactly what RMS predicted is happening. We have got a
lot of open source that is not free software, one cannot do what one
wants. Example are Redis modules and other software changing their
licenses as they do not want companies to sell them as cloud
services. There is now new term such as "source available", and so on,
that adds to confusion.

Now is more than ever important to promote free software due to
increasing number of corporations that control their users and their
data. 

>    My interest in free or open source software has never been either
>    political or industrial. My interest has always been educational. That
>    is, access to the source code provided the opportunity to learn from
>    it. So, in the same spirit as the Open Source / Free Software
>    distinction, I coined the term Liberal Software to refer to software
>    where the intent of the programmer is educational(liberal as in
>    education). Any one of these three intents can produce software for
>    which the source code is available — and that is often called FLOSS,
>    meaning Free, Liberal, or Open Source Software.

Alright, but there are some quite big differences in the article, as
spirit of Open Source is not the same spirit of Free Software, and we
can see how Open Source movement does not adequately forward the
purpose of free software.

>    I prefer to think about these categories in terms of intent, because
>    that opens the door to reflecting about effective strategies to
>    implement that intent. So, for example, if it were to turn out that,
>    all other things being equal, providing source code for libraries could
>    be shown to produce software of inferior quality (and there is much
>    evidence to support such a conclusion), then someone with an intent to
>    produce industrial software might choose to pursue a course of action
>    that did not involve making the source code available. The availability
>    of source code is certainly invaluable in Liberal Software, and there
>    are several scenarios regarding industrial software that require access
>    to the source code. But that is a discussion for a different
>    time.

Quality of software is purpose of many programmers and developers, but
not a main purpose. 

>    Today’s topic is political software. I think it is clear that the Free
>    Software Foundation has failed to move the needle on the political
>    issues relating to software. Those of us who are interested in issues
>    of freedom and ethics and social justice related to software must
>    explore alternative stratagems to achieve those objectives. The tactics
>    of the Free Software Foundation (the insistence on copylefting software
>    and fighting software patents) have become more and more ineffective.
>    The world of software has evolved and changed in the years since 1985:
>    we need to let the past die and build a better future.

That does not sound as a sane call to action.

>    The first sign that free software is intellectually bankrupt is that
>    the Free Software Foundation seems unable to develop new generations of
>    leadership. Free societies are usually lukewarm to the practice of
>    “dictators for life”. After around a decade, it is a healthy sign if
>    new leadership emerges. It is a sign of growth and innovation. It is
>    healthy. Seeing the same people in the same places pursuing the same
>    failed tactics decade after decade is evidence of a lack of broader
>    acceptance.

What a nonsense bag of gibberish I am reading here...