When you have Right on your side (or Left, as the case may be)
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But not this week. It's time here to get a neat little ribbon and wrap upsome of the "my license can beat up your license" discussions thatstarted Going deep Now, as I understand it, the primary goal of BSD coders is to have theircode used, and how it's used is less important. But this one-way flowmust nonetheless be irksome to those who have seen Linux far surpass thelonger-running BSD model in public mind share. One could also see it in a different way. While BSD folk write code justto "get it out there," and the open source movement (at least asexpressed by Eric Raymond) advocates that its use makes economic sense,the GNU rationale is based mainly on righteousness. While others seem tovalue the merits of free software on practical merits or evenpureself-interest, the people behind GNU say, when it comes down to it,this is a simple matter of right and wrong. The definition of sharing (Now, let's not go off on a tangent here. I'm not red baiting. Nor am Isuggesting that Stallman or anyone else in the GNU Project has anytolerance for what has passed as communism for the last hundred years orso. But I do believe that some of the core beliefs at the heart of theGNU philosophy owe more than a little to the ground Marx covered. Go and read As for any kind of explanation -- rational, spiritual or otherwise -- ofwhy people ought to share, it's just taken as a given. Go to the GNUlink on And as for this core belief that sharing is inherently Good, I know more thana few Objectivistswho would object fundamentally (pardon the pun). There's a significantphilosophical mind set here that holds "rational individualism" as the highestgoal and considers enlightened selfishness a virtue. As you might imagine, my Objectivist friends -- whose pressure willget me to actually make it through Ayn Rand's Icon bashing Meyer's piece can be reasonably dismissed because it's simply tooself-contradictory, and for all its length, its conclusions are amazinglysuperficial. In his zeal to defend commercial developers from "slander" atthe hands of free software advocates, Meyer stoops to linking the ethicsof the whole free software and open source movements to Stallman'spersonality or Raymond's well-known affection for firearms. Worst of all, he uses one of the worst possible historical comparisonsone can put in an Internet document. It used to be a Usenet convention to dredge up Hitler's name to get a rise out of one's foes in debate. The convention now isto close down a discussion when the name is brought up, simply because it means the conversation has moved past any rational point.Well, you get to the end of Meyer's chapter two and there are the Nazis: case closed. Too bad,too, for it will be indeed interesting to see someone write a realObjectivist spin on the issues surrounding free software and GNU. Then again, now that I've mentioned the N-word myself, I suppose mythread is exhausted too. All I can ask is that you think about theissues from as many sides as you can find, challenge assumptions,be comfortable with your position, but also be tolerant of others'. And, I promise, next week we'll lighten up. Are you tired of debates about licenses? Let us know in the TalkBack below or in the
I started the subject by explaining what I saw as problems in the BSDlicense, and tried later to figure out why BSD model supporters hate theGNU GeneralPublic License. A number of good reasons have been advanced, including a
The GNU cause has its own "...the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it withother people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users andconquer them, making each user agree not to share with others."
From whence comes such a Golden Rule? The general belief in "sharing isgood, hoarding is bad" as a truism owes more to religion or spiritualitythan to any logic or observation. After all, Richard Stallman wasn't the first todecry the hoarding of private property as a social ill -- the concept iswell-explained in Karl Marx's 1846 work,
Last week I asked you to have a look at an article titled
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