Hello,
This thread is very interesting and it seems that a new discourse is developed by FSFE representatives, that is not so much shared by many people on this list.
Subject: Re: Free software and open source philosophies differ, sometimes with radically different outcomes From: Heiki Lõhmus repentinus@fsfe.org Date: 11/21/2017 06:55 PM
To: discussion@lists.fsfe.org
My preferred term is Free Software because I believe individual freedom to be the highest political goal or utility and Free Software safeguards every individual's freedom and control over their devices.
As antecedently said in many posts, it clearly appears that to preserve individual freedom we should actively build a different social organization since the one we are in now is clearly based of restraining individual freedom by surveillance and exploitation (of human and natural resources). Of course I understand individual freedom as the freedom of every individual on the planet not only the richest, but I know this is not a widely shared view of individual freedom.
I have no communitarian leanings beyond recognizing that cooperating in communities is a valid exercise of any individual's freedom of association,
Well this is quite sad to hear from someone who is is vice president of an important community based structure acting for free software.
and I am decidedly pro-business as a valid exercise of individual freedom too.
Business as individual freedom, this is interesting viewpoint, it seems like a very politically oriented assertion and certainly pro-capitalist. Can you be a bit more precise please, as far as I know there are many type of businesses and a very unequal spectrum where big corporations develop extensive amounts of power while individuals or smaller organizations struggle to get important projects out.
While I prefer the term Free Software, I also recognize that in the vast majority of cases contributions from people whose preferred term is Open Source also lead to increased individual choice and control over their device.
Well the issue here is not only from person to person, indeed what one person uses as a terminology does not really matter, nor does it allow to under-evaluate that persons contribution, however the term open source has been consciously differentiated in order to fulfill the needs of capitalists, resulting in many projects led by monopolistic corporations that certainly do not serve individual freedom. First obvious example, the use that is made of android, or so many other things...
This is true of contributions from large corporations too, and where any particular user disagrees with the corporation's direction, they are free to fork the project.
Seems easy indeed ... but you do not seem to acknowledge that large corporations have an infrastructure and revenues that others don't have. Android was forked its a one man's project running on a negligible number of devices , its obviously impossible to compete. Following the "winners takes it all " scheme, or "first come first served" (or other great assertions) major corporations embedded in the financial capitalism, have developed without direct competition, which makes it impossible for others to exist alongside their massive businesses fed by data brokerage, and many more nasty stuff.
Less complaining and more use of the four freedoms would be entirely appropriate in such cases.
Which cases?
This thread is very interesting and it seems that a new discourse is developed by FSFE representatives, that is not so much shared by many people on this list.
Those who disagree are more vocal than those who agree. Always.
FWIW, I agree (and, yes, I am a member of FSFE). And I chose to keep silent becuase saying "+1" is just needless noise.
As for being pro-business, it doesn't mean being pro-monopolists or pro-corporations or pro-capitalist. In my case I am pro-business ("as a valid exercise of individual freedom too") exactly because only doing business (keeping code and information available) can limit the damages of our monopolistic technological environment. If you are anti-business, you fall into "free for non-commercial use", which was never considered FS, BTW.
Trying to stay out of the market is self-destructive, in my opinion. I sometimes do as a personal choice, in some environments or about some vendors, but I avoid promoting it as a solution for the evil of the world. If you do so, you bring all of your ideas (including the good ones) to be discarded with laugh and despise.
/alessandro
Just to note that I'm also "pro-business", also because I believe in the other half of freedoms 2 and 3.
But as was evidenced here, and in the parent thread I replied, my "pro-business" mood changes when seeing businesses getting in the way of the advance of free/libre software *philosophy* (not just in regards to the product/result/software itself).
Alessandro Rubini made an interesting point: market dominance isn't addressed with free/libre software philosophy (nor with its products). Personally speaking, I think one way out of this market dominance issue would be standardization (be it with formal process such as what was done with email, XMPP, SIP, HTML, vCard, RSS feeds, Atom feeds, CSV, ODF; or with informal one in free/libre software, such as what was done with LaTeX documents/spreadsheets/slides/images, Emacs Org mode documents/spreadsheets/slides/images and Ledger-CLI accounting files (these last two have the benefit of being simple to both *read* and edit in plain/simple text editors, at least for basic functionality)).
Besides, LaTeX documents can be interpreted by many compilers that are able to understand LaTeX syntax, there is LaTeX, LuaLaTeX, XeLaTeX (?), ConTeXt (?), htlatex (?), mk4ht (?). For Org mode documents I know GNU Emacs and Pandoc can convert or export these (in the case of GNU Emacs, it supports everything; as for Pandoc, I don't know how far the support is/was implemented). As for Ledger-CLI, there are other applications that if I'm not mistaken are similar to it (although I don't know if they understand and use the same "standard"), in some point of Ledger history it supported GnuCash files, but this is no longer true.
Note that in some cases a "player" is so big that it starts derailing from the standard or acting badly towards other "players", for example in vCard standard, some big "players" such as addressbook managers in phones, web and popular ones in email clients or specific computer software started deviating from the standard or abusing either "ADDR", "LABEL" or "X-" fields ([1][2]). Also, see the case of WhatsApp, which uses a XMPP non-compliant variant (FunXMPP) and which requires phone numbers ("fun" for who?). Finally, email service providers, see how bad it is for the bigger ones to be more advertised than the small local ones, and then find out that most of all the providers have some bad configuration that denies your legitimate emails and requires you to run non-free software in order to authenticate both as a user or for proving that you are not sending spam to their clients/users.
[1] https://github.com/scheibler/khard.
[2] https://alessandrorossini.org/the-sad-story-of-the-vcard-format-and-its-lack-of-interoperability/.
2017-11-22T12:37:50+0100 Alessandro Rubini wrote:
Those who disagree are more vocal than those who agree. Always.
FWIW, I agree (and, yes, I am a member of FSFE). And I chose to keep silent becuase saying "+1" is just needless noise.
As for being pro-business, it doesn't mean being pro-monopolists or pro-corporations or pro-capitalist. In my case I am pro-business ("as a valid exercise of individual freedom too") exactly because only doing business (keeping code and information available) can limit the damages of our monopolistic technological environment. If you are anti-business, you fall into "free for non-commercial use", which was never considered FS, BTW.
Trying to stay out of the market is self-destructive, in my opinion. I sometimes do as a personal choice, in some environments or about some vendors, but I avoid promoting it as a solution for the evil of the world. If you do so, you bring all of your ideas (including the good ones) to be discarded with laugh and despise.
/alessandro _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
* Adonay Felipe Nogueira [2017-11-22 11:24:30 -0200]:
[...]
Alessandro Rubini made an interesting point: market dominance isn't addressed with free/libre software philosophy (nor with its products).
ehrm: Rubini did *not* said that
2017-11-22T12:37:50+0100 Alessandro Rubini wrote:
[...]
As for being pro-business, it doesn't mean being pro-monopolists or pro-corporations or pro-capitalist.
amen!
pro-business != pro-domination ?!? :-)
[...]
If you are anti-business, you fall into "free for non-commercial use",
amen!
and now let's pray together: Saint'IGNUtius, ora pro nobis... :-D
[...]
Trying to stay out of the market is self-destructive
cannot be self-destructive because it's **impossible** from a philosophy of economy point of view: the market reaches you anywhere you can hide :-D
to be clear: no one could even *imagine* that someone can stay out of the market, at the same time no one can even *imagine* the market does not change in history (at least to find an equilibrium)
we are here to _shape_ the software market of the coming future, aren't we?
ciao Giovanni
P.S.: OK I'll rest at least for a couple of days, I swear! :-)
El Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 05:56:37PM +0100, Giovanni Biscuolo deia:
and now let's pray together: Saint'IGNUtius, ora pro nobis... :-D
heresy! Our prayer has always been
Saint IGNUtius, code pro nobis...
Who cares what RMS prays or whether he prays at all ?
:) ;op
(anyone knows the latin for "to code" ? can it include software, licenses and evangelism ?)
[...]
Trying to stay out of the market is self-destructive
cannot be self-destructive because it's **impossible** from a philosophy of economy point of view: the market reaches you anywhere you can hide :-D
Mind the quote said "trying". You can try impossible things (not saying it's wise, but you can, at least until you know they're impossible).
Hi,
Seems easy indeed ... but you do not seem to acknowledge that large corporations have an infrastructure and revenues that others don't have. Android was forked its a one man's project running on a negligible number of devices , its obviously impossible to compete.
That doesn't seem to be a failure of neither Open Source nor Free Software, or anything of the kind. Free Software is not immune or an answer to market dominance, as we can see historically in Apache, as an example, which just ten years ago or so had a 70% market share. It was, and continue to be, difficult to compete with that.
Just as it is difficult to compete today with the Linux kernel on embedded devices. In some ways, what we want in Free Software *is* market dominance, but market dominance of Free Software solutions. Whether you can effectively compete with such solutions or not is a different problem which Free Software does not provide an answer to.