I want to start a discussion of MIT vs GPL and see what you all think
Before this devolves into a flame war, here’s for you the introductory paragraph
Disclaimer: I’m aware that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not defending those nor the man himself. I’m not defending blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I claim that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever.
That said, I only see valid points here. For a long time, I too had a preference for MIT-style of licenses, thinking that they would “at least give a chance for a major business to embrace and extend, for the benefit of the open-source world”, win-win, right?
Fast-forward, it’s now pretty clear how the corporate world used the open-source movement to consolidate its monopoly, common good shouldn’t get privatized, and large corporations don’t have your best interest at heart.
Here’s a link to a list of several of his essays with links to translations and various collateral material: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
As a young programmer when he wrote it, I really enjoyed The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
That’s Eric S Raymond (ESR) not Richard Stallman (RMS). ESR was an early and influencial voice in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), advocating for a distinction between Open Source and Free Software, acknowledging the GNU Public License (GPL) would not work for all parties, some flexibility was need.
RMS is a GPL purist and against any form of compromise. Both made a huge impact and helped make the world and internet better. But they both contributed in very different ways.
Once again, I confuse the two. :) Thanks for pointing it out.
No worries. It’s all good. 😁
Great post. Thanks for the read. I look at open source hardware as an issue of ownership. I believe anything proprietary only exists for exploitation and is theft of ownership. I often call this issue the rise of the age of neo digital feudalism.
The idea of protecting the public commons in this blog post fits well into this. Growing up I always wondered how people devolved into serfdom in the middle ages. We are currently experiencing it first hand. In a generation or two, the entire concept of ownership will fall apart. The only difference between a serf and a citizen is ownership of one’s tools and property. Proprietary is stealing the tools while government corruption is eroding ownership of any property. This is history rhyming. The future is slavery in all but name, and that future is now.
Good article. Despite Stallman’s being an asshole, he was right about a great many things.
Stallman is the type of guy–in any case–where i think you can remove the ideas from the person without issue (quite literally here, since part of his whole deal is copyleft). it is the case that he is extremely influential in how these ideas have been formulated and manifest,[1] but they’re really not things that live or die by him as a person.
probably to their detriment at times, but that’s a sidenote here not worth pursuing ↩︎
We need more of Stallman’s idealism, but we need less of the black-and-white firey rhetoric that often comes with. It becomes a lot harder to see other points of view and come to a common understanding when we are constantly at eachother’s throats.
yes, more of that Richard Stallman computing philosophy brain, and zero of that creepy predator of children brain.
Do we also need more doctorates?
Is it just me or is he… excessively pedantic?
He is certainly a visionary but he’s also a condescending creep.
If you’re looking for a good laugh and have some free time, you should check out the rider he sends out before speaking at events.
What the article fails to address and what I’ve been struggling with personally is… We all need food. Yeah it’s great working on GPL code and ensuring it’s all open. But when companies consider your gpl library vs someone else’s mit library they will naturally go with mit. And then they’ll say “well we’re using this free library already might as well donate/fund it”. So suddenly this MIT dev is able to put way more time into the mit library than your gpl library because it becomes their job. Something that feeds them. Their library gets better faster… And more and more companies use it and fund it. GPL is great if absolutely everyone is on board and everyone is fed. But that’s not the world we live in.
But it being MIT also makes it easy for the company to just work internally by themselves to make improvements for their version of the software without paying anything at all to the original dev. They can even release a better product than the original dev using his own changes and unfairly compete against them without sharing anything back.
Whereas, if the license is GPL, they would need to hire the original dev and colaborate with him fairly if they ever want to make a proprietary version of the software (which can be done, as long as the dev is the sole copyright holder).
Yes I wasn’t arguing that MIT>GPL I was instead identifying the source of GPL’s challenges in hopes to find a solution for those challenges.
He has his problems but I’m particularly concerned about the “GPL2/3 or later” clauses in a lot of GPL-released software and how the absence of his leadership might compromise it. I’m sure a lot of corporations would like to see a good chunk of GPL’d software end up under an MIT-style license.
