[POLITICS] Re: When is the Last Time You Booted to Windows?

[Joel Rees]

On 2006/02/18, at 14:01, Les Mikesell wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-02-17 at 18:58, Joel Rees wrote:
>>>
>>> It does dump hundreds of copies of the COPYING file with
>>> it's redefinition of 'freedom' and implicit political
>>> statement on your hard drive.  They are pretty much inseparable.
>
>> You're reversing a logical dependency, and, no, the GPL does not
>> attempt to alter the definition of freedom, even though it advocates
>> sets of tradeoffs that are not in vogue in the current eco-political
>> climate.
>
> You don't make something free by adding restrictions.

It's the oldest, most trite and over-used example in the philosophy,  
but how do you keep a kite in the air? If you let go of the string,  
how long does it fly?

That said, what is this about adding restrictions? I don't know of  
any source that has ever been under, for instance, a BSD/MIT-style  
license that is now under GPL retro-actively.

> You
> don't make something better by restricting how it can be
> improved.

One of the essential tasks a mechanical engineer must repeatedly  
perform is figuring out how to free up motion in a desired direction  
by, get this, restricting motion in another direction that nobody  
cares about. Nobody cared about the code before it was built except a  
bunch of geeks. The target market is _still_ people who are willing  
to trade a little work for a lot of freedom from (you know this)  
restrictive EULAs and the various kinds of malware that world breeds  
like, well, mold in the fridge (or virii in overworked sinuses in  
spring).

> You don't increase sharing by restricting how
> sharing can be done.

No one is restricting anything. This is the license that incubated  
Linux. Nothing has changed.

I'll repeat the allegory about friction, in the hopes that it will  
help you see some reality here, and I'll even dress it out a bit.

First, pumping a bicycle against the wind is hard work. In the real  
world, sometimes the wind is in your face and sometimes the wind is  
behind you. There is no way of getting rid of the wind except for  
taking the air away, and how do you pump in a vacuum? Other kinds of  
friction are troublesome, too. But if you take away all the friction  
of the bearings, those bearings just pop right out. In order to keep  
the bearings there you pay for it in a relatively tiny bit of  
friction. The friction of the tires on the road is another thing that  
sucks your energy, but if you take that away, you can't even get  
started, and it's a good thing, because you would be unable to brake  
or steer if you could get started. (Have you ever biked on ice?) You  
don't think you like friction, but you need a little of it. Likewise,  
gravity. You don't like pumping uphill, but if you always coast  
downhill, you eventually end up at the bottom of the hill. If you do  
away with gravity, you find yourself without anything to hold your  
tires on the road.

Actually, that isn't an allegory. Freedom has restrictions or it is  
useless.

Traditional EULAs are like joints without bearings, say a wheel  
straight on an axle. You have to prime it with a lot of grease  
(money) or the wheel doesn't turn. Money is the grease. In the case  
of metal or polished wood, leather binding (assurances, usage  
restrictions) will do away with the need for grease, but leather  
wears out.

Copyleft agreements are like bearings. They greatly reduce the need  
for grease and leather straps. Why? Simply that the author and the  
user are on equal footing. There's a mutual assurance in there, but  
it is not a leather strap. It's about the minimum assurance that can  
exist between two people who are going to cooperate. If you shift the  
balance either way, then the author and the user are no longer on  
equal footing, and friction in one direction or another increases.

Free licenses without copyleft are like mag-lev. They take a lot of  
energy, but significantly reduce friction. Useful for large trains  
and maybe elevators. This is why the BSDs tend to require a lot of  
charismatic energy from the project leaders, and a lot of  
administrative effort when it's necessary to update the system or the  
packages. But you don't use mag-lev on an ordinary desktop or  
workstation. But I'm not going to leave my sister on the other side  
of the ocean trying to figure out how to update a freebsd or openbsd  
box.

(You note that Apple uses a (very) weak copyleft, and that's why  
updates are relatively painless. You also note that Apple has a lot  
of money to pay their engineers and that Steve has a level of  
charisma in the same league as Theo.)

Public domain is like free-fall, you throw the thing, and if it  
lands, it doesn't move very much. If it doesn't land, it's way out of  
the range of ordinary living. That's part of the reason fig-FORTH  
didn't go much of anywhere.

Linus chose copyleft, and copyleft is a major part of the reason  
Linux gained the acceptance it has, as opposed to, say, Minix and the  
BSDs.

What you are asking is for the authors of Linux to give that up, to  
shift the balance of power off towards the user and away from the  
authors. But that is not necessary, all that is necessary, since the  
LGPL can operate at the boundary between drivers and the kernel if  
the drivers are designed well, is for the hardware makers to quit  
listening to people who claim that the GPL is equivalent to  
communism, pick up the GPL and LGPL and read the licenses from the  
point of view of engineers.

Some hardware manufacturers are doing so. Others are even going  
farther and seeing if they can exist in a world where they put their  
customers on the same standing as themselves.

Actually, all the argument we are going through here now is  
irrelevant. The way of the future is for supply side and demand side  
to treat each other as equals. It will happen, no matter how much  
anyone fights it now.

--
Joel Rees
imitation computer scientist
random philosopher extraordinaire