I read that in an upcoming version of Firefox, the increasingly popular free software web browser, there will be an “Exit Survey”. Ben Goodger, a Firefox developer, writes in his blog:

We’d like to know why people leave Firefox. A survey on uninstall would help us find ways to make the software better in future versions.

This is interesting because I believe that a significant number of users will have no reason to run Firefox in Microsoft Windows Vista because that version of Windows will run Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7. MSIE 7 will have tabbed browsing and increased support for web standards, two of the reasons most popularly given for running Firefox.

Neither of these reasons is why I recommend one run a free software web browser, such as Firefox.

I recommend users run it because it respects the user’s freedoms to share and modify the browser (hence the “free” in “free software”). But this is not a view shared by the Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla Foundation is a supporter of the Open Source movement which eschews software freedom and promotes a development methodology that says businesses ought to license their programs under an “Open Source” license because then the program will be developed faster, with fewer bugs, and all at remarkably little additional cost to the business.

Unpaid labor is certainly attractive to many businesses, but something that ought not appeal much to users (neither on the order of treating a business like a charity, nor because most computer users aren’t running businesses). Also, this is a set of claims which is easily disproven. There are plenty of so-called “Open Source” programs with bugs, or programs which are developed quite slowly compared to their proprietary counterparts.

The Mozilla Foundation talks about browser choice. The claim is one I’ve laid out here before, but it basically goes like this. Users deserve a choice in what browsers to use so that no one organization can dictate how things work on the WWW.

This would be okay as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far and it isn’t really true. Mozilla (the project producing the software we know today) didn’t offer users a choice in browsers. One only needs two alternatives to be said to have a choice, and therefore we can say that Microsoft and Opera offered WWW users a choice. And there’s nothing about a “choice” that requires software freedom. Netscape Navigator, MSIE, and Opera (once the most popular web browsers) are all proprietary programs. So there’s your choice, pick your master. This isn’t surprising, the Open Source movement only complains about proprietary software in that it is less efficiently developed than the software development model they advocate; there’s nothing there about how people ought to treat one another, how to build a better society by eschewing a dog-eat-dog society, and why we ought to value freedom for its own sake.

So long as the Mozilla Foundation remains silent on software freedom, they are ignoring the best reason to use Firefox instead of a non-free browser, and in so doing giving users no reason to stay with free software. Users have to learn to value software freedom for its own sake to have a reason to continue to use free software instead of a proprietary alternative.

For those of you who don’t know:

• MP3 is patent-encumbered. The algorithms used to make or play MP3s are patented and (in some countries, like the US) must be licensed before they can be used legally (glossing over some details here in the interest of brevity). The license structure is incompatible with free software.
• Fluendo, a multimedia organization that has made free software multimedia programs for free software systems, recently purchased an MP3 license and distributes MP3 player (decoder) software.
• There is a way of doing the same job MP3 does without the patent hassle, and which (according to all the blind tests I have read over the past few years) sounds at least as good as MP3 at comparable compression levels (but quite likely better than MP3 in higher quality settings), and has better tagging facilities than MP3. This codec is called Ogg Vorbis.
• The fight to popularize Ogg Vorbis is right in line with the fight to popularize free software because Ogg Vorbis is an unencumbered codec.

Listen to http://x2a.org/pub/events/gplv3/moglen-comments.ogg (which is actually a Speex file, Speex being like Ogg Vorbis but aimed at compressing human speech very tightly) around 56 minutes 10 seconds into the recording to hear RMS‘ response to Fluendo’s recent purchase of an MP3 license. RMS mentioned this during the explanation of the “Liberty or Death” article in the first draft of GPLv3, the introduction of the most popular free software license the GNU General Public License version 3. You can download a better sounding copy of the same audio with a video track from the official Bittorrent or a direct download.

The need for this provision was underlined by a recent article talking about a GStreamer plugin which includes source code distributed under an X11 license, or so it says. But then when you read further you see, in fact, that that’s not the whole of the license; there’s a patent license involved also, and that, in fact, it’s not free software at all! And this was presented as a way of making things better for our community. So you believe that a non-free program can make things better for people, that it’s a step forward, as the author of the article I read did, then you might think what they did was great. But if your goal is to make sure—is to defend user’s freedom, to establish a community of freedom, to spread the idea that freedom is important, than you cannot accept the idea that such a thing is a positive step. It’s a surrender, not an amelioration. And so the “Liberty or Death” article of the GPL is just as important as it ever was.

Putting this in my own words: Now that I think about this more along the lines of who is affected by it and what this patent license purchase allows me to do, I see that Fluendo’s purchase of an MP3 license and their MP3 player software is not really a gift at all, it’s just another non-free codec to tempt us away from freedom.

Measured from the perspective of who is affected by Fluendo’s purchase of an MP3 patent license: the codec changes nothing for most everyone on the planet. For those who don’t live in software patent-encumbered countries, this is yet another free software MP3 encoder, something this audience has had access to for years now. For those who live in software patent-encumbered countries, the MIT X11 license is a ruse because that license does absolutely nothing to protect licensees from the adverse effects of software patents. The Fluendo MP3 software is non-free.

Measured from the perspective of what this lets me do: lose interest in fighting for a free codec that is also a better quality codec. Using non-free software would not be a win for freedom, that’s a win for those who want more people to give into non-free media.

Hubert Figuiere thanks Fluendo for the “gift”. But who is really getting something that they didn’t have before? Lots of people have non-free MP3 players including anyone who is comfortable violating patent law.

Another threat to freedom comes from the Mozilla Foundation in the form of a recommendation to run non-free software. Recently, the Mozilla Foundation is now recommending that MacOS 9 users switch from using Mozilla Suite 1.2.1 for MacOS 9 (the last build to run on that OS) to a proprietary web browser. And at least one Mozilla Foundation employee supports the recommendation. A portion of what RMS said—”So you believe that a non-free program can make things better for people […] It’s a surrender, not an amelioration.”—is applicable to this situation too, although he wasn’t speaking with regard to this situation.

Update: Fedora Core GNU/Linux will include Mono, an implementation of a portion of .net. For a long time, Redhat has not included Mono or any Mono apps. Redhat has not released any substantive report as to their apparent change of mind. Ubuntu GNU/Linux and Novell’s GNU/Linux distribution has included Mono and Mono-dependant apps for some time now. Is this a huge mistake, essentially a way for users to become liable for patent infringement lawsuits? The decision gets little substantive analysis from the supporters; just glowing words of support.

Update: Novell is trying the same strategy as Fluendo and undoubtedly there will be Novell promoters coming along shortly to tell us what a “gift” this new non-free MP3 player program “Banshee” is.

From its first paragraph, the article fails to describe reality:

“The OSS vision is of a world in which there are no greedy corporations run by megalomaniac billionaires intent on screwing users out of their hard-earned cash in return for bloated, unstable, insecure software which only operates properly with other products from the same manufacturer and has laughable customer support. Instead, there are communities of gentle, altruistic individuals working together voluntarily for the good of mankind. Unsullied by the sordid world of commerce, the code that they produce is somehow purer and more ethical than proprietary software.”

Actually, the thinly veiled reference to Microsoft is wrong. Microsoft has long distributed software which is licensed by OSI-approved licenses. Microsoft’s Services for Unix package has long included GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection which is licensed under the GNU GPL, a free software license which is also approved of by the OSI.

Commerce is very much a part of this software, many FLOSS programs are developed for business and/or distributed for a fee. In fact, the “open source” term was coined in part because the OSI founders wanted a term that would not convey the idea that the software must only be distributed gratis (despite that the GNU Project was using the word “free” to convey freedoms users have with the software, not a price one must pay to get a copy of the software). The ethics of the situation are not considered by the open source movement; that movement does not say that some licenses respect your freedom to share and modify and other licenses trample those freedoms and are wrong. The open source movement’s philosophy centers on a practical developmental methodology and is chiefly aimed at a business audience. That anyone would conflate ethics as a part of the open source movement’s message is a tip that Stephen J Marshall doesn’t clearly understand the differences between the philosophies he’s talking about. We see this more clearly when Marshall argues that:

This utopian vision of technology is championed by high-profile pressure groups such as the Free Software Foundation […]

The FSF does not argue anything in terms of “OSS” or “Open Source Software”. They explicitly disclaim such points in their essay “Why Free Software is better than Open Source“:

“We are not against the Open Source movement, but we don’t want to be lumped in with them. We acknowledge that they have contributed to our community, but we created this community, and we want people to know this. We want people to associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy, not with theirs. We want to be heard, not obscured behind a group with different views. To prevent people from thinking we are part of them, we take pains to avoid using the word “open” to describe free software, or its contrary, “closed”, in talking about non-free software.“

To put a fine point on this, consider a hypothetical situation Richard Stallman laid out in a recent interview with the newly renamed GNU/Linux Show where the user is faced with a proprietary program that works well and a free software program that is unreliable (about 44 minutes and 54 seconds into the program). The open source philosophy advocates for high-quality technical achievement, and thus is likely to endorse the former program despite its license having no chance of being OSI-approved. Free software advocates, on the other hand, would endorse the latter program pointing out that the technical quality of a program can be improved, while the proprietary program’s license is probably very hard to change. No free software advocate will complain about having a reliable program. But they will complain and work to reimplement non-free software. Free software advocates won’t push aside their freedom to share and modify software for immediate practical gains.

Marshall writes:

“Despite the overt counterculture and anti-globalization agendas displayed by certain sections of the open source movement, many governments are now also turning towards OSS in their quest for an information society for every citizen.”

Don’t confuse the philosophy of the movement with some of its participants. Stallman holds political views which don’t express the opinion of the GNU Project or the FSF. Neither the GNU Project nor the FSF have opinions on corporate globalization except where this intersects with computer software, as Stallman pointed out in a 2003 interview where he explains that: (starting at 3 minutes 17 seconds)

“Free software shows how globalization can be a good thing. The free software movement has been global since the Eighties when we had developers and users on four continents, and now it’s six continents I believe. Free software doesn’t tend to concentrate wealth, it provides ways for some people to make a living, so we can see the contrast between globalization of power versus globalization of voluntary cooperation.“

Both the free and open source software movements are pro-business; neither has a problem with the software they endorse being used for business purposes. The FSF tells people to distribute free software for a fee and get as much money as one can doing so, and to alter free software for a fee. Some people take this message to heart: Brad Kuhn, the FSF’s former executive director (now Chief Technology Officer of the Software Freedom Law Center) has gone on record talking about the high hourly fees commercial GCC hackers charge and the long waiting lists these firms have.

On the categorized complaints Marshall raises, his complaint about so-called “IP” (intellectual property) is that many employees of various organizations are under contract such that “[a]ny software that they write, irrespective of whether it is during or outside normal working hours, legally belongs to their employer” and therefore much of the software they wrote and distributed is not actually theirs to license, but instead their employers’. No specific examples are presented to support this claim and Marshall does not approach this topic from the perspective of recommending to workers that they closely examine their employment contracts so that they will not fall into the trap of giving everything they do to their employer, even if what they’re working on is completely unconnected to their job. Thus this claim comes off as unhelpful as well as unsupported. Marshall’s conclusion that “[a]nyone else contributing to OSS projects may be unwittingly engaged in illegal activity by stealing their employer’s IP.” takes the term “intellectual property” at face value without ever critiquing it (which is, ironically, something that members of both the free and open source software movements are likely to do). One of the reasons the term “intellectual property” is so problematic is because it is prejudicial. We are left to believe that copyright, trademark, patent, and other disparate laws ought to be thought of as property; not that framing these issues as property is unnatural and merely one choice of many. Spirited debate of this issue is so much a part of the free and open source movements, it is appalling that any examination of how the free software community works would leave out this debate.

“Conceptual integrity” is Marshall’s call for adhering to “good design and tight specifications to minimize bugs” and that community development doesn’t achieve this. This is a developmental methodology and does not address the more important issue of software freedom and how people ought to treat one another, but one can see significant counterexamples. The GNU Project, started in 1984, is one such community-based project that has come up with a lot of useful software that many individuals and organizations rely on (directly by running the programs or indirectly by hiring the services of an Internet service provider which directly runs the programs). The Mozilla programs offer another set of counterexamples, as more people discover how well Firefox and Thunderbird work. It seems like a number of developers choose the Bugzilla bug-tracking software to use in their own projects. I think Marshall reveals the most in his call for “professionalism” where he essentially chastises “bedroom programmers” for being insufficiently professional. I wonder how the judgement is being made without actually hiring someone to do work under contract, as a professional would.

Innovation is the last of Marshall’s bulletted points and here he claims that “[t]he open source community has so far tended to create facsimiles of proprietary packages rather than the next killer application.”. Marshall’s example here, the GNU/Linux operating system, inaccurately referred to as “Linux“, fails to acknowledge certain other factors involved here:

• “Killer apps” are hard to come up with which explains why non-free software developers don’t often come up with them either.
• Some “killer apps” were free software first but go unacknowledged as such. Internet email that we use today (as opposed to email systems used chiefly on BBSes and email systems that require use of a certain client program) and the World Wide Web were free software and are still two big reasons that people want to get on the Internet. Beagle predates Apple’s Spotlight desktop search program, but since most reviewers are biased in favor of reviewing non-free software, they have no idea Beagle exists. Beagle is, for all its faults, more trustworthy than Spotlight or the Google desktop search software for Microsoft Windows because Beagle can be free software and the others are not. Thus, if you are concerned about what Beagle does—perhaps you suspect that your index data or your search queries are being distributed without your approval—you can inspect Beagle and change it to meet your needs, or you can hire someone to do this work for you. These are simply not options for non-free programs because the only people who have the source code and the legal permission to share and modify the improved software are the organizations you shouldn’t trust by default in the first place.
• Innovation is commonly overvalued, even to the point of giving up freedom in exchange for innovation. I don’t believe that most people need programs that are radically new. I believe that most people use a computer for just a few things and they need those programs to work well. I don’t need an innovative email client, I need one that is easy to set up and use for my most frequently used functions. I use a web browser to see content published by someone else. Most of what I would like to see are ways of doing the right thing by default, not giving me a lot of options to do things I’ll rarely want to do: automatically configuring a reasonable setup so that I don’t have to spend time configuring things myself, updates that never leave my computer in an unusable state, an easy way to do recommended things like making periodic backups, encrypting email, storing only encrypted data on my media, and seeing what services are available to me on my network. And I want to do all of this without giving up my software freedom. I believe that these are non-trivial requests which require a great deal of coordination, but I doubt users will widely refer to them as something akin to “killer applications”.

The natural questions from reading “In theory, an OSS license doesn’t actually prevent anyone from selling the software but in practice no one will buy it if the source code is freely available, unless the seller is also providing some kind of added value.” goes unasked: why is it our job to support bad business models? Why are business concerns so prominent? Why can’t they switch to a consulting model and try to get work? Also, one notices how many failed businesses distribute proprietary software at no fee, allowing people to use the program, but disallowing users from understanding or changing what the program does. But it’s clear in Marshall’s essay that tending to user’s individual needs is not considered “innovative” and probably won’t be until it becomes the mainstay of large multinational corporations that get a lot of press attention (like Microsoft). IBM, Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and others doing this apparently aren’t interesting. Exclusivity is not needed when the business is based on talented and attentive consulting, in fact one should be glad that this is not exclusive to anyone or any organization in case one consultant doesn’t work out.

But what’s more important is the effect on society, not framing every question in terms of how it will affect business. As RMS explains in the aforementioned GNU/Linux Show interview: (about 1 hour and 2 minutes into the show)

“Businesses should have free software just as every computer user should have free software. But we [at the FSF] don’t focus our concerns on business. And that’s a matter of a basic philosophical decision: we don’t want to make business the measure of all things. The world is plagued today by a philosophy which is called businessism. Just as humanism meant measuring things in human terms, businessism measures everything in business terms. I’m not a businessist. When I think about how to promote free software, I don’t think “above all: business”, I think “above all: schools”. Schools must switch to free software because they should not be teaching their students to be addicts to proprietary software; to develop a dependency that will be hard for them to get out of.“

Freedom is not having to ask permission by Dave Neary.

Jeff Waugh asks if RMS “gets it”—presumably, that Waugh believes asking for GNU to receive a share of the credit “seems rather to distract attention from freedom”, as RMS said about the Linux trademark naming issues being dealt with now. I can only presume what Waugh is referring to since Waugh doesn’t describe his exact meaning in his blog. RMS’ take on the issue, on the other hand, is quite clear: the trademark issue doesn’t rise to the level of a problem for software freedom, hence it doesn’t receive much attention from RMS. On the other hand, calling the work in GNU “Linux” instead means giving more credit to a man who is profoundly disinterested in software freedom. Linus Torvalds’ reaction against Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell’s work on a Bitkeeper-compatible program during the recent Bitkeeper episode is another major step along the path of paying more attention to immediate desires than ethical examination.

If you would like to learn why RMS and the GNU Project ask for people to give GNU a share of the credit for the GNU/Linux operating system, read the FSF’s GNU/Linux naming FAQ. It covers a lot of questions people have about this issue.

People are working on the HURD (GNU’s official kernel replacement). And, like the Linux kernel in the early days, the HURD is not yet ready for wide use. Some argue that GNU/Linux isn’t ready for wide use either, but the point is that programs of this complexity take time to write and debug. Unlike Linux, HURD takes an unusual approach to doing the jobs a kernel does. It is more complex to debug than a monolithic kernel and its design will theoretically grant some interesting advantages for program development and ordinary use.

Update: I have yet to find an interview with Linus Torvalds that is this generous in sharing credit for notable achievements toward Richard Stallman (or the GNU Project) as this Stallman interview is with regards to Torvalds. Typically, Torvalds lets interviewers give him more credit than he deserves by allowing them to come away thinking he wrote an entire OS.

Background

For some time now, Firefox advocates have been discussing this web browser in terms of its popularity. Many have cited how Microsoft Internet Explorer’s usage shrinks because Firefox’s usage grows. One of the most recent of such arguments comes from Asa Dotzler, Firefox and Thunderbird product release manager.

I have no objection to the Firefox web browser, in fact I use it as my primary web browser and have for some time now. Before that, for many years, I used the Mozilla suite (a combination of web browser, email client, chat program, and webpage editor). However, the argument with which one is ostensibly convinced to use Firefox is particularly weak and has been repeated for so long those who espouse it are unlikely to closely examine why it fails to convince.

Here’s the theme, from the best essay I’ve seen on the philosophical differences between the free software movement and the open source movement (emphasis mine):

“Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn’t all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea–and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the “keep quiet” approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.

At present, we have plenty of “keep quiet”, but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom–usually because they seek to be “more acceptable to business.””

The next major release of Microsoft Windows will come with a new version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, a version which is already being tested in public and many users have had time to try it out. Like Firefox, this new MSIE features tabs, a speedy webpage renderer, and an interface to run extensions. But MSIE is proprietary software. How it works is a secret, so that you can’t easily learn what is happening to your data. Experts are equally stymied as the secret is kept from them too. The software may not be shared, so even if you discover that MSIE is doing something you don’t want it to do and you somehow figure out a way to change how MSIE behaves you cannot share that improved version. Being a good neighbor or a good friend is prohibited with proprietary software, thus proprietary software is an anti-social trap.

Free software is the exact opposite of this: free software is software that respects the user’s freedom to share and modify the program to help themselves, help their neighbors, and help their community. Everyone has the right to inspect, share, and modify the software for whatever purpose at any time so that they can make the computer behave as they want it to behave.

The problem with Firefox and MSIE debates from many Firefox advocates and corporate media

Sadly, the debate involving Firefox and MSIE is being framed in terms of features (or on the equally poor argument of “choice”) instead of software freedom. Particularly with well-financed, well-advertised proprietary software with the power to bundle something with the OS, proprietors can maintain a strong popular lead. The argument Firefox proponents offer doesn’t take any time to teach users to value their software freedom, thus these users have no reason to reject the next version of MSIE. Hence, popularity is both (1) a minor concern that (2) has yet to really be tested at all.

Choice is often an effective way to railroad someone out of something they value. In US presidential elections, narrowing one’s choices is a way to railroad most voters into voting for the interests of the wealthy (Bush versus Kerry). In the context of web browsing, choice meant railroading users out of their software freedom. Mozilla suite and Firefox are not needed to provide choice. At one time, well before the current Mozilla project was a part of our lives, the three most popular graphical web browsers were Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Opera. Since there were at least two browsers in the set, choice was satisfied. But software freedom was not satisified at all because none of the browsers in that set were free software browsers. Hence, Mozilla suite and Firefox don’t give one “choice”, one had choices before these browsers came along. But one did not have software freedom.

Software freedom is something Microsoft chooses not to supply to its users. Software freedom serves the needs of the users and proprietary software is untrustworthy by default. Hence, the debate should be focused on technical concerns and features after one has whittled away the competition by asking which program respects the user’s freedoms to share and modify the software.

Why not discuss software freedom

The Mozilla Foundation and Firefox proponents often don’t discuss software freedom because they are advocates for the open source movement. This movement started over a decade after the free software movement. The open source movement was formed to be more business-friendly. To accomplish this, this movement’s founders decided that they could more effectively talk to businesses by touting practical benefits of so-called “open source” software—that software is developed faster, cheaper, and with fewer bugs when more people can have a hand in writing the software—while pushing aside any freedom talk. User’s freedom to control how their computers work is not a cause the open source movement fights for. Effectively, the open source movement is a call to value an efficient development methodology by getting businesses to leverage the talented hackers of the world to work for them at no charge.

Timothy R. Butler, editor-in-chief of “Open for Business” offers his take on businesses running proprietary software starting with how Linus Torvalds blew it when picking a proprietary program (BitKeeper) to manage the source code for his fork of the Linux kernel. RMS, the founder of the free software movement, and virtually everyone else in the free software movement saw this coming years ago when they first learned of Torvalds’ decision. But Torvalds’ hypocrisy has gone unmentioned and it’s important that it be challenged because Torvalds is looked to as a hero of the free software movement.

Background

For those not in the know, in 1992 Torvalds decided to BitKeeper to track the various files that constitute the Linux kernel (roughly, a part of an operating system that manages hardware resources and allows programs to use them harmoniously). BitKeeper offers attractive technical features Torvalds couldn’t get elsewhere. Instead of improving a comparable extant program, or asking the community to improve something for him (he has the celebrity and the following to be able to get some things he wants by asking), his poor example essentially asked fellow kernel hackers to also install and run BitKeeper. Some time later, BitMover (BitKeeper’s copyright holder) distributed a proprietary but zero-cost version of BitKeeper that was limited in its capabilities, but enough to tempt some hackers into buying a BitKeeper license.

BitMover learned that Andrew “Tridge” Tridgell, one of the authors of Samba (a program which lets Microsoft Windows and free software OSes share printers and files), was reverse-engineering BitKeeper’s network protocols to make a drop-in free software replacement for BitKeeper. Larry McVoy (head of BitMover) knew that the Samba team had the skill needed to get this job done because much of the work in Samba had been done the same way by examining how Microsoft Windows systems interacted when authenticating, sharing files, and printing. McVoy decided to not sell Torvalds or anyone else at OSDN any more BitKeeper licenses. OSDN’s current BitMover licenses are now void and McVoy doesn’t even want them running the program any more (although how McVoy will enforce this, I don’t know).

More recently

McVoy claims that Torvalds tried to get Tridgell to stop development and that he and Torvalds think the same way on this issue:

Larry [McVoy] is perfectly fine with somebody writing a free replacement. He’s told me so, and I believe him, because I actually do believe that he has a strong moral back-bone.

What Larry is _not_ fine with, is somebody writing a free replacement by just reverse-engineering what _he_ did.

Larry has a very clear moral standpoint: “You can compete with me, but you can’t do so by riding on my coat-tails. Solve the problems on your own, and compete _honestly_. Don’t compete by looking at my solution.”

And that is what the BK license boils down to. It says: “Get off my coat-tails, you free-loader”. And I can’t really argue against that.

But that’s not what the BitKeeper license says because copyright law doesn’t let them have that power. Also, Torvalds didn’t mention the part of the BitKeeper license that says the licensee isn’t allowed to use it to develop competitive programs. Compatibility and software freedom be damned, if you do something like what BitKeeper does, don’t think it’s okay to allow BitKeeper users to move to something they can inspect, share, and modify!

If the free software movement held Torvalds’ ridiculous opinion, Torvalds’ own desire for popularity would be squelched. A GNU/Linux system is currently the most popular way to run Samba or OpenOffice.org, both programs built on reverse engineering proprietary protocols and file formats. Nobody would care about a GNU/Linux system if it had absolutely no compatibility with what is already in use. As you’ll see if you read the next link, doing one better than UNIX systems was a design decision for GNU which RMS two decades ago. GNU programs are widely known for doing the same jobs UNIX programs do but handling junk data better than they do. Should we look at RMS’ effort and persuade him to stop because it might draw sales away from proprietary UNIX systems?

I see nothing wrong with reverse-engineering the software to achieve freedom. Even the Free Software Foundation says they would run the non-free software to achieve this end, then when the free program was far enough along, they would stop running the non-free program and delete it from their system.

As the New York Times recently reported, Brazil is asking for free software. What’s not clear is that Brazil, like Peru, is not asking for open source. The headline and the quote inside the NYT article get it right. Seeing “open source” language is an attempt to horn in on the popularity of software freedom but without actually consistently delivering software freedom or pitching a message based on software freedom. This has happened before. A few years ago, Peruvian Congressman Villanueva was being lobbied by Microsoft about a free software in government bill the congressman was pushing in Congress. The congressman took a the Microsoft rep down a peg when the MS rep wanted to reframe the argument to focusing on “open source”; Villanueva corrected him and insisted on debating the issue around software freedom.

Microsoft wants to challenge “open source” because they know they can’t compete with software freedom. Microsoft is a proprietor and what they sell caters to people focusing on price and features — two values that matter a great deal to the open source movement. The open source movement was built to deny software freedom in exchange for values Open Source Initiative founders believed that their target audience—business—would respond to. So, goodbye software freedom, hello leveraging an unpaid workforce to help write software in exchange for a slightly more amenable license.

Soon, OpenOffice.org v2.0 will come out (beta versions are available now), but there’s a catch: some of its functionality is based on a Java runtime engine which is non-free software (Sun Microsystem’s JRE). This means that some of OO.org’s functionality is written in a programming language (Java) for which there is no free software replacement yet. Therefore, in order to run some parts of OO.org v2.0, users will need to install Sun’s non-free JRE or do without the functionality. Fortunately for most users, the bulk of OO.org’s most popular functions (word processing, drawing, presentation, spreadsheet, and equation editor) are not adversely affected.

But the message is clear: this is what happens when you stop caring about software freedom. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software community, warned us about this. He said that such a program would be “free but shackled” to a non-free program, and thus not useful in the free world where users run nothing but free software.

Frank Schönheit is a Sun employee cited in a Newsforge article on OO.o 2.0. He is quoted as saying that “functionality is what matters”, and he’s not lying. For software proprietors and for the audience the open source movement speaks to, adopting proprietary software in order to get some job done is a perfectly amenable thing to do. For free software advocates, writing a free software replacement is far more attractive.