> Remind me again how the GPL preserves my freedom.
Very well.
The governments and states of the world has agreed that any written or creative works shall have owners, called “copyright holders”, who can decide who, if any, other persons shall have the right to make further copies and/or make modifications of those works. This legal arrangement is made with a few specific business models in mind, but those business models originate from the age of printing presses, and this legal arrangement is not conducive to free collaboration and improvements of the works in question, as is the expected norm in, for example, science. Some people who are, for this reason, opposed to this arrangement, noted that this arrangement is, incidentally but necessarily, giving the authors quite a lot of power, and so they constructed the GPL. The GPL is a specific use to which authors can, if they wish, put these powers they have been granted. The GPL is meant to enable the above-mentioned collaborations and improvements without having any other deleterious effects, like making the authors feel like they are being (or could be) exploited. It is quite ingenious, since if you deny the right of authors to apply the GPL, you deny the rights given them by the legal arrangement of copyright.
The specific way in which the GPL preserves your freedom depends on the work in question and your role in the situation. As a recipient of a work to which the author(s) have given you a license to use the freedoms granted by the GPL, you are permitted to do many things which would otherwise have been forbidden by copyright law. An an author, the GPL does not make you any more free (since copyright law already gives you absolute power), but the GPL is a tool which you can use to ensure that all users of your works are permitted to collaborate on and improve the work further, which might give you the incentive to produce and release more works.
And I guess that's the problem isn't it? It does have deleterious effects, but within the narrow definition of "freedom" the GPL uses, those effects are unimportant/ignored. The long-term vision of the GPL does provide a kind of "freedom" along it's specific definition, but strongly denies all other kinds along the way.
It's like saying "drinking alcohol is unhealthy" and citing cases of drunk driving and alcoholism as examples of this. And then narrowly defining "healthy" narrowly to include only lifestyles where no alcohol is consumed. Then completely ignoring and even actively working against all the ways in which alcohol can be healthy (and even healthier than no alcohol at all) because it doesn't fit into the narrow definition of "healthy".
So when somebody says "remind me how the GNU Public Health Handbook keeps me healthy", when it's brought up that moderate alcohol consumption can increase various health factors and longevity...in other words that alcohol consumption can be "compatible" with health...it's the same kind of scenario here.
The GPL's fixation with its specific ideological pure and completely arbitrary definition of "freedom" does not represent all kinds of freedom and that it purports to represent some kind of maximal freedom state is highly disingenuous at best and outright lying at worst. There are certain exercises of freedom that provide for better outcomes within certain criteria than anything the GPL offers and without certain deleterious effects that come from the GPL. But the GPL philosophy either acts like those shouldn't exist or are evil. And I find that highly spurious.
There is no such thing as consequence-free freedom. There's always a trade-off of some kind. The GPL is a fiction that comes from a fantasy that this isn't the case and just like any philosophy that relies on ideological purity conveniently ignores the cases where the ideology has negative consequences.
The only one here who is talking about the definition of "freedom" is you, and I find it lacking in both insight and meaning.
Freedom has a long history of philosophical thoughts from the last two centuries. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote over 2000 years ago that freedom is "a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech", from which we can derive that equal rights is an aspect of freedom. As teddyh wrote above, copyright do not give equal rights to whomever has the work, but GPL changes this and preserves the rights which without copyright we would all equally share.
John Stuart Mill published in 1859 a book called "On Liberty", in which he recognized the difference between liberty as the freedom to act and liberty as the absence of coercion. This concept of positive liberty and negative liberty can be distilled into two different concepts of "freedom". One can have the freedom of speech (a positive liberty), and the freedom of not getting enslaved (a negative liberty).
GPL provides the latter, in that it prevents the coercion which copyright law provides.
> GPL provides the latter, in that it prevents the coercion which copyright law provides.
GPL is an instance of the coercion which copyright law provides, not a prevention of it: you can use the thing to which I have been granted exclusive rights under copyright, so long as you act as I have directed based on my perception of what serves my interests.
And, compared to other free software licenses, the GPL -- especially the GPLv3 -- is a fairly heavy handed instance of that coercion.
In order to enforce any liberty, coercion is the only way available to do so. Its an paradoxical aspect of liberty which exist when ever one try to enable liberty. A typical example is how the police is allowed to use physical violence, fines and imprisonment in order to enable liberty from violence, theft and enslavement.
When someone is given freedom of speach, it means restricting those who would want to stop your speach. When someone is talking about freedom from slavery, it means the restrictions of those who want to enslave others. Liberty as a concept thus do not address those who want to act onto others, but those who would be acted onto.
GPL prevent distributors from using copyright law to coerce a third party. Those distributors who want to use copyright for coercion is prevented, and the police will enforce it.
Please try define a freedom which do not need coercion of someone in order to enforce it. I defy that any such thing could exist.
If you want freedom of speech, you have to prevent those who would seek out to squelch it. Freedom of the press is only possible by preventing those who would otherwise burn down the printing press. Freedom of person prevents assassins and rapists from doing their ill deeds, and has to be prevented with coercion that employ violence, theft (fines), imprisonment, or social pressure. The later is simply violence that is psychological rather than of physical.
If you read up on the history of liberty, the definition of freedom, you will find that all this has been thought about a long time ago. The paradoxical nature of using coercion (laws) in order to have liberty is not a new insight.
Well that's disingenuous. You specifically brought up that the GPL is a non-coercive agent for freedom. Now that we've demonstrated that it is coercive, you moved your fence posts.
You're really tied up in the the history of liberty and freedom, and act like it the matter is all tied up and resolved. But very little could be further from the truth!
Even more important, you keep attempting to draw parallels to enlightenment thought on freedom, when the modern thought on the matter has come a long way since then and to anybody who seriously studies all of the eras of liberal thinking, the GPL is not a particularly interesting or conforming philosophy.
It parallels totalitarian philosophies far more easily than any democratic of liberal thinking on the matter. A country based around the kind of self-perpetuation at all costs kind of philosophy the GPL is built around would be a dystopia.
When its been demostrated that your arguments has dismissed in 17th century, you start to lash out agressively.
If you had proof of "the truth", you would have written it. Like a ideologically driven and uncritical thinker, You Know The Truth! You are the modern thought of today. Not that you have to mention what that modern thought is, since obviously, you already possess it.
I could sit here and explain to you how none of the above post says GPL is a non-coercive agent. Liberty can never be non-coercive, and despite claims of otherwhise in this discussion, none has provided an example of a liberty that can be enforced non-coercivly. Liberty has to employ coercion, or liberty is just empty word with no meaning.
> GPL provides the latter, in that it prevents the coercion
> as the absence of coercion
That's incorrect on all points. GPL is exists purely as a coercive license. It's up to you to decide if the coercion it's employing is a good thing or a bad thing (or somewhere in the middle), but it's one of the most highly coercive legal concepts in existence.
What exactly do you think the GPL is about?
It explicitly denies many exercises of freedom while using a coercive license to enforce community contribution and attribution.
I'm specifically not saying that other legal agreements provide more freedom or even different freedoms, only that the GPL doesn't provide the maximal sort of freedom it ideologically espouses. It's so obvious that the purpose of the GPLv3 was specifically to remove freedoms that people had been enjoying when using the GPLv2.
To cement the point, I'm going to show you what an actual, objective, maximally free license might look like:
"Do whatever you want with this software."
Now go through the thought experiment and start enumerating the ways in which any of the GPL licenses erode an objectively maximally free license. Each one of those things that you can't do under the GPL is a specific freedom that is removed.
This is probably a good place to mention that the GPL licenses are specifically protected by copyright held and enforced by the FSF. You aren't even free to copy the license itself!
I'm specifically not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing. But I am saying that this is a reality that is not ideologically recognized by the FSF and ideologically aligned people. The GPL licenses are very clever hacks on the legal system. But they are not the standards of freedom people should probably be following.
This isn't something that's hard to understand, but downvotes above show that this is something that's hard to digest by ideologically driven HN members.
If the GPL has had one success over all others, it has been turning copyright law and legal licensing schemes into a religion promulgated by uncritically thinking followers.
> To cement the point, I'm going to show you what an actual, objective, maximally free license might look like:
> "Do whatever you want with this software."
So here's the perspective shift you need to understand it: that's not "maximally free". Because software is rarely a simple one layer system like:
programmer -> user
Instead it passes through many hands:
programmer -> derivative work programmer -> packager -> user
Your "maximally free" license is only maximal at the first exchange. But it gives anyone in the chain the "freedom" to remove the end user's ability to change the code (or incorporate it into a derivative work) as they see fit.
The GPL, on the other hand, tries to preserve the freedom all the way to the end user. There are way more users than there are middle-men, so I'd say the GPL gives more freedom to the world, even though it ties the hands of the people along the way to the end user ("forcing" them to pass the freedoms they enjoyed on to the next guy in the chain).
It really comes down to whether you believe that you (the end-user) should have the fundamental right to tinker with the source code of any piece of software you buy/acquire/run. The FSF believes in that right. Everything they do falls out from that belief.
> This is probably a good place to mention that the GPL licenses are specifically protected by copyright held and enforced by the FSF.
No, not really—it's not applicable to the situation at all. (A) The GPL isn't itself software, and (B) it's tightly controlled for practical reasons—if everyone and their dog changed little bits of the license you'd have a million incompatible licenses out there. That can only do harm to the ecosystem.
I don't materially disagree with most of what your saying. You seem to be providing an appropriately nuanced view of how the GPL works and the goals.
And I agree completely with this statement
> Your "maximally free" license is only maximal at the first exchange. But it gives anyone in the chain the "freedom" to remove the end user's ability to change the code (or incorporate it into a derivative work) as they see fit.
That is entirely correct.
What I disagree with (a little bit) is this
> The GPL, on the other hand, tries to preserve the freedom all the way to the end user.
The GPL tries to preserve a particular kind of freedom through the chain -- and that kind of freedom is rather narrow, even if it does try to guarantee self-perpetuity. But it completely tramples all others -- especially v3, which does so with prejudice. This is consistently what my point is in this thread.
I'm not sure I understand where any disagreement on this definition lies. You even agree that the GPL is not maximal and only guarantees a subset of the freedoms a notional maximal license grants "it gives anyone in the chain the 'freedom' to...<do whatever>".
But you'll see by all the downvotes here that a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of the GPL is virtually impossible -- because "freedom".
> It really comes down to whether you believe that you (the end-user) should have the fundamental right to tinker with...
The notional maximal license also believes in this. But it does not guarantee it. The notional maximal license believes all freedoms are equally valid and does not enforce one particular freedom at the expense of others.
And to be clear, I'm not advocating for the notional maximal license. It has obvious shortcomings and also protects many kinds of objectively negative freedoms (the right to profit from other people's labor without their consent, etc.). But I'm using it as a trivial tool to demonstrate that the GPL does not ensure the greatest possible freedom. It merely ensures the greatest possible expression of one particular kind of freedom, and it does so at the expense of others.
I'm also not saying the GPL is bad, it is what it is. It's resulted in a lot of good in the world and some bad. But again, it is what it is, it's not a tool for ensuring the most possible freedom.
> No, not really—it's not applicable to the situation at all. (A) The GPL isn't itself software...
Actually it is. The GPL can be used on non-software items. Not GPLing the license itself does nothing to prevent the proliferation of licenses. There are already hundreds of incompatible licenses. Not GPLing the GPL I think is shortsighted. If the original vanilla GPL licenses are the best, people will use them regardless of the derivatives and alternatives, if they aren't then they'll use something else, even if it's an incompatible derivative.
The only freedom the GPL takes away is the freedom to deny freedom to others.
Just as I live in a free country, yet I don't have the freedom to steal my neighbor's TV with no consequences. In that sense, yes, the GPL denies freedom. I guess I don't see the point of that argument though.
> But I'm using it as a trivial tool to demonstrate that the GPL does not ensure the greatest possible freedom. It merely ensures the greatest possible expression of one particular kind of freedom, and it does so at the expense of others.
Yes, I suppose I'm not really counting negative freedoms as freedom (since negative freedoms tend to take away freedom from others, or cause others harm). So from my perspective, the GPL takes away a bunch of negative freedoms as the cost of bestowing positive freedoms. That seems more maximally free (in the positive sense) to me than something that mixes a bunch of negative freedoms in, where the negative freedoms are allowed to cancel the positive ones.
> > It really comes down to whether you believe that you (the end-user) should have the fundamental right to tinker with...
> The notional maximal license also believes in this. But it does not guarantee it.
Then I would argue it doesn't really believe it. No true Scotsman, etc.
> The only freedom the GPL takes away is the freedom to deny freedom to others.
Example, I would like to take GPL software and then put it into the public domain.
No freedoms have been abridged, I have not prevented people from making changes to the software or tinkering with it, nor have I denied anybody the freedom to take it and put it back under some kind of license (after some derivation). In fact I would enable numerous freedoms, like the freedom for somebody to take the PD code and make changes (uninfringed), and then sell that changed code without releasing the source.
The GPL prevents me from having this freedom and others from enjoying the results of my exercise of this freedom.
You argue that a person who does that is unethically taking advantage of somebody else's labor, but the freedom of the originator to do the same isn't abridged either, so the originators of the labor could benefit from their own labor.
Or they can mix code from incompatible licenses, a freedom prevented under the GPL (most specifically 3). Under my license arbitrary distinctions like preventing the freedom to "link" to code are eliminated. I've advanced freedom again.
The trade-off is that I've removed the guarantee of perpetuating the transmission and disclosure of the source code. That's the only thing I've changed. But I haven't prevented the same thing from happening either. Under my plan somebody could make changes and also disseminate those changes via releasing the source if they wished to. Changes to the source might still thus perpetuate. But no freedom has been denied. Unlike with the GPL.
The GPL also seriously erodes the freedom to earn reward for labor and virtually abolishes the freedom to earn reward due to property ownership. It's a tradeoff that sides with increasing the efficiency of labor (by allowing for reuse). But there's a large body of work on recognized, but unexercisable freedoms because the person lacks the means to exercise it.
> Just as I live in a free country, yet I don't have the freedom to steal my neighbor's TV with no consequences. In that sense, yes, the GPL denies freedom. I guess I don't see the point of that argument though.
Then why argue it? I'm shedding karma here, because people can't accept this inarguable point of fact. More problematic than the freedom the GPL erodes is the religious tones it takes on. People talk about "freedom" without understanding it and downvote sensible discussions of the issues with the GPL without debate. Locke keeps being brought up by somebody else, but Locke's philosophy on property and the GPL are squarely at odds and irreconcilable.
> > The notional maximal license also believes in this. But it does not guarantee it.
Then I would argue it doesn't really believe it. No true Scotsman, etc.
There's an enormous body of work on freedom as a guarantee vs. freedoms needing to be exercised. The notional maximal license enables all freedoms, but requires them to be exercised to be enjoyed. The GPL enables and guarantees a single freedom, but at the expense of all others.
> The GPL also seriously erodes the freedom to earn reward for labor and virtually abolishes the freedom to earn reward due to property ownership. It's a tradeoff that sides with increasing the efficiency of labor (by allowing for reuse). But there's a large body of work on recognized, but unexercisable freedoms because the person lacks the means to exercise it.
Translation: startups can't make their millions by selling a bunch of IP they've cobbled together from GPLed sources. Color me uncaring.
In the end, if you go back to my silly ascii art graph—your argument can be summed up that the individual '->'s lack freedom when the code is GPLed. I agree. But my point is with the GPL, the overall chain has more freedom because there are many more transactions the more arrows there are in the graph and the farther to the right you go (it's really more of a tree, but I collapsed it by node type for brevity).
Looking at the big picture, the GPL grants (almost paradoxically) infinitely more freedom to the world at large by the very fact that it restricts some developer freedoms. The GPL doesn't cater to developers, it was made for the end users.
I'm leaving your last comment above as the conclusion of the discussion. I appreciate the lively sharing of views and enjoyed it (despite the rampant downvoting by others).
The only way to have maximum freedom as you define it, is by having no liberty.
To give someone else liberty, someone must be coerced into giving it. This is simply a logical fact. In order for the maximum freedom you are talking about, the only thing said must be "do whatever you want". Kill who ever, steal what ever, enslave whom ever. If someone speak, someone else must be allowed to prevent them from speaking.
But this is simply a confusion that defines freedom as "no rules". Freedom has a much broader definition, which is why I brought up how philosophers during the ages has defined it. To quote John Locke: "Thus, freedom is not as Sir Robert Filmer defines it: ‘A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws.’ Freedom is constrained by laws in both the state of nature and political society."
The argument you are making was discarded in the 17th century by the Father of Classical Liberalism. Calling those who disagree with you as ideologically driven and uncritical thinkers really do show who is right here, doesn't it?
I think if you want to parallel Locke with the philosophy of the GPL, you need to reread your Locke.
You keep talking about freedom like it's a settled topic, but the debate on what is freedom and how to maximize is robust and vigorous, and Locke has not been the leader in liberal thought for a very long time and RMS is not taken very seriously in those circles either.
