One reason I think the open source movement is heading for a train wreck is that the different parts of the community have widely varying values. At root, IBM, Red Hat, Sun, HP, Google, and the other large companies that put big chunks of money into open source, and especially Linux, are acting according to economic rationality. They are getting a standardized Unix, they are commoditizing the operating system while they focus on selling hardware and services, and they can hang applications on Linux and collect the value of the product instead of sharing it with any OS proprietor. No wonder HP alone has 6500 people providing support for Linux. Go, guys! Around here, we like to see such shrewd greed.

But what does Richard Stallman of the FSF, the proprietor of the GPL, think of his brothers-in-arms?

We did not decide to let the community decide what goes into GPL version 3. There is a fundamental reason for this. Because Free Software is very often attractive for purely practical reasons, we have collected tens of millions of users who choose Free Software purely for practical benefits and do not appreciate the freedom that we have given them. These are the kind of people that assume that you should choose between Free Software and proprietary software based on practical convenience, which is another way of saying that they value freedom at zero. How sad. How can freedom ever be safe, when people don't appreciate it. People have had to fight for freedom, over and over.

And when people do not value their freedom, they are very likely to lose it. But that's the fact. Most of our community does not appreciate freedom. Most of the World, lets go of vital freedoms whenever some crooked politician tells them "I'm going to protect you from terrorists, give up your freedom, let me protect you."

So, if we wanted to do a good job of protecting freedom with version 3 of the GNU GPL, we could not let the majority of our users decide what goes into that licence, but we need to listen to what they have to say because there are lots of potential problems and we're not smart enough to see them all.

Ah, yes! False Consciousness -- one of the old reliables as to why the people cannot be allowed to decide. And the Vanguard of the Party -- another old reliable that triggers a sense of deja vu for long ago history classes.

This is the language of religion, and of politics as religion, not of economic calculation. It is Savonorola, kindling a Bonfire of the Commercial Vanities. Seeking commonality here is sort of like suggesting that the inquisitors and the heretics just need to talk out their differences.

It is the language of non-compromise. If the commercial users have problems with the proposed changes, that is just tough. They will be made free, damn it! So even if Stallman were talked out of his intentions for this round, what about GPLv4 or v5? The GPL contains a phrase whereby someone using covered software also agrees automatically to be bound by any later version of the license. It is hard to imagine these commerically-savvy companies going further down this road.

On the other hand, powerful internal corporate forces are at work to minimize any problem. Few of the staffers in large companies who told their top management to ride the GPL horse are likely to send up a memo saying "Oops!" Better to hunker down and hope it works out.

This may account for the lack of discussion of what seem to be some exceedingly important issues. The FSF has no interest in telling the commercial allies that they are in trouble, and the commmercial entities have no interest in admitting that there is any problem, especially to their own managers. If it is indeed a train wreck, it may come in very slow motion.

posted by James DeLong @ 12:47 PM | Software

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