Richard Stallman on P2P (LinuxP2P) [LWN.net]

Not the best choice of quote, IMO

Posted Feb 7, 2006 19:02 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

He has many things to say in this interview, and they're all consistent with his message. He stays on-message better than a presidential candidate.

And, in general, I agree with his view, and his messages, as regular readers will already know, even though I'm not as passionate about them as he is.

But I hope that this particular incident doesn't negatively impact the Creative Commons folks. rms's right to swing his fist on copyright issues ends at the tip of the nose of me, and anyone else who might want to copyright a piece of creative work.

CC is the only organization promoting general licenses which hew towards the same goals as FSF -- in denigrating them, he's actually hurting his cause, as far as I can see.

Copyright, and the law surrounding it, isn't going away. Probably ever, not even just Any Time Soon; there's a whole big world we live in.

I think it's irresponsible to say bad things about the only organization encouraging people to implement an approach to copyright that aligns with your point of view. There is such a thing as being More Catholic Than The Pope... but it's not real smart.

Not the best choice of quote, IMO

Posted Feb 8, 2006 7:12 UTC (Wed) by jstAusr (guest, #27224) [Link]

RMS thinks of the future, most people only think in the present. If you want to get an idea if RMS will be right check what he was saying years ago and see if it is true today.

Not the best choice of quote, IMO

Posted Feb 8, 2006 8:06 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

It is a fair statement to make. Most sites using CC licenses use terms like "licensed under a Creative Commons license" or "some rights reserved". What does this actually mean?

About the only thing in common for the CC licenses is a right to make verbatim copies for non-commercial purposes. Some of the newer CC licenses (such as the Sampling and Developing Nations licenses) don't even give you that. This falls a long way short of what we expect of our software.

Given that all these different licenses are marketed under the same banner, it seems entirely consistent for RMS to not endorse Creative Commons as a whole.

Not the best choice of quote, IMO

Posted Feb 8, 2006 16:11 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

Thats for the links. A couple of quotes from the Developing Nations license:

"Developing Nation" means any nation that is not classified as a "high-income enconomy" by the World Bank.

This License does not authorize making the Work, any Derivative Works or any Collective Works publicly available on the Internet unless reasonable measures are undertaken to verify that the recipient is located in a Developing Nation, such as by requiring recipients to provide name and postal mailing address, or by limiting the distribution of the Work to Internet IP addresses within a Developing Nation.

That's pretty nasty. The recipients of the work must take protective measures to limit further distribution of the work. Many shareware licenses are less restricting than that! Doesn't it negate the whole meaning of "Commons"? I always assumed that all "Creative Commons" licenses exist to promote cooperation between people. I was wrong. Thanks to RMS for bringing this issue to our attention.

Not the best choice of quote, IMO

Posted Feb 11, 2006 3:31 UTC (Sat) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

I always assumed that all "Creative Commons" licenses exist to promote cooperation between people.

I think (not being anything of a Creative Commons expert) that their main goal is to let copyright holders give away some of their rights in a simple, standard, machine-readable manner. However, Creative Commons doesn't have a strong agenda regarding which rights should be granted and which retained. Thus I guess it's natural for they and Stallman to part ways.

Not the best choice of quote, IMO

Posted Feb 8, 2006 9:59 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

CC has momentum and some merits of course too, but it's still wrong to endorse them for "freedom reasons" because they are clearly not pro-freedom. Bundling a truly Free license (like BY-SA) with "you can copy this, but do nothing else"-type of licenses just does harm because most people don't understand anything but "it's a CC license and therefore it's good". Most CC stuff I see is either or both no-derived-works / non-commercial. It's not that it wouldn't be nice to have free as in beer stuff, but it's not that useful either.

And CC is not the "only one", it's just has gotten more attention. There is eg. The Libre Society and its licenses, which are a kind of (strong) response to CC. http://www.libresociety.org/

Richard Stallman on P2P (LinuxP2P)

Posted Feb 7, 2006 20:35 UTC (Tue) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link]

I would have found the interview really irritating, but I've decided lately to let Stallman be Stallman and choose to just laugh at him when I think he's being laughable.

He heard somewhere that words shape our perception of things; he failed to realize that it doesn't work if everybody knows you're doing it. Going on and on trying to get people to use different phrases for things that everybody else has already settled on just makes him look silly and, in the specific case of "Digital Restrictions Management" makes the GPLv3 less clear.

He gives every impression that he sees this as a crusade and divides the world into people who will join the crusade and the enemy. He needs to be aware that this is risky - that pushing the people who think of it as "open source," rather than "free software" into the "not-us" category could end up making the division much more obvious and diminish the perceived impact of the crusade.

Richard Stallman on P2P (LinuxP2P)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 7:54 UTC (Wed) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

RMS has a habit of being right. Such behavior is naturally irritating to people who haven't quite got the knack.

Richard Stallman on P2P (LinuxP2P)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 10:35 UTC (Wed) by pontus (subscriber, #3701) [Link]

This is the strategy he has been using for the past 20 years or so, and look at where Free Software is today.

Richard Stallman on P2P (LinuxP2P)

Posted Feb 8, 2006 21:18 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

pushing the people who think of it as "open source," rather than "free software" into the "not-us" category could end up making the division much more obvious and diminish the perceived impact of the crusade.

I don't think you are right. Stallman certainly tells apart "free software" and "open source", but he never acted like he is on a "crusade". Crusaders were not missionaries; they wanted to conquer, not to convert. Is this what we want?

Even if people tend to think otherwise, Stallman and the FSF have never cut the bridges with the corporate world; in fact they have been quite successful attracting business people to his side, witness the latest GPLv3 gig. Are Raymond and his troupe of "open-sourcerers" able to do the same thing? It appears that intelligent people, after all, are not afraid of the whole "freedom" thing, even inside large corporations.

Stallman was ahead of his time (among other things) in that he never limited use of his software to "non-commercial" interests or special groups; corporate use was specifically encouraged. A large part of the FSF's success can be attributed to never think in terms of "wars" or "crusades", but to work with interested people and in the process sidestep direct confrontation with old-fashioned (some say "evil") entities like Microsoft.

Richard Stallman on P2P (LinuxP2P)

Posted Feb 11, 2006 3:58 UTC (Sat) by pimlott (guest, #1535) [Link]

Going on and on trying to get people to use different phrases for things that everybody else has already settled on just makes him look silly and, in the specific case of "Digital Restrictions Management" makes the GPLv3 less clear.

You always have to remember with RMS the timescale he's operating on. It doesn't worry him that being stubborn is going to turn some people off today. On the other hand, being stubborn for two decades has an inexorable effect--even though his methods are, as you note, blunt and transparent. Being consistent and taking the long view is an incredibly powerful approach. It will not surprise me if, when the DRM wars hit the public consciousness, "digital restrictions management" is a part of the debate, just as "freedom" is now part of the debate over "open source" in schools, government, and developing countries. (Besides, it's clever, and as a hacker, you've got to admire clever.)

Digital Restrictions Management

Posted Feb 15, 2006 13:21 UTC (Wed) by lilo (guest, #661) [Link]

You know, FSF has been using that phrase, Digital Restrictions Management, in releases recently and I don't think it's off-the-mark or even inaccurate. Contrast the phrase "Treacherous Computing," which seems a bit over-the-top and dramatic (not that I don't understand where they're coming from).

Digital Restrictions Management isn't overly dramatic—it's just the reality for the end-user. DRM manages restrictions to access to copyrighted material.

Language and Perception

Posted Feb 15, 2006 15:58 UTC (Wed) by shane (subscriber, #3335) [Link]

He heard somewhere that words shape our perception of things; he failed to realize that it doesn't work if everybody knows you're doing it.

Words do shape our perception of things. You learn concepts that do not exist in English when you learn a foreign language (consider "gratis" verus "libre" as RMS uses). Likewise there are things in English that are hard to explain in some languages.

Sometimes words shape our perceptions, even if we know that this is the goal. For instance, using words that are clear and easy to understand makes writing clearer and easier to understand, even if the person reading knows you are doing this.

You may be partially right. Maybe people are more easily swayed if they don't know that they are being influenced. But RMS is a computer person, and I have noticed that computer people like precise definitions.