First FOSS OS? [LWN.net]

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 21, 2007 21:40 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963)
In reply to: First FOSS OS? by bronson
Parent article: The road to freedom in the embedded world

> a trite 9-character slogan won't help you at all

I hope it does. " This didn't mean they would all agree with us, but at least they would pay attention to the arguments. They would give it serious consideration." http://fsfeurope.org/documents/rms-fs-2006-03-09.en.html#...

>Nobody else strives to explain freedom with respect to knowledge?

Yes. Nobody. e.g. Linus says "Me, I just don't care about proprietary software. It's not "evil" or "immoral," it just doesn't matter."
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?ar...

What in effect he is saying is that copyright is not a problem. For me it is a serious problem and somebody needs to talk about it. Have you read Misintrepreting Copyright?

> FSF used to lead by example, now they're mostly shouting
> instructions from the rear. It's depressing to watch.

Well they make 3/4 millon dollars a year. They can take leadership in developing sw. Even assuming the best leadership their contributions will be a drop in the FOSS ocean. (they have high priority projects http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html but that is still a drop)

Why was FSF important in 1980s? Becuase the community was relatively very small any technical contributions that they gave were significant. Being in a central place (the MIT) they could act as a clearing house, absorb and send out techinal impovements etc. With the advent of net anybody can do that, and there is no reason why the FOSS community needs them to act in that role.

FSFs importance was never merely technical, it has always been about the spread of the idea of freedom. They had an effect on the licensing terms of BSD, and other important projects. (everybody knows gplv2 is cool).

http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html
"Hired in 1986, Bostic had taken on the personal project of porting BSD over to the Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 computer. It was during this period, Bostic says, that he came into close interaction with Stallman during Stallman's occasional forays out to the west coast. "I remember vividly arguing copyright with Stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at CSRG," says Bostic. "We'd go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner."

The arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way Stallman would have liked. In June, 1989, Berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the AT&T-owned operating system and distributed it under a University of California license."

The modified BSD license as we know today is also in part due to RMS.

"The University of California's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. Looking for a less restrictive alternative to the GPL, some hackers used the University of California, replacing "University of California" with the name of their own instution. The result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. In 1999, after a decade of lobbying on Stallman's part, the University of California agreed to drop this clause."
"The BSD License Problem" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html.

RMS wrote a beautiful essay on Free Encylopedia in late 2000 if not earlier. You can see that he might as well have been talking about wikipedia (except that the essay preceded wikipedia).
http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html

To sum up. When it was important to develop code, fsf did that. Now it is more important to talk about freedom and they are doing that.

RMS has been clear about this. To paraphrase him "people are spreading gnu+linux but not talking about freedoms. if we dont tell them why gnu+linux is important, if we dont talk about freedoms they will lose the freedoms. i am going to spread the word becuase there are a lot of people spreading the SW"

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First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 2:26 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

That's why I like capitalism. (True capitalism. Not 'haha I am a big capitolist and I make lots of people lots of money; now pass laws to protect my market') It's goes very well with Freedom.

It's the economics that goes with the politics.

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 23, 2007 0:42 UTC (Fri) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link]

> Linus doesn't, therefore nobody does,

"Linux community has done (and yes, I'll take at least some of the credit for that personally) has been to try to view it as just a license, i.e. strip the politics away from it." -Linus

It is not that nobody else does it. But just that I find that he is a good summary/reflection of OSS opinion.
OSS are a good example of spreading freedom via code, but they dont talk about the immorality of copyright. It is fine with Linus and a lot of other people if under current laws 99% of the worlds non-western people are criminals under copyright law. I dont think learning or using forms of knowledge should be criminalized.

> Before the FSF there was no such thing as freedom,

You are exaggerating here. I said that they talk about freedom of knowledge. Which is one aspect of the various freedoms of being a human.

> organizations like the ACLU are more recent developments?

I did not find that freedom of knowledge to be the defining role of ACLU, sure they have done good work with civil rights. But with freedom of knowledge?

Debian, EFF are much more recent organisations and dont do as much advocacy as FSF does.

>Yeah, Stallman took credit for BSD when I drove up to Boston to interview

Can you provide a link to his saying that? I know he claims to have influenced the BSD *License*, but I have not seen him take credit for the projects code. Link please.

>I'm sure he'll find a way to take credit for Adam Smith
Please stop this. RMS is controversial enough without you making things up and smearing him.
I am not objecting to you questiong GNUs contribution in todays FOSS world. But this is over the top.

> For a perspective on why open source is good
>http://landley.net/writing/stuff/commodity.html

I have given enough thought to know that "open source" is good, your arguments are not new to me.
But Freedom of knowledge and Public Domain are even better than the "open source" that is where RMS philosophy comes in.
For a lot of people the slavery of copyright is OK. But for me it is not. d I wish not to be a slave to the "Intellectual Property" of anybody in the world.

Knowledge is not property. Deal with it.

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 23, 2007 17:03 UTC (Fri) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]

> But with freedom of knowledge?

http://lwn.net/Articles/177602/

And a couple hundred years earlier, how about Benjamin Franklin founding
the first public library in the country? (Do you honestly think this is
a recent development unique to one individual? Hello? Did you miss the
whole printing press thing?)

> > Yeah, Stallman took credit for BSD when I drove up to Boston to
> > interview
>
> Can you provide a link to his saying that? I know he claims to have
> influenced the BSD *License*, but I have not seen him take credit for
> the projects code. Link please.

Ok, you see above where I said "I drove up to Boston to interview him in
2000"? Spoke face to face? (He borrowed my car and left it unlocked on
the streets of Boston, and gave me a shirt someone had just given to him,
because he refuses to wear anything that has writing on it and it
says "snow" with a picture of a snowflake over the pocket. I still have
the shirt.)

He didn't claim credit for the code, he said that he spoke to someone (on
the phone, I think, might have been Keith Bostic?) when AT&T first
challenged them on copyright grounds and convinced them to fight back and
release a cleaned-out version. (It seems unlikely that they wouldn't
have without him, but it was a digression I didn't follow up on. I note
that McKusick's write-up of this history didn't mention a need for
outside prompting to do any of this:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html )

I've been doing my computer history research for a longish time. :)

During this interview I specificaly asked him what the FSF was doing
about deCSS and software patents. He wasn't intersted, said it wasn't
their fight, and that he had his hands full with what he was already
doing. (Which as far as I could tell, in 2000 consisted entirely of the
Gnu/Linux/Dammit campaign and traveling to brazil and czechoslovakia
giving speeches which Maddog was doing just as much of from a different
angle. I TRIED to convince him deCSS was important, to his face, in
2000, and he just wouldn't bite.)

> Please stop this. RMS is controversial enough without you making things
> up and smearing him. I am not objecting to you questiong GNUs
> contribution in todays FOSS world. But this is over the top.

I may be just a touch biased after my friends Kandy Danner and Stu Green
hosted a barbecue for him in Austin a few years back where he managed to
insult the hostess, hit on a 14 year old girl named Amber, and basically
Not Get Invited Back in a big way. (And no, I didn't make that up.)

However, my point was that Stallman taking credit for Minix-inspired
Linux makes exactly as much sense to me as Stallman taking credit for
Adam Smith.

> But Freedom of knowledge and Public Domain are even better than
> the "open source" that is where RMS philosophy comes in.

Back in the last 90's my roommate was a graduate student getting a
Master's of Library Science, and six months ago I had three different
coworkers doing clearances for Project Gutenberg. Also, Intellectual
Property Law has been a hobby of mine since sometime before I wrote this:

http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...
http://www.fool.com/portfolios/rulemaker/2000/rulemaker00...

And I've been following the Electronic Frontier Foundation since the
Steve Jackson raid, as did everyone in the BBS world. I'd never heard of
the FSF back then, and they certainly didn't step up to defend him.

None of that has anything to do with the FSF.

> For a lot of people the slavery of copyright is OK.

Just a little over the top, don't you think?

> But for me it is not. d I wish not to be a slave to the "Intellectual
> Property" of anybody in the world.

There are five major kinds of IP law: copyrights, patents, trademarks,
contracts, and trade secrets. Very few people rail against trademarks or
contracts, and the point of both copyright and patent is to suck users
_away_ from trade secrets, which were dominant through the middle ages
and a _huge_ drag on historical progress (the whole "alchemy"
vs "chemistry" thing).

> Knowledge is not property. Deal with it.

If I have it and you don't and I'm never going to tell you what it is,
only let you pay me for me to do it for you while you remain in ignorance
of my secret, forever?

Patents are designed to expire, and they make you document the thing.
They've gotten screwed up recently but the original purpose made a whole
lot of sense. And if you don't believe in copyrights, you should never
release any code under the GPL but place it in the public domain instead
(or at least an MIT/BSD license).

Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality is that
the current legal system very extensively contradicts you. Fundamentally
land itself doesn't actually belong to anyone, it was here a million
years before we were and is likely to remain long after. But I still
have the legal right to shoot you for trespassing.

Which of us has problem dealing with reality? Saying "it shouldn't be
this way" is not the same as saying "it currently isn't this way". You
have to recognize current reality before you can change it.

Rob

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 28, 2007 4:05 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link]

>how about Benjamin Franklin founding the first public library in the country?

Your references are interesting. ACLU, EFF, Ben Franklin. "the country" by which i presume you mean USA.

I guess only 5% of the worlds population matters. The rest? ohh they can be slaves to copyright. Right? I have to reject that NorthAmerican centrisim.

Of all the orgs that you mentioned I have great respect for Micheal Hart of Project Gutenberg. He is an advocate of the Public Domain. and i dont think he likes more than 14 (maybe 28) year copyrights.

> And if you don't believe in copyrights, you should never
> release any code under the GPL but place it in the public domain
> instead (or at least an MIT/BSD license).

and allow other people to make put code back under the slavery of copyright. Nope. GPL defends Freedom, and I am not going to use anything inferior. Of course you understand this well

"[GPL] preamble explaining how it uses copyright law against itself, to effectively keep software in the public domain, and prevent it from being taken OUT of the public domain" -Rob Landley

> Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality
> is that the current legal system very extensively contradicts you

yeah... europe dominated the world for a 500 hundred years and copyright is ubiquitous since the colonial powers signed berne(?) in late 1800s. i see no reason to assume that law defines morality.

> only let you pay me for me to do it for you while you remain
> in ignorance of my secret, forever?

Good strawman. Read "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

most of what we produce is for local consumption, in our local societies. if you reveal a secret in your local community, they why should people who are shores away pay you a royalty. because you are royalty and can impose your will on them? you mean colonial subjects. Now i get it.

I notice that you did not bother to reply to my assertion the OSS people dont care "if under current laws 99% of the worlds non-western people are criminals under copyright law." I presume you read "Misinterpreting Copyright"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

non-western goverments (in the 60's and 70's)tried and failed to get better copyright treaties

C.F. Johnson,'The Origins of the Stockholm Protocol',
Bulletin of the Copyright Society of the USA, XVIII (1970)
vol 18, pp91, 142-143, 180.

Access to Knowledge is another recent effort to deal with the salvery of copyright and other forms of "IP" .
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 22, 2007 19:46 UTC (Thu) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link]

RMS predicted Wikipedia the same way he predicted a free Unix?

In 2000? He was hardly the first man to come up with the concept of an electronic online encyclopedia written by a vast array of far-flung writers updated (semi | in | )frequently. Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide, anyone? That was 1978.

Sorry, that's the GNU/Hitchhiker's Guide. RMS had the same idea, therefore the idea is his.

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 23, 2007 1:30 UTC (Fri) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link]

>You'll notice that I never claimed that Linus strives

You claimed that RedHat is a counterexample, but are they. They have no problem with copyright. In fact claming that they have "intellectual property". Really? Since when are government granted monopolies property?
http://www.redhat.com/legal/legal_statement.html

Property Rights and Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K.Levine
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/coffee.htm

"All of this brings us to what intellectual property law is really about - a reality that is simply obscured by analogies to other types of property. Intellectual property law is not about your right to control your copy of your idea - this is a right that we have just pointed out, does not need a great deal of protection. What intellectual property law is really about is about your right to control my copy of your idea."

"The closest case is that of slavery. That is, the courts will not enforce a contract in which you sell yourself into slavery. In the case of slavery, as in the case of intellectual "property" we believe that the economic and moral arguments point in the same direction for the same reason. Your labor is irrevocably bound to your person. To enforce a contract in which you sell yourself to someone else requires them to enforce the contract by intrusive, expensive, and morally offensive measures. Hence we allow you to rent your labor, but not sell yourself."

> RMS predicted Wikipedia the same way he predicted a free Unix?

It is not merely about prediction. It is about setting out to work and trying to do it. "A similar non-wiki project, the GNUpedia project, co-existed with Nupedia early in its history; however, it has been retired and its creator, free-software figure Richard Stallman, has lent his support to Wikipedia."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Related_projects

Not just that, trying to come up with the principles of how it should be licensed etc... is important. I gave a link to the essay because he explains the principles clearly and I found them useful.
e.g "Permit mirror sites." Seems trivial right? Not fully. I tried to get images in wikipedia and you cant download them. Because some of them are there under fair use, wikipedia is trying to weed out "fair use" images as much as possible even if it costs them a bit in quality. Why? Because then anybody can build mirror sites with images at that point. I want to donate such a mirror site to a school without internet access. (want kids to view images also, text is so boring)

"The last and most important rule for pages in the encyclopedia is the exclusionary rule:

If a page on the web covers subject matter that ought to be in the encyclopedia or the course library, but its license is too restricted to qualify, we must not make links to it from encyclopedia articles or from courses. "
Wikipedia follows a similar rule.

This is not about praising RMS. It is just that he is thoughtful and what he says has a lot of utility. We must consider his arguments both on rational and moral grounds. Whether we agree or not is a different matter.

First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 23, 2007 10:30 UTC (Fri) by NigelK (guest, #42083) [Link]

Wikipedia wasn't the first.

http://www.galactic-guide.com/faq/faq.shtml#what-is-pgg

The Galactic Guide started in 1991.

Can I mirror Galactic Guide?

Posted Mar 28, 2007 3:23 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963) [Link]

Do I the freedoms of free culture w.r.t. Galactic Guide?