Free to whom? The freedom to use it in commercial software is restricted by the GPL. For this reason I consider the BSD/MIT licenses more free, for it says nothing except, go ahead use it, tinker with it, change it, republish it, whatever.
Maybe if I thought bicycling..., I think your analogy would work better if it was bicycling as a strategy to fight against the cars and freeways paradigm. The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral - it's not just the promotion of more free software. Being that the software industry exists within a larger social framework where intellectual property is accepted, and we have many commercial entities doing it, I don't believe that producing more GPL software will result in reversing that move that Stallman was so upset about, that led to the FSF - that move from everyone freely sharing their software in the early days, to closing it up and selling it commercially. For your bicycling analogy, I think the BSD/MIT licenses work fine. Biking is fun, and so is making free software, but biking more as a tactic to end the automotive industry, once again, seems naive. I believe that if the FSF has a moral problem with intellectual property, a legitimate philosophical argument, then it should be addressed on a larger scale than simply in software.
The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use. - The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL. This protection of rights argument comes from the mentioned viral strategy of the FSF as a strategy to --combat-- proprietary software, specifically by eliminating this freedom to use it in commercial software (an immoral use).
Trying to cause such a revolution from inside the software industry out doesn't seem plausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong - and maybe they'll win, but I don't think it's doing much -- so I continue to paste in the MIT license when I want to give away software, just so they know they can do whatever they want with it, and if someone wants to paste some of that into their commercial program, wonderful -- knowledge shared - which was my goal of giving it away: to contribute to the general understandings and capacities of software.
The freedom to use it in commercial software is restricted by the GPL.
Not at all. Software licensed under the GPL cannot be used in proprietary software. There is no restriction on commercial use.
For this reason I consider the BSD/MIT licenses more free, for it says nothing except, go ahead use it, tinker with it, change it, republish it, whatever.
Again: "free to whom?". From the user's perspective, the GPL provides more freedoms than the BSD and MIT license.
The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral
This is not correct. The FSF is against use of the term "intellectual property", because it conflates unrelated sections of law, but they are not against copyright. The FSF site is copyrighted, their licenses are copyright licenses, and they even require assignment of copyright for any patches applied to GNU software.
I do not understand where the belief that the FSF opposes copyright springs from, but it has no basis in reality.
The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL.
That's an odd definition of "user". What about the person sitting at the terminal, using the software? Are they guaranteed the right to inspect, modify, and distribute it? Remember that Stallman launched the FSF out of frustration with a poorly-implemented printer driver that he was not allowed to fix.
Every right granted to somebody is taken from somebody else. The emancipation proclamation stripped rights from slave-owners. Women's suffrage stripped rights from men. The GPL strips rights from distributors. Nevertheless, these things are named as increasing freedom because the rights they remove are ways to hold power over others.
>> The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral
> This is not correct.
Well, it is basically correct. The core idea of the Free Software movement is that all software should be free. They believe that software not fitting their subjective definition of "free" is immoral (or evil).
This has been declared quite a few times by Richard Stallman; for example, here:
“The free software movement aims for a social change: to make all software free so that all software users are free […]. Every non-free program gives its developer unjust power over the users. Our goal is to put an end to that injustice.” -- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html
I admit, the word "intellectual property" was an unlucky choice by the previous poster.
You must be using some definition for "correct" of which I was previously unaware. The FSF opposes the term "intellectual property" because it is vague and confuses several unrelated areas of law. However, I have never heard them argue against copyright, trademark, or patents -- only specific, poorly-considered applications of these such as patents on equations.
Furthermore, the only way to have capital-F Free software requires strong copyright protection. In a world without copyright, Free software would be impossible because there would be no laws to prevent distribution without the source code.
That's an odd definition of "user". What about the person sitting at the terminal, using the software? Are they guaranteed the right to inspect, modify, and distribute it?
That person doesn't know how to inspect or modify it, and largely doesn't pay any attention to the license before emailing it to a friend. That person at the terminal isn't using code, they're using a program. Once you start talking about the rights to inspect and modify software, you've left those people behind, so they aren't the users who are concerned with those rights.
Frankly, I hope the day comes faster -- for it is coming, make no mistake -- when people "protect" their work by contract and technological measures alone, rather than by legal threats and actions. For people sitting at computers and using programs, that day has already largely arrived, in spite of the attempts by the RIAA, et al, to roll back to a time when that wasn't so. Eventually the legal situation will catch up with the cultural one.
That person doesn't know how to inspect or modify it, and largely doesn't pay any attention to the license before emailing it to a friend. That person at the terminal isn't using code, they're using a program. Once you start talking about the rights to inspect and modify software, you've left those people behind, so they aren't the users who are concerned with those rights.
This is a common refrain when criticizing the GPL -- that users are hopelessly ignorant, and incapable of even the most basic modifications to the software they use. "Why even bother giving them the source? They'll never be able to use it anyway".
There are several issues with this criticism. Ignoring for now the set of end users with the technical ability to modify and compile the source code on their own, lets assume a non-technical user wants to make a change to the software on their system. The software is licensed under the terms of the GPL, so the source is available. This user has several options:
1. Buy some books, attend classes, and learn enough about software engineering to modify it themselves. Not an attractive option, obviously, but it's available as a fundamental baseline. This is only available to users with plenty of free time.
2. Ask somebody, either in the online or local community, to make the change and provide the updated version. This is the purpose of "bug trackers", a popular fixture on most websites for free software. Unreliable for complex features or specialized use cases, but for issues common to everybody ("software crashes when this button is double-clicked") it can be effective.
3. Hire a contractor to modify the software. Possibly expensive, depending on what language the software is written in and what changes are being made, but likely within the budget of even small businesses for most reasonable cases.
Now, lets compare it with the case of a non-technical user with a BSD-licensed binary on their system. The source code might not be available, because the BSD license does not require distribution of corresponding source, and there may be legal restrictions on whether the user is allowed to inspect or modify the software.
1. The first option, "do it yourself", is made more difficult because the set of required skills will be larger. Assuming for now that the software was given to the user under the BSD license (ie, no additional restrictions), they still face the challenge of reverse-engineering and modifying the binary. This requires a more specialized skill-set than modifying (for example) Python or Java code. It can be done -- I know a dentist who hex-edited his practice management software to change some poorly-worded tooltips which were confusing his staff -- but will certainly be more difficult than modifying the source.
2. Since the source code for some version of the software is probably on the internet, somewhere, the user can attempt to find it. This source might not correspond to the version on the user's system -- perhaps there are missing features, or incompatibilities between versions. In the best case -- source is the same version, everything works -- there was no advantage to the user over GPL'd software. In the worst case, the source is useless and the user must revert to editing the binary.
3. Asking the distributor to make changes to the software is possible, but unlikely to succeed unless the change is likely to result in additional revenue to the distributor.
4. Hiring a contractor will be much the same as in the GPL'd case, assuming no additional restrictions have been applied. However, as in the first case, editing of a compiled file without the corresponding source will be difficult and time-consuming. The price of hiring a sufficiently skilled contractor will be tremendous.
First, let me point out that "hopelessly ignorant" seems pejorative, and since I'm in the category I was describing for most of the technologies of which I'm a user, I'd prefer "rationally ignorant". It's not a good use of my time to learn everything about the inner workings of a tool I'm using, if I'm not already interested, and most non-programmers are not interested. There are, as you note, exceptions, such as your dentist.
I don't even disagree with the bulk of your post, nor am I interested in discouraging use of the GPL (at least, before free software is the default, whereupon I'll encourage people to use licenses with fewer restrictions, or public domain, as I do, licenses and contracts permitting).
I also prefer for the source code to be available, but I don't think it's properly a legal matter to make sure that it is. I have a lot of sympathy for the view that the GPL's source code requirements are necessary to make enforcement of the other terms practical, thus aiding the copyleft, however, which is a good reason for me not to complain about GPL software or licensing, and I don't.
I do, though, think that it's somewhat beside the point to talk of the needs of the end user regarding the license provisions about source code, which was my original reason for replying. As a practical matter, few end users ever care about the source code, and few end users pay any attention to the licenses of software they use anyway, and that last is a behavior I'd like to encourage. If enough people ignore bad laws, they cease to be effective.
Maybe if I thought bicycling..., I think your analogy would work better if it was bicycling as a strategy to fight against the cars and freeways paradigm. The GPL is a legal tactic of the FSF movement, who believe that intellectual property in software is immoral - it's not just the promotion of more free software. Being that the software industry exists within a larger social framework where intellectual property is accepted, and we have many commercial entities doing it, I don't believe that producing more GPL software will result in reversing that move that Stallman was so upset about, that led to the FSF - that move from everyone freely sharing their software in the early days, to closing it up and selling it commercially. For your bicycling analogy, I think the BSD/MIT licenses work fine. Biking is fun, and so is making free software, but biking more as a tactic to end the automotive industry, once again, seems naive. I believe that if the FSF has a moral problem with intellectual property, a legitimate philosophical argument, then it should be addressed on a larger scale than simply in software.
The philosophical reason to use the GPL, rather than the BSD or MIT licenses, is to ensure that users have certain rights to the software they use. - The BSD/MIT licenses are more free for the user, for they can now use it in commercial software, a right eliminated by GPL. This protection of rights argument comes from the mentioned viral strategy of the FSF as a strategy to --combat-- proprietary software, specifically by eliminating this freedom to use it in commercial software (an immoral use).
Trying to cause such a revolution from inside the software industry out doesn't seem plausible to me. Maybe I'm wrong - and maybe they'll win, but I don't think it's doing much -- so I continue to paste in the MIT license when I want to give away software, just so they know they can do whatever they want with it, and if someone wants to paste some of that into their commercial program, wonderful -- knowledge shared - which was my goal of giving it away: to contribute to the general understandings and capacities of software.