The funniest part of the recent Stallman announcement

[cenavano]

Next point (I’ve lost track of the numbers): why does copyrighting software provide more freedom than patenting software? The stated intent of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United State Constitution, is to “promote the progress of science and useful arts” by striking a bargain: inventors would document their inventions in exchange for an exclusive right for a limited time. That “limited time” for copyright is the remaining life of the author plus 70 years. That “limited time” for patents is 20 years. It seems to me that there is more freedom sooner with a patent than a copyright. If we eliminated the ability to copyright software, we could have more software in the public domain sooner. That sounds like increasing freedom. There is a fruitful area for proposing legislation to advance things on this front. Software patents could be of shorter duration. Software patents might require the source code to be part of the filing (which, not incidentally, provides the same “bad actor” protection as the GPL). Then the government would be enforcing universal access to the source code, as opposed to now, where that function falls to a subsidiary of Microsoft (Github). If there is a political dimension to software, then the mechanisms to enforce that freedom properly belong to government, not multi-national corporations. Yet the Free Software Foundation does not have a great record of proposing and lobbying for legislation to increase the rights of “the software”, relying instead on a single counter-intuitive quirk of copyright law. Sometime in the early 2000’s, I was invited by a telecommunications lobbying group to attend an event in Washington D.C. to lobby on behalf of free software to a collection of congressmen and senators. I remember the event because it was there that I met Bruce Momjian (who was the most interesting free software advocate) and Joe Biden (who was the most interesting politician). Unfortunately, the politicians did all of the talking, because the free software contingent did not have a legislative agenda. I doubt I’ll get another opportunity, but I sometimes ponder the hypothetical: if I did get another meeting with Joe Biden to lobby him for legislative changes to improve “software freedom”, what would I ask him to implement? If the Free Software Foundation has a legislative platform, I don’t know what it is. It seems to be an organization that focuses on litigation rather than legislation. It is against laws that others have proposed, rather than for laws that it has proposed. It focuses on products (boycotting them or building them) rather than governance (proposing legislation and regulation). The Free Software Foundation seems to be a collection of programmers who want to write software and talk about software and boycott software. It seems to be uninterested in proposing political solutions to issues it cares about — but willing to attack proposals that others have made that it disagrees with. As a political organization, it is profoundly ineffective, apparently by design. Before so-called “free software”, there was public software. We could return to public software. As there are public libraries for books, there could be public libraries for software. Interestingly, a public library does not give people the right to make their own copies. They can check books out of the library and read them for a time, then return them so that others can read them. The activity is funded by the government. There is no reason that this activity could not be mimicked with software. It need not be “free software”. It could be licensed commercial software (using floating network licenses), funded by the government, providing software licenses to its citizenry to check out, use for a time, then return for others to use. This would increase access to software to our citizenry — increased freedom for all. Freedom of the press is the freedom to publish without government interference. However, the existence of a “free press” does not mean that I can copy an article written by a journalist, print my own copies, and distribute them myself (whether I charge for them or not). Specifically, we are all agreed that a free press can healthily exist in a regime where copying or modifying the published work of that free press is not allowed. Is, in a word, illegal. (Illegal, incidentally, according the same regulatory regime that the Free Software regime employs to “keep software free”.) That prohibition against copying apparently, does not infringe on the freedom of the press. Similarly, I think it is manifestly obvious that freedoms of “the software” do not require the ability to make copies or even to make modifications. If we are going to use the “free press” metaphor to understand “free software”, then programs which are “free software” can be restricted from being copied or modified without impinging on any freedoms. Which is a long winded way of saying that I can easily imagine a world in which the GPL has been abandoned, but other policies and regulations and legislative actions have created a world with considerably more freedoms for “the software” than we enjoy today. These are people who are so invested in their cultish conspiracy theories that they literally have no idea how software works today.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The funniest part of the recent Stallman announcement about his return to the FSF board was the admission that they couldn’t figure out how to make a video of the announcement and distribute it. We are way beyond new board members, or a new organization to keep the flame of “Free Software” alive. It is time to admit that all the tropes and rhetoric and conspiracy theories of the so-called free software movement are an impediment to making any actual progress on making positive political change with regards to software. I believe firmly that we need to have better engagement from government to improve the positive impact that software can make on society. Regulations and legislation and governmental programs and non-governmental organizations need to keep pace with the evolving nature of software. I also firmly believe that so-called “free software” is the greatest impediment to making real progress on any of these fronts. The Free Software clique is rooted in the deep past, and committed to endlessly rehashing the software controversies of the 1980’s — when mainframes were battling with minicomputers for supremacy. The leadership is morally and intellectually bankrupt. The organization is morally and intellectually bankrupt. The “movement” is morally and intellectually bankrupt. It was an idea that had resonance and a potential future in the 1990’s. Back then, I was a believer. That time is passed. Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what we aspire to be. A society with a rational governance framework for software and its effects. I’m willing to support a Public Software Foundation that advocates for that. In the future, should I use the phrase “free software”, I will be talking about software that I don’t have to pay for. Otherwise, I’ll be talking about “digital autonomy”, or open source software, or liberal software, or, as most publications have been doing for the last few decades, “liberally licensed software”. It’s from the Latin “libre” (referring to freedom), or perhaps from the Latin “liber” (meaning “book” — a metonym for education).