Giants fight

October 6, 2009 General 21 Comments

Reading the Miguel’s answer to RMS, I could not stop thinking Richard had a good point.

The last thing that convinced me was that footnote: “the “open source” vs “free software” non-issue”.

It is amazing that after all those years people still do not see the difference between ethics and technology. Or – even worse perhaps – consider that difference as “non-issue”. Richard explained that difference in many many ways – still noone listens. People oh people, where are your ears?

It is not a problem for the corporate world to fight open source. Actually, as a matter of fact, there is no immediate need to fight – these phenomena can collaborate[1]. No doubt. That’s how CodePlexish things appear (though, of course, let’s wait for the fruits before judging). Open source can be embraced by companies, as long as holes (big and small, as in BSD and GPL2) in open source licenses support ethically questionable business models.

I think that’s what RMS means when he say bad things about Miguel and Linus. The guys concentrate on the technical aspects, processual aspects of the open source idea. Listening to them, I got impression that keeping the source open is a formal requirement that guarantees that certain methods of development and maintenance would work – that’s it. I wonder, do Miguel and Linus always remember that open source is just a logical consequence of the higher level ethical requirements (and these requirements have some other consequences – like not supporting unfair business models)? If yes, RMS owes the lads apologies perhaps. If no, RMS is right, at least from the POV of the free software values.

[1] In terms of fighting… Open source development model is not a silver bullet, you we all can see proprietary products technically superior to the open source ones, and vice versa. Open source cannot decisevly win technical battle on all grounds – so, it will never be an unavoidable threat to the world of proprietary technologies.