Libre Software isn’t Radical (RFC)

It should be radical

Birth of Free Softwre

Libre software and the free software movement emerged during the personal computer revolution (1970s) and is in essence a struggle between individuals and software ownership. This can be shown with the simple correspondence between tool ownership rights and software ownership rights put forward by the Free Software Foundation.

If you buy a tool like a screwdriver then you should be able to:

Use the tool as you see fit

Study and modify the tool to meet your needs

Share it with others with or without the modifications

If you bought software then you should be able to:

Run the program as you wish, for any purpose. (Freedom 0)

Study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish; access to the source code is a precondition for this. (Freedom 1)

Redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. (Freedom 2).

Distribute copies of your modified versions to others; by doing this you give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes, access to the source code is a precondition for this. (Freedom 3)

I had the good fortune in the 1970’s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. Now, this community could trace its ancestry essentially back to the beginning of computing. In the 1970’s, though, it was a bit rare for there to be a community where people shared software. And, in fact, this was sort of an extreme case, because in the lab where I worked, the entire operating system was software developed by the people in our community, and we’d share any of it with anybody. Anybody was welcome to come and take a look, and take away a copy, and do whatever he wanted to do. There were no copyright notices on these programs. Cooperation was our way of life. And we were secure in that way of life. We didn’t fight for it. We didn’t have to fight for it. We just lived that way. And, as far as we knew, we would just keep on living that way. So there was free software, but there was no free software movement.

But then our community was destroyed by a series of calamities that happened to it. Ultimately it was wiped out. Ultimately, the PDP-10 computer which we used for all our work was discontinued. And you know, our system — the Incompatible Timesharing System — was written starting in the ‘60’s, so it was written in assembler language. That’s what you used to write an operating system in the ‘60’s. So, of course, assembler language is for one particular computer architecture; if that gets discontinued, all your work turns into dust — it’s useless. And that’s what happened to us. The 20 years or so of work of our community turned into dust. But before this happened, I had an experience that prepared me, helped me see what to do, helped prepare me to see what to do when this happened, because at certain point, Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. It was very fast, printed a page a second, very fine in many respects, but it was unreliable, because it was really a high-speed office copier that had been modified into a printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there’s somebody there to fix them. The printer jammed and nobody saw. So it stayed jammed for a long time.

Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can tell our timesharing machine, and tell the users who are waiting for printouts, or something like that, you know, tell them, go fix the printer. Because if they only knew it was jammed, of course, if you’re waiting for a printout and you know that the printer is jammed, you don’t want to sit and wait forever, you’re going to go fix it.

But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary. We couldn’t have the source code; Xerox wouldn’t let us have the source code. So, despite our skill as programmers — after all, we had written our own timesharing system — we were completely helpless to add this feature to the printer software. Richard Stallman — Transcript of Richard M. Stallman’s speech, “Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation”

1st Problem

The Four Freedoms provide basic rights to software owners however they do not stop a third party from modifying (or not) and redistributing libre software as privative, non-libre, software. In such a case, contributors of free software could have their labor taken from them for private gain of for-profit corporations that take away the Four Freedoms.

This problem has a solution: Copyleft

Copyleft only restricts Freedom 2 and Freedom 3 in that the license must be preserved and sticks around through modifications and redistributions. However, this restriction doesn’t affect an end-user, it stops those that want to make a derivative work from turning libre software into non-libre software.

2nd Problem

What if a corporation provides Software as a Service(SaaS) that use libre software? It wouldn’t be “distributing” binaries, plainly providing a service that happens to use libre software in the background. This loophole allows corporations to profit from libre software in non-libre ways. It again creates a scenario where the Four Freedoms can be restricted to end users.

This problem has a solution: Affero

Essentially usage counts as distributions and therefore users are entitled to their Four Freedoms regardless of a binary being given to them or just an interface to a corporate platform.

3rd Problem

After ensuring that the Four Freedoms can’t be revoked there is one last problem standing, reciprocity. For-profit corporations can leverage libre software for capital accumulation but without having to give back to the libre software community.

Even worse, for-profit corportations didn’t even support core projects and that ends up costing us a lot of money such as in Heartbleed

“There are a lot of companies making big bucks that use this in their core products,” Laurie said by phone on Wednesday from his home in Wales. “They should be making contributions, but their position is, ‘We found this nice thing you’re giving away for nothing. That’s kind of you, but we’re not going to help you.’” … Despite its critical role in Internet security, the software is written and maintained largely by Laurie and three other people who live in Europe, as well as a few contributors. Together, they earned less than $1 million last year for their work on OpenSSL from a mix of contract work and donations, said Steve Marquess, president of OpenSSL Software Foundation, which raises money for the programmers. … Felten said he was “surprised” to learn that so few people maintain the computer code for software that is so important to Internet security, and that he thinks major companies should help pay for its maintenance. How The Internet’s Worst Nightmare Could Have Been Avoided

As an aside, libre software is about personal property rights of individuals not private property rights of corporations.

Whether software is free, code — along with the physical infrastructure it’s running on — is always subject to control, whether individual or social. The vital political question in software development, then, is not, “What are the restrictions on individual modification of software?” but rather, “Who controls the processes of computing?” In other words, free software isn’t socialism for your computer. It can furnish useful tools and models, but the broader project of reclaiming the computing commons requires the articulation of a political agenda and the mobilization necessary to pursue it. Coding skills are honed and maintained in academic and industrial contexts where proprietary code is used, developed, and marketed. Requesting payment for free software’s development is not, in itself, a violation of the free software ethic, which requires only that people not be prohibited from altering or redistributing code. But the free software movement has not, and indeed could not, serve as the template for a profit-driven software development industry founded on the exploitation of coders’ labor. Peek at the software repositories under the hood of any Linux distribution, and you will see an enormous concatenation of labor in the form of thousands of applications and millions of lines of code. Beyond free software’s social dependence on software development more generally (and mirroring copyleft’s reliance on existing legal frameworks) the availability of fully functional and widely available free software rests on the highly coordinated cooperation of large numbers of workers. Rob Hunter — Reclaiming the Computing Commons

Linus Torvalds has a few words on this issue too:

The other side of the picture is that yes, intellectual property may be unfair, and yes, intellectual property laws are largely designed to further the aims of large corporations over the rights of consumers or even the individual author or inventor. But boy is it lucrative! It concentrates the power of the powerful, and the very fact that it’s a powerful weapon makes it so effective in the market-place. The same reason that made nuclear weapons the ultimate force in the Cold War makes intellectual property so attractive in the war of technology. And technology sells. … So I see both sides-although I have to admit that most of the time I’d rather see a more fun and inspiring world of technology. One where economic factors wouldn’t always prevail. I have a dream — one day IP laws will be dictated by morals, not on who gets the biggest piece of the cake.

Proposed Solution for Problem 3

Copyfair

A principle which aims to re-introduce reciprocity requirements in market activities: — it aims to preserve the right of sharing knowledge without conditions — but aims to subject commercialization of any such knowledge commons to some form of contribution to that commons.

Copyfair License

Today, more and more individuals and communities, locally and globally, are involved in the creation of shared resources, i.e. commons. Yet most of the time, the possible ‘exchange value’ that can be created by such commons, still the main mode of creating livelihoods in our political economy, is extracted by private companies. It is very hard to create a sustainable and fair livelihood outside of working as labor for companies or as freelances in the market. Paradoxically, this situation is facilitated by the existing open licenses, which allow anyone to use the commons (we have no objection to that), but also to profit from the commons without specific required reciprocity. This is the challenge that the copyfair license addresses: can communities and their commons keep the freedoms of usage fully protected, but set a condition on profit-making that requires stronger reciprocity. In this context, we have elsewhere proposed the creation of ‘Open Cooperatives’, i.e. we recommend commoners to create their own cooperatives, but coops that are specifically engaged and oblige themselves statutorily (in their own statutes) to co-create commons.

A way to get copyfair libre software would be to use a dual licensing approach by restricting existing libre licenses to individuals, public, non-for profit organizations and cooperatives and offering a commercial license to for-profit corporations that are interested in using the libre copyfair software.

Why this is radical

Ownership and capital of libre software would remain part of the libre community and the Four Freedoms would be preserved for individuals. Individuals, public organizations, non-for-profits, and cooperatives would still benefit from copyfair libre software which would still empower them to provide a social benefit.

Even better, a single copyfair libre dependency would make a software project copyfair. (Since the software that requires the copyfair libre wouldn’t be usable by for-profit corportations without aquiring a commercial license for the copyfair libre software)

Actions

Lets talk about copyfair, lets create copyfair licenses, and most importantly lets advocate for copyfair libre software.