Open-source extremism, and how the OSI can help, followed by Apache and the future of open-source licensing.

Stage One: Introduce yourself

In the first article Mr. Asay asserts that the Open Source community is “stagnant”, “insular”, full of “group-think”, and the tent needs widening. He also suggests that the community rejects “anything that fails to discuss knighthood and/or sainthood for Richard Stallman”

His solution: include representatives from Microsoft and Oracle on the OSI board.

Now there’s a whole shipment of stupid in this article, starting with they very idea that our community – however you want to call it – is full of “group-think” and one-mindedness. If anything, we have too much debate. I’m not calling for less debate – I’m just saying there isn’t any shortage of it, on any topic you are care to choose. Asserting that we are all of one mind is so out-of-touch with the reality of the situation, it makes me wonder why Mr. Asay would even say something like that.

Then we get into the dig at Richard Stallman. I think the issues of the past few weeks have shown there is a significant portion of the community that does not think Mr. Stallman is up for “knighthood and/or sainthood”! Furthermore, there has always been a large portion of the community that feels the MIT/X11 approach is “more free”. I disagree, but I do confess I see their point and do not rail against non-copyleft or non-GPL software.

Finally, we end up with the positively absurd notion that Microsoft should be on the board of the OSI. I can only guess that this is because the “commercialization” of Open Source is seen as the ultimate end goal for some interests. I do not think there is anything wrong with commercialization, but it is a by-product, not an end goal.

Stage two: Hit ‘em with the good stuff

In the second article, Mr. Asay asks us if, through the GPL,  “did Stallman simply create an alternative way to release proprietary software?”

At one point he links to Zed Shaw’s reasons for using the GPL, and then manages to misrepresent Mr. Shaw’s entire argument and throw in some more craziness:

Shaw, and perhaps other coders, have turned to the GPL as a way to protect their software from use they deem objectionable. But isn’t this precisely what the proprietary software licenses do? The only difference is that the GPL forces code to be open, rather than closed.

Read Mr. Shaw’s piece. It’s long, but interesting. And it’s not at all about “protecting his software from use he deems objectionable.” It’s more along the lines of : ”I’m tired of building other people’s businesses and not even getting patches back or a word of public recognition.”

Then we have the fallacy that protecting software from objectional use is precisely what proprietary software licenses do – which is wrong. To the extent they do that, it is only as a side effect of maximizing profit, increasing user reliance on the vendor, and maintaining an advantage over competitors.

If a company felt it could give away code and still achieve those 3 goals, they would not give a tinker’s damn how you used the software or if you could see the code. Sort of like Microsoft and its “Shared Source” program, which they try so hard to conflate with “Open Source”.

Finally, the assertion that the only difference between GPL and proprietary licensing is not just open/closed code. There are all sorts of good things in proprietary licenses unrelated to the visibility of code like:

• You can’t use this product to develop on competing platforms
• You can’t publish benchmarks without our approval
• You can’t developed products that compete with our products using this product
• You agree that we can use your CPU for some purpose
• You agree that we can maintain some personal information on you

and so on, and so on.

That Mr. Asay manages to get so much so wrong in just one paragraph makes me wonder why he is even bothering. The rest of the article is filled with the same quality of reasoning, so it’s not worth going over, except as an exercise in descontructing poor arguments.

Stage 3: Dodge Tomato(e)s

Well, I came for the Stallman/Open Source talk, but I stayed for the stupid. I just thought it a bit of interest that the man relases two articles in two days each with a bit of anti-GPL / anti-Free Software / anti-Stallman angle in them.

Also, I’m not implying anything sinister about cnet or Mr. Asay. See the question mark up there in the blog title. I learned that trick from network news. You can put a question mark at the end of any headline and you are totally an unbiased reporter. Watch:

• Is RMS God incarnate and walking among us today?
• Is Mono actually funded directly by Bill Gates and Kim Jong Ill?
• Are mono-critics really all frothing morons with no point at all?

See? Perfect objectivity through punctuation!