Eric S. Raymond and his opinion of the GPL

Transcript: What is the point of being famous and respected if you can't speak heresy about your own movement. What is the point? One of my heretical opinions is that we worry way too much about licensing. And in particular; I don't think we really need reciprocal licensing. I don't think we need licenses like the GPL, that punish people for taking code closed-source. Let me explain what I think. And then I'll explain [why] the fact we don't actually need those [licenses] matters. I don't think we need them because. There has been a fair amount of economic analysis done in the last 10 years, significant amount of it has been done by, well, me. Which seems to demonstrate that open source is what the economist call a more efficient mode of production use, superior mode of production. You get better investment, better return out of the resources you invested by doing open source development than closed source development. In particular, there have been a number of occasions on which people have taken open source products that were reasonable successful, and just taken them closed. Effectively putting them under proprietary control, proprietary licensing and then tried to make a business model out of that. They generally fail. And the reason they fail is pretty simple. That is because when you take a product closed, you are now limited to what ever small number of developers that your corporation can afford to hire. The open source community that you just turned your back on does not, they have more people than you. They can put out releases more frequently, getting more user feedback. So the suggestion is, simply because of the numerical dynamics of the process: taking open software closed is something that the market is going to punish. You are going to loose. The inefficiencies inherent in closed source development are eventually going to ambush you, going to [inaudible] you, and your are not going to have a business model or product anymore. We've seen this happened number of times. But now, lets look at the implications of taking this seriously. The question I found myself asking is: if the market punished people for taking open source closed, then why do our licenses need to punish people for taking open source closed? That is why I don't think you really need GPL or a reciprocal licenses anymore. It is attempting to prevent the behavior that the market punishes anyway. That attempt has a downside, the downside is that people, especially lawyers, especially corporate bosses look at the GPL and experience fear. Fear that all of their corporate secrets, business knowledge, and special sauce will suddenly be everted to the outside world by some inadvertent slip by some internal code. I think that fear is now costing us more than the threat of [inaudible]. And that is why I don't we need the GPL anymore. -- Eric S. Raymond

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• heresy
• fsf
• gpl
• gnu
• linux
• bsd

[g98ay8ht3jg]

Reciprocity is not the only point of the GPL. It is about protecting our valuable freedoms whether or not they are already protected by the market system. The GPL is a tool to support not only an elegant philosophy, but to create a world in which everybody can run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software.

[smegingbastard]

When are you going to understand this? It was NEVER about superior business models or efficiency or quality of software. It is about protecting people's freedom!

The market will not protect anyone's freedom and I don't see the market punishing Microsoft and Apple. In fact, the big guns ARE the market.

If those criminals fear the GPL it is because they see us demanding the freedom they tried to suppress. And we are taking that freedom for ourselves by rejecting their software.

[DMStraylight]

At 2:32, the missing word in the transcript is "dry-gulch", meaning to suddenly and violently ambush or betray, with connotations of intent to kill.

At 3:39, the missing phrase is "punishment is gaining us".

[icguilty]

more dosent meant more. more of wht. bad programmers. dnt fukk

[Julien1345]

What he said is exactly what i thought all the time. The open source community is strong and people don't need to fear that somebody will make a lot of money with their code.

[bozzioisgod44]

I like having both the Free Software AND OpenSource terms. Period.

[borkoboyanov]

Eric is right... GPL was needed to make people think twice before they do close sources (speech). Now BSD Licenses are getting more market incentive while the GPL'd software is used primarily as a weapon in corps. fighting other corps.

[CaptainMongles]

grinning and masturbating furiously

[a34j6hgwy]

@a34j6hgwy

Addendum: Look at the TED talk "Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions" if you think science can't help us with such dilemmas. By the way, I also use the (2-clause) BSD license for my projects (and did so as well when I posted here about the GPL months ago, if it matters to anyone).

[a34j6hgwy]

@daemonpoet

I didn't focus solely on *my* freedom. (I posted as g98ay8ht3jg earlier, this is another account of mine). It really depends on how you define freedom anyway. But this whole idea about proprietary software being unethical is a pretty extraordinary claim (at least, to me), and therefore requires extraordinary evidence. As such, I suggest that the supporters of the philosophy behind the GPL to provide it to me/us.