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Why Free Software isn't Public Domain
Raconteur GuyFawkes starts out discussing DRM and control of written works, and suggests that the very idea of such is bogus. But rather than arriving at Richard Stallman's idea to turn copyright on its head and require that software be kept free, GuyFawkes suggests that there would be more and bigger cooperation around Linux if Linux went public-domain. Technocrat publisher Bruce Perens asks: if that's so, wouldn't it have happened already, and tries to answer his own question.
First, GuyFawkes:
DRM = Digital Rights Management.
GPL = General Public Licence
There is a whole bunch of other stuff too, DMCA and such like, but they are all, or are all about, various forms of licensing, so what is licensing?
If I go to Ford and buy a car, I do not buy a licence to operate the car while Ford retain ownership, I own the car. There are restrictions on my use of that car, if I bought it expressly to play Death Race 2000 or GTA San Andreas in real life there are consequences, but Ford doesn't say a word. Ford does not make me sign a piece of paper absolving them from my criminal use, it (absolution) is understood to exist anyway, nor do they ask me to sign a piece of paper allowing them to repossess the car...
This doesn't mean Ford don't practice the practical equivalent, try and buy a Volkswagen crankshaft that fits a Ford, or try to perform a routine task without special tool #14327, but even so once you buy the car it is yours, to do with as you wish.
Software is not like this, nor is music, nor movies, nor anything else that can be stored, edited or created on computer, it all comes with draconian rules, and this is where the problem starts.
If I buy a copy of Microsoft Windows, in exchange for my money I am not actually getting any property, I am buying a licence that allows me to use, within specified parameters, that software.
If I buy a copy of Mepis Linux, in exchange for my money I am not actually getting any property, I am buying a licence that allows me to use, within specified parameters, that software.
At this point the Linux zealots are screaming and the screen is covered in spittle, but it is true, let me explain.
I don't own the code of Linux when I buy a copy, there is no transfer of title or deed in law (if I am given a copy and pay nothing, then in law there can be no transfer of ownership) and it is no more mine than the contents of a book that I buy.
It is true that I am free, under the Linux GPL, to do many things that I cannot do under a Windows licence, and these things include being able to examine it and disassemble it to my hearts content to see how it works, and including it in a commercial product that I sell, but this is still licensing, it is a world away from ownership, which you get from Ford.
To everyone on the planet who is not a geek or nerd, which is the vast majority of everyone, the differences between these two schemes are obscure, much like Mac vs PC zealotry, individuals do not "get" licensing, they "get" ownership.
ALL forms of licensing exist for one purpose only, as an impediment. If I was a coder I could create some software that performed function x, then I could decide to licence it under terms that prohibited you using it in your commercial product, or terms that prohibited you using it in any military application, or that prohibited you using it on a Wednesday.
This, by any other name, is Digital Rights Management.
Hollywood is in California because the bosses at the time went there to escape the licensing terms that were being forced upon them in the East, no other reason. When *they* grew to sufficient size they swapped hats and took exactly the same attitude as the Edison corporation amongst others, whose licensing schemes they went to California to escape in the first place.
This whole idea is as old as humanity, from guilds that used secret techniques to make a product to Rolls Royce locking the bonnet (hood) at the factory. Using Law and calling it Copyright or Intellectual Property or Digital Rights Management is no more than a new way of singing the same old song.
I want to impede you from doing this thing, and this retain my commercial / financial / military / political / industrial advantage over you.
This whole argument is bogus, and it goes like this.
If I am Ford, when I make a car and sell it I get paid, and if I make another car and sell it I get paid.
If I write software, when I sell it I get paid, then you can make it as easily and as cheaply as I can, so I will not get paid any more, this is unfair to me, therefore I wish to be paid for being a smartarse who had a clever idea once.
The facts are that there are thousands of man hours of labour and megawatts of energy involved in the production of every single Ford off the production line, this simply is not the case with anything that can be delivered on a CD, cost of development and cost of creation are being confused here.
So let's re-examine this business model, and take the worst case scenario, Microsoft, who are the worst case scenario because it costs them billions in development costs for a new product, and cents to create the finished product on a per item basis.
If Microsoft SOLD Windows the same way as Ford sells cars, what will it mean?
Well, I could simply copy it for free, and MS would lose all those sales and go bust in a week, or would they? Not really, because if Windows was sold, there would be a transfer of title, or ownership, and just like the Ford, ownership or title bestows all sorts of rights in Law to the owner. If I am a businessman here in the UK the minimum legal wage for one week will buy my copy of Windows, that is a very, very small price for a business, which has just purchased a capital asset, which bestows me as that business owner with full title and full rights under a broad spectrum of laws.
Could I, as an owner of that copy of Windows, simply reverse engineer it and release a better product? Yeah, if I have a few thousand coders and a few tens of million dollars to throw at it, and when I do Microsoft (or anyone else) can then take my work and improve upon it.
Will this lead to anarchy, millions of versions of windows that are all mutually incompatible? No way, history tells us we have already been there with every engineer inventing his own proprietary screw thread and fastener, as soon as cross pollination starts the whole thing settles down to a few standards, standards that may or may not evolve, but which are nonetheless easy to deal with.
Will this lead to innovation? Yes, I can practically rebuild a Ford from the wheels up without buying a single official Ford part, this hasn't hurt Ford, on the contrary, it has sustained it, and a host of symbiotic industries, many of which have created positive feedback systems that benefit Ford in many ways.
So what about Linux?
Linux is like the Ford after market industry, except no-one is making parts that fit a Ford, and there is no Volkswagen or GM, and the trouble here is all these licensing systems are no entry signs at both ends of what should be a two way street.
The after market products industry licensing prevents Ford from using any of their stuff, in fact it is worse than that, it creates a situation where Ford has to make sure none of their parts fit a Ford, and the reverse is true for the after market products industry.
Meanwhile both Ford and the after market products industry as busy blaming the other side for their licensing system being the problem, and the customer doesn't get any of it, with the result that the hot rodders build cars out of aftermarket parts, and everyone else and notably business simply buys Ford.
Bill Gates is a business genius of the first order, and if I was him I could not wish for a situation more perfectly tailor made to preserve my business hegemony that a system of two fundamentally opposed but essentially identical licensing systems.
The GPL, whatever version, is the biggest obstacle Linux faces. You cannot claim guns are evil and then hold one yourself, just for self defence, understand. It is hypocrisy. Guns or licensing, the same principle applies. We have a GOOD democracy, but the Palestinians have a BAD democracy.
Throw away ALL licensing for Linux, put the whole lot in the Public Domain, and what will happen?
Coders everywhere will start using snippets, it won't kill the beast of Redmond, but it will turn it from an overgrazing monoculture into a richer and more vital, more diverse system, and that will benefit everyone, particularly all those coders trying to work out how to make a living out of Linux.
Vast numbers of people and vast swathes of the media will be out of a gravy train, all the acronym agencies will dry up and blow away, the system as a whole, eg the coders themselves, will have a lower burden of parasites to support, as well as a more dynamic ecosystem to inhabit.
Most importantly, the Linux community could change the course of human history and social evolution at a stroke, a cure for avian flu would be disseminated widely, instead of guarded until the pandemic hits and profits are there for the taking.
Or we can hide behind our four legs good, two legs bad for of licensing and participate in a culture where knowledge and information are traded like De Beers trade diamonds, and of we go down that road we deserve everything when get when one day someone somewhere notices something and says "that's odd" and then decides not to share it, and 4 billion people die.
Bruce Perens responds:
GuyFawkes,
Certainly there has been Public Domain software for decades. There is also a sort of software licensing, called BSD, MIT, or Apache, which is as close as possible to public domain, requiring only that author attribution be preserved. And yet, neither public domain nor BSD have taken over. Indeed, the BSD operating system kernel, while technically excellent, robust and useful, is a poor cousin to Linux in terms of the size of the community working on it or the number of people using it.
So, paradoxically it might seem, people seem to prefer to have the restrictions of the GPL rather than no restrictions at all. Why?
Well, as a Free Software author myself, I feel happy to make a release under the BSD license as long as someone is paying me for the work. When nobody's paying me for the work, I do it from my own motivation to make more and better Free Software. And the best way for me to do that is to give people an incentive to share. The incentive I give them is the right to use great software, and if they are business people a time-to-market improvement over what they'd have if they had to write the software themselves. What do I get back? They share the changes that they make to my software.
Once I wrote a program called Busybox that is now in a lot of embedded devices that you can buy in the store. I worked on it for a month, and really didn't touch it again after that. Two embedded Linux companies came along, and put at least two man-years of work into my program. More people came along, and did the same. Now, the program is five times as functional as it was when I finished with it.
If I had not used the GPL, those embedded Linux companies would have kept extensions to my original work proprietary, as a means of competing with each other. I would not have gotten that "multiplier effect". The world would not have as much great Free Software as it does today.
If I wrote BSD or Public Domain software without being paid for it, and some company made a proprietary version and didn't share their code as I shared mine, I'd feel like some taken-advantage-of unpaid employee, and I'd not have much motivation to release my code. When I can enforce share-and-share alike terms, my motiation is preserved. And I think that's why most Open Source projects choose the GPL.