Dear all, Interesting article which was forwarded on bytesforall:
> http://www.deccanherald.com/Content/Dec172008/cyberspace20081216107137.asp Cheers, Subir --- Darwinian or Marxist? L Subramani What do you think of piracy? Richard Stallman, considered the father of the free software movement, provided an amusing and thought-provoking answer to this question. "Piracy," Stallman said during his public speech in Bangalore on Saturday, "is totally wrong, because it is wrong to attack ships on sail." If the person posing the question happens to get smarter and asks specifically about software and music piracy, Stallman gave an even better answer: "Pirates never attack ships with software and music, they do it with guns." In Stallman's opinion, piracy is one of the terms invented as a means of attacking freedom and "social solidarity" of a community that needs to be rejected. "Breaking any agreement isn't the right thing to do, but if a software vendor compares your urge to share things you like with your friends with attacking a ship, the idea deserves to be denounced," Stallman declared during his public speech, to the applause of the crowd. Without doubt, the idea of 'free' software is to think about software development/distribution from the user's point of view. The freedoms to run, to study the source code, to modify and to share and distribute the copies with others would make sense to a user. But to what extent such things can be demanded in an era of branding and 'big money' technology is a question that still lingers after all the convincing arguments. For a fact, Stallman himself doesn't oppose the idea of doing business by selling software, but he wants those developing/selling software products to follow the 'freedoms' stringently. Perhaps his contention that people are so occupied to buy something that can run on their machines that they forget their rights, could be valid. But you can't help asking if it is so wrong for certain product vendors to monitor their user's system in order to learn how best they can customise their product for them or to prevent copies from distributed – which is the only way he can ensure sales of his software. As Stallman himself observes we may not be caring too much since we often don't understand the implications of software licensing. Until recently, it never occurred to many people the implications of selling their old PCs without making sure private data doesn't remain in the machine's hard disk. Experts have also pointed to the dangers of signing 'privacy policies' of web services without giving a good reading. But should we be so 'extremist' in our response, as Stallman suggests, to the extent of rejecting proprietary software and embrace fully the free software? The answer came that same evening from Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the largest knowledge source in the world. Wales has provided the best working model of Stallman's idea by making Wikipedia an open platform to freely create, share and modify content. Though Wales confesses to be more of a "Stallmanist" in his approach, he agrees he isn't so radicalist in developing the online knowledge system with contents from more than 200 languages that rivals the much powerful encyclopedias such as Britannica. "Free software is an approach to creation and distribution of software/soft content," Wales said. "There is often a tension existing between the two (free and proprietary software) . We can't imagine, for instance, that an individual would create a software system that would be purchased for millions of dollars. This is as absurd as saying large vendors would make software systems totally open source. So somewhere they should learn to co-exist." And there are reasons to think that free software and proprietary software models to co-exist. It is hard, for instance, to reject Stallman's argument that school children should be taught in free software so that they are not made undue dependents on just one proprietary system. Just how they learn about leaves of plants by closely examining them, they can learn about how a software works by studying its source code, which is possible with a free software system in place. But it is also hard to think of software development advancing without a proprietary model. Most users can do perhaps is to insist vendors to be less intrusive. Stallman argues that businesses should do more than protecting their interest. "Businesses must give products which are of use to people and should not hold them for ransom by unacceptable practices," Stallman said. "Today software products install spy programmes to see what a user is doing and vendors force users to create content on their programmes, instead of selling a copy of their software to them. Such things compromise user's rights and we must insist our rights with such vendors." To what extent vendors would listen to that is anyone's guess. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ FOSS Nepal mailing list: [email protected] http://groups.google.com/group/foss-nepal To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] Community website: http://www.fossnepal.org/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
