Software Freedom Scale

[BobRobertson]

Richard Stalinman is enemy #1, or maybe second only to PETA in his nuttiness and hatred of individual rights.

I would suggest, rather, that he doesn't understand them.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Theo de Raadt responded to my e-mail!

Code: [Select] I am sorry but though I would like to reply in detail there is no way I can for the next week since I am 100% flooded with 5 more days of solid hacking in the company of 15 developers, and then taking a little break.

So far so good. 

[AL the Inconspicuous]

A couple of anti-GPL vids in case you missed them...


Eric S. Raymond and his opinion of the GPL:

[youtube=425,350]<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/gEPg2M1qbEs&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/gEPg2M1qbEs&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>[/youtube]


BSD v. GPL, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon 2008:

[youtube=425,350]<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mMmbjJI5su0&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mMmbjJI5su0&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>[/youtube]





This week's "coolest permissive desktop screenshot award goes to"...  OpenBSD + JWM!



Using copyleft / proprietary software is OK in situations where there simply are no free alternatives, but I'm discovering that a lot of light image work can be done via ImageMagick instead of Gimp, and Chromium + HTML5 will soon reduce the need for player apps like XMMS or mplayer.  There are also plenty of freer alternatives to rxvt, like xterm and eterm.


BTW, check out how many libertarians (broadly speaking) there are on this BSD forum!

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Theo de Raadt never got back to me on the politics question...  I was also never able to get OpenBSD working on my other laptop, and my main desktop really needs Nvidia support and is slow enough without forcing it to run a slower OS on top of (or rather on the bottom of) everything else...   Also I'm in no position to turn down MySQL work at the moment, which unfortunately is far more plentiful than PostgreSQL...  So I'm taking a break from "my Anarcho-Capitalist software philosophy jihad"...  for a while... 

[error]

Welcome.....to the real world.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

The leaders of all major software companies are socialists...

• Microsoft founder Bill Gates -- strong endorsement of Obama, "the president's team is on the right track" --
  
  [youtube=425,350]<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nG3VRx0tuok&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nG3VRx0tuok&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>[/youtube]
  
  (And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer donated to Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy and others.  Etc, etc, etc.)

• IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano -- "business and government working together" --
  
  [youtube=425,350]<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/2k-P2avHv5Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/2k-P2avHv5Y&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>[/youtube]

• Oracle CEO Larry Ellison -- "I voted for President Obama" --
  
  [youtube=425,350]<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fH-a4nq6ja8&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fH-a4nq6ja8&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>[/youtube]

• Google CEO Eric E. Schmidt -- Obama will pay your student loans, make you a job, etc --
  
  [youtube=425,350]<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/otIsr4exwac&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/otIsr4exwac&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>[/youtube]
  
  (And this thread isn't big enough to encompass all the other ties Google has to Washington DC.)

• Apple - c'mon, Al Gore is on the Board of Directors!

(to be edited and expanded)

[AL the Inconspicuous]

After being censored and banned from a FOSS forum over ideological dissent yet again, I've decided to give my attempt to strike up an e-mail conversation with Theo de Raadt one final bump.

As you may recall, I first e-mailed him on the night of January 9th, and he replied two days later saying that he'll get back to me.  I waited (im)patiently, and two weeks later I replied to his reply with the following:

Code: [Select] Theo, I understand that you are very busy doing very important things, and I am looking forward to your reply if/when you ever find the time to answer.

Then...  nothing.  So this morning I wrote the following:

Code: [Select] Theo, I'd really hate to be the kind of clueless e-mail troll who keeps nagging a VIP, but you did say that you wanted to "reply in detail", whereas it would probably have taken less of your time to simply block me.  It's been exactly one month.  You obviously don't owe anyone an explanation of your political opinions, but some of my "which OS to use"      decisions really do depend on if/how you answer, so I'd at least like to know if an answer is forthcoming; if not to me via e-mail then perhaps in a blog entry or an industry publication interview someday... Greater government control of the Internet with the so-called "Net Neutrality" and other legislation (ex. CAN-SPAM) is one example of an issue I'd like to know your opinion about, but I would be even more interested in learning about the root of your personal philosophy, and how it applies to the various political and economic questions of the present day.  I obviously don't expect you to be a fellow Rothbardian Anarcho-Capitalist, but I seriously hope that the foreshadowing of where you'd stand was not entirely unfounded. A lot of my friends in the libertarian hacker circles (and we use that term very loosely) have come to have a great amount of admiration for not just your work, but for your personal character as well.  With most other software industry VIP's being the kind of people who've never met a government interventionism program they didn't like, you seem to stand out, and your speaking truth to power with the famous DARPA funding quagmire can only be described as heroic!  Even seemingly trivial details, like your choice to settle in one of Canada's most fiscally conservative cities, has been read into and (mis)interpreted. A lot of us, and myself personally, see you as a great real-world example of a "Randian hero" - a software industry equivalent of Howard Roark, who is driven by a rational set of principles and would not give in to the irrationality of the world around him.  I once even used you as an example of what a future agorist secession movement (ex. the Free State Project, Seasteading Institute, etc) may try to accomplish: peacefully "fork" from mainstream society, demonstrate the superiority of our ideas through competition, and after many years of hard work come to attract top brains and capital, just as OpenBSD came to surpass NetBSD! So, once again - thank you very much for your work, I hope you'll keep doing what you do so well, and that I'll be in a position where I can be of some help, financially or otherwise.  I really hope that you will eventually find a moment of your time to reply, and I hope it will be sooner rather than later. Best regards, Alex Libman

I'll keep you posted.

[Harry Tuttle]

I read that whole email and though it to be a very good, rational, appeal to the man. Then you put in a couple of paragraphs about a Randian fantasy of him that seem likely to creep him out.

 

[AL the Inconspicuous]

Hey, well, it is what it is.

[AL the Inconspicuous]

So, needless to say, Theo ain't getting back to me... 

My ideological reasons to run *BSD have been overpowered by the practical benefits of running Linux - at least for now...

I started having persistent dreams about sending public e-mails to RMS now, explaining my critique of his philosophy, etc.  (Us Internet shut-ins stop dreaming about actual physical interactions with people after a certain point.)  Some of those dreams are weirder than others.  In one I propose that while he has no right to use the guns of government to enforce GPL as if it was an explicit contract, he could make a plan to turn GNU/Linux into the world's first AI entity that can be recognized as rational economic actor, and thereby his software can own itself!

(No, this is not an attempt at a joke, just explaining what my subconscious mind is going through with this dilemma.)

[AL the Inconspicuous]

One last e-mail to de Raadt for closure:

Code: [Select] Theo, You know, there's nothing more insidious in online relations than telling someone you will get back to him and never doing so, ignoring all further e-mails for months.  I can only guess whether you intended this effect, or maybe you really are so prioritized you file away less important e-mails for months and would get back to me eventually, or maybe some peculiar spam filtering on your end is getting in the way...      Your reply from Jan 11th did not seem to be automated by timing and content, so it would have probably taken less of your time to simply tell me to "f@#$ off", and I would have thought better of you if you had done that instead of leaving me hanging for months... I continue to look up to you as a developer, but my plans to deploy OpenBSD and quite possibly allocate some considerable resources to aid its development in the long-term are crumbling.  Forking aside, when an operating system is this dependent on a single personality, and that personality is hostile to you for political reasons, then committing to such an operating system would be pure foolishness.  The Linux and even the FreeBSD people may ban people like me from their forums for contradicting their overwhelmingly statist ideology, but at least you know exactly where they stand, so people like me don't try to justify their software choices philosophically, as I tried to do with OpenBSD. Though it may take a very long time, someday there will be a software stack that an Anarcho-Capitalist philosopher can use knowing that his software shares his moral values, and for example won't go cap in hand to Mommy Government for a grant the next day, or initiate legalistic aggression the day after that.  My vision of basing this stack on OpenBSD may need to be revised, but doing this fast is less important than doing it right.

EDIT - he replied quickly this time:

Code: [Select] I am not interested in talking to you.

So that's that...

[Alex Libman]

Looks like me calling Theo a "Randian 'hero'" went straight to his head...

Some say that I'm a hero But I'm just being me With my filter I can hide My true identity

I must say that DragonFly BSD is a much more efficient operating system than OpenBSD, especially judging from the time it takes its lead developer to make it clear that he ain't gonna reply to your e-mails.  Here's what I wrote to Matthew Dillon:

Code: [Select] Subject:   A question not entirely related to DragonFly Matt, Hi.  I'm a person who has a very weird hobby.  Some people collect stamps, some fly kites - I research where the various permissively licensed OS developer VIP's stand politically, and how compatible their positions are with my philosophy of libertarian free market capitalism. I think it started when I was banned from forums.freebsd.org (and had all my prior posts deleted, even those where I was offering technical support) for expressing a dissenting opinion on a thread about government intervention in Oracle's acquisition of Sun, and it became more of a sport when I tried to figure out Theo de Raadt - now there's a mystery wrapped in an enigma surfing the vortex of a black hole! The question of Matthew Dillon was much easier to figure out from your Slashdot posts, particularly one where you praised California regulators for making washing machines more efficient and making 2 + 2 add up to 4, only thanks to them.  There goes yet another BSD-licensed operating system that won't be getting any support from any Murray Rothbard fans any time soon...  Of course being able to judge a person's political philosophy from just a few online posts is not an exact science (did a subsequent one advocate nuking something?), and any clues you might volunteer, in public or private conversation, would be much appreciated. If you ask me to keep something private, I will. That said, I'd also just like to express my utmost admiration for you as a developer, and I wish political issues would not be a factor in my organization's choice of operating systems, but unfortunately they are. Best regards, Alex Libman

And I'm really impressed how quickly he didn't reply to my e-mail, no months of waiting like with Theo.  


Here is another BSD-related anecdote - in the #OpenBSD IRC chat-room on Freenode I got privately MSG'ed by a ... well, here's the chat log:

(16:18:03) ArchGT: I am a marxist freebsd sysadmin/user and I share your hate for the gpl
(16:18:27) ArchGT: openbsd*
(16:19:03) AlexLibman: Are you a good Marxist or a bad Marxist?
(16:19:53) ArchGT: I think that depends on your point of view
(16:20:50) ArchGT: but hey! much of the points you made against the gpl I agree with
(16:21:08) ArchGT: and share with my linux-user friend
(16:21:18) ArchGT: users*
(16:21:24) AlexLibman: A "good" proponent of any ideology is willing to practice that ideology without initiating aggression against others.  You can buy up some private land, invite people to join you there voluntarily, and share as much as you like.
(16:21:29) AlexLibman: I guess that question would only apply to communists, not Marxists specifically, since pretty much all of Marxist ideas are based on violence.
(16:22:30) ArchGT: I must be a bad marxist since I can not recall any of those violence based ideas
(16:23:03) AlexLibman: So then, if your political ideas are any good, why can't they be practised without theft and murder on a massive scale?
(16:23:51) AlexLibman: Libertarian movements grow organically - the greater the level of economic freedom (including property rights) within a society, the more brains and capital it attracts.
(16:24:02) ArchGT: no they can not
(16:24:09) ArchGT: it's called capitalism
(16:24:26) AlexLibman: Yes, and I am a capitalist.  I own myself.
(16:25:13) AlexLibman: http://www.isil.org/resources/introduction.swf
(16:25:35) ArchGT: flash is hard in openbsd
(16:25:56) AlexLibman: Oh, right.  My bad.
(16:25:57) ArchGT: I'll look at it later
(16:26:37) AlexLibman: You can use HTML5 or youtube-dl from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyEs5OP5Ahc
(16:27:35) ArchGT: ok
(16:27:38) ArchGT: saving...
(16:28:32) AlexLibman: There are obviously mountains of Objectivist / Anarcho-Capitalist literature to RTFM, but this short video sums up our ideas of self-ownership very nicely.
(16:28:44) ArchGT: I have read them
(16:29:12) ArchGT: FA Hayek is standing 2 feet from my head
(16:29:35) AlexLibman: And how does one go from reading and understanding Rand / Rothbard / Friedman / etc back to the religion of class-worship?
(16:30:40) ArchGT: quite easy, the explaination they offer is incomplete
(16:30:49) ArchGT: so you go somewhere else
(16:31:19) AlexLibman: How are they incomplete compared to Marxism?
(16:31:54) ArchGT: it's based on menger's value theory
(16:32:12) ArchGT: and it can not stand a breeze
(16:32:23) AlexLibman: Ah, the old "my emotions justify my violence" routine?
(16:32:45) ArchGT: I'm not familiar with that routine
(16:32:55) ArchGT: any url for that?
(16:34:01) AlexLibman: It is my summation for all of collectivist thought, from thousand-year-old religions to all modern socialist ideas.  What gives you the right to initiate aggression against others?  Emotion, nothing else.
(16:34:58) AlexLibman: All of human history is one econometric fact being repeated over and over again - capitalism works, collectivism doesn't.  Objectivist epistemology and some other libertarian psychologists have done a very good job explaining why.
(16:35:16) ArchGT: and yet you can shoot to kill in order to defend your property
(16:35:37) ArchGT: making private property god-like or religion-like
(16:35:57) AlexLibman: I would rather use a "less lethal weapon" and take you alive - it's more profitable that way.
(16:36:06) ArchGT: certainly
(16:36:35) ArchGT: you have the name of one of those libertarian psychologists?
(16:36:47) ArchGT: I like to read you kno
(16:36:51) ArchGT: know
(16:36:55) AlexLibman: There is a logical foundation behind property rights.  If you want to live within a "gift economy" you can still do that, but without violating the rights of the individuals who don't want to be a part of your "gift economy".
(16:38:11) AlexLibman: I'm a big fan of Stefan Molyneux, though he's not exactly a psychologist.  And then there's Nathaniel Branden, obviously.
(16:39:18) ArchGT: I have this hipotesis of libertarian thinking being pushed by corporate america because, well, they get to look like heros on one side and the other being people tired of watching people on wellfare checks doing nothing?
(16:39:25) ArchGT: thanks for the names
(16:39:51) ArchGT: what you think about that?
(16:40:15) AlexLibman: Rights are only attributable to "rational economic actors" - that is entities that are capable of independent thought, independent action, and experiencing individual consequences of one's actions (capital or liability).  An involuntary group of people cannot have "collective rights".
(16:41:19) AlexLibman: Corporate America hates free market.  In the free market Microsoft wouldn't be able to bust software pirates who never entered into an explicit contractual agreement with them, and every BP shareholder would lose the shirt off his back.
(16:42:33) ArchGT: but the "less regulation" speech is making wonders to their pockets
(16:42:41) AlexLibman: Anarcho-Capitalism is a gradual transition toward individual ownership of means of production, and a triumph of [non-profit] market entities over for-profit ones (which we already see in industries like software).
(16:44:16) AlexLibman: No governmental regulation, but also no corporate welfare, no military-industrial complex crony-ism, no liability limitations, no artificial scarcity (ex. patents), no wide-spread "Mommy Government didn't ban it so it must be good for you" delusion, etc.
(16:45:57) AlexLibman: Regulation mostly benefits the big corporations who can afford to comply, and thus it raises barrier to entry for would-be competition.  The benefit of economy of scale quickly reach a point of diminishing returns, which combined with a localism bias means in an Anarcho-Capitalist society WalMart would be more profitable as 10,000 independent stores than one giant corporation.
(16:47:21) ArchGT: and the process from here to there is free market?
(16:47:40) ArchGT: they profit less so shrink or die?
(16:47:57) ArchGT: and small business take over
(16:48:12) ArchGT: sound ok to me
(16:48:26) ArchGT: somewhat dreamy
(16:48:50) AlexLibman: Not in any "vote for Ron Paul" sort of sense.  You can't get the plantation owners (governments) to free the slaves voluntarily, and the plantation owners have a lot more nukes than we do, you have to raise the cost of slavery to the point where it isn't profitable anymore.
(16:49:03) ArchGT: heavy industries don't fall into that
(16:49:17) ArchGT: they need to be large and already are
(16:49:37) AlexLibman: The way toward Anarcho-Capitalism is mostly based in political migration, and efforts like seasteading (someday spacesteading).
(16:49:37) ArchGT: and have monopoly power on strategic reserves
(16:50:28) ArchGT: their power is gobernment-backed which you hate
(16:50:33) AlexLibman: Corporations by themselves are not your enemy, they are just voluntary agreements between people.  A marriage is a corporation.  All the evil things you associate with corporations in reality come from government.
(16:52:50) ArchGT: and we are back into menger/marx's realm
(16:54:40) AlexLibman: Have you read Ayn Rand?
(16:56:30) AlexLibman: Yes, she was wrong about a number of things, mostly on anti-Soviet grounds, and most notably she was wrong on intellectual property, but she's really the first person to put together a complete secular philosophical system of free market capitalism.
(16:56:57) ArchGT: no I haven't
(16:57:22) AlexLibman: She definitely wouldn't have had a problem with FLOSS software, as long as it's not funded by government force (as often is the case).
(16:57:32) ArchGT: I hated the "atlas shruged" meme few years ago
(16:58:13) ArchGT: so I never read anything but the wikipedia page
(16:59:07) AlexLibman: That meme perfectly describes how capitalism has triumphed over socialism (Nazi Marxism, Soviet Marxism, etc) in the 20th century.  All the smart people simply left, or became alcoholics, or made deliberate errors in their physics papers...
(16:59:22) ArchGT: so she would be ok with the bsd/isc license
(16:59:44) AlexLibman: I think she wouldn't like the B in BSD, hehe.
(16:59:56) ArchGT: xD
(16:59:59) ArchGT: right
(17:00:30) AlexLibman: But Google's use of the BSD license for their code is definitely something Ayn Rand would appreciate.
(17:01:30) ArchGT: google's use is the same as apple's
(17:02:18) ArchGT: and even google have some gpl software they modified and since the not released they don't have to share any source
(17:02:37) ArchGT: that bothers many gpl people
(17:03:27) AlexLibman: She wouldn't like governments releasing software under any license.  Free market competition naturally leads to some goods being so cheap to produce / distribute that charging for them doesn't make any sort of business sense.  In today's world this mostly applies to information and also some levels of access costs - you can go to a mall and park there and walk around all day and not buy anything.
(17:03:38) ArchGT: which is a good thing because they get to rethink the license
(17:05:07) ArchGT: well, I should leave the keyboard, nice to talk to you
(17:05:12) ArchGT: see you in #openbsd
(17:05:29) AlexLibman: As technology advances, more and more things will become free - agorists in New Hampshire build their own backyard greenhouses (and some have very large backyards), and their motivation is self-reliance, not profit, but when they grow too much they just give it away for free.
(17:05:58) AlexLibman: ok, TTYL.  You can find me on forums by googling my name together with a term like "anarcho capitalism".
(17:06:25) ArchGT: I did
(17:07:36) AlexLibman: BTW, a quick question...
(17:08:00) AlexLibman: Do you happen to know anything about Theo's personal politics?  As you see, I really wanna know...
(17:08:39) ArchGT: no, I'm totally in blank there
(17:08:41) ArchGT: sorry
(17:08:51) AlexLibman: ok, thanks anyway
(17:08:56) ArchGT: np

Gee wiz, you don't meet a lot of Marxists at Microsoft / Oracle certification exams...  The more I live the more I come to question if maybe Ayn Rand was right about IP rights all along...  

[Alex Libman]

But anywayz, putting politics / philosophy aside and just using whatever works best, I've rekindled the old love-affair with my favorite Linux distro, namely Gentoo.  Definitely the fastest and the most flexible system out there, and a joy to drive if you know what you're doing (and I like to at least pretend that I still do).

I like playing with alternative versions of it in chrooted / emulated environments, with each version built to reflect a specific software philosophy.  I used to do that to keep a pure GNOME desktop separate from a pure KDE desktop, etc, but what I find more interesting now is playing with the ACCEPT_LICENSE setting - I can set it to just allow permissive licenses and work to reduce the list of license mask exceptions (the kernel and build system (obviously), Gentoo-specific utilities (unfortunately), and some dependencies for X + Chromium + UPP IDE).  It's a great learning experience trying to hack ebuilds to work w/ fewer restrictively-licensed dependencies.  Of course I have no moral qualms about the x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers...

Another nice thing about Gentoo is their forums are very tolerant of my opinions, at least in the "Off The Wall" section (and I've tested the tolerances quite thoroughly) - this by itself makes Gentoo more libertarian than those commie fucks in Ubuntu and FreeBSD.

[Alex Libman]

After yet another phase of Windows and Linux distro-hopping, I'm back on FreeBSD.  Like I've said on the other thread, if there is to be a "libertarian operating system" fork someday, FreeBSD is the most likely base for it.  The anti-copyleft movement is gradually starting to pick up some steam - check out the following sites:

• Copyfree.org

• SoftwareLiberationFront.org

• BSDfund.org

I'm also a big fan of something called Time-limited Hybrid Source.

[Stoker]

The leaders of all major software companies are socialists...

• Microsoft founder Bill Gates -- strong endorsement of Obama, "the president's team is on the right track" --
  
  [youtube=425,350]<object width="560" height="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nG3VRx0tuok&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nG3VRx0tuok&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="560" height="340"></embed></object>[/youtube]
  
  (And Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer donated to Nancy Pelosi, Edward Kennedy and others.  Etc, etc, etc.)

These corporate leaders are not only "Socialist" , they are National Socialists.