Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Free Software Ethic
I am a Kool-Aid drinker. One summer, my college roommate and I drank 400 gallons of the pre-sugared variety, and saved all of the containers in a large Kool-Aid pyramid. And not just for the free stuff we could have gotten, had we bothered.
That, as usual, is a tangent.
I also drank the Free Software Kool-Aid. Richard Stallman is right. Open Source misses the point. But I think Richard also misses an important point, which I'd like to address: the development practices associated with "Open Source" are not, in fact, practical or pragmatic.
When I, a programmer, write software, I do so to solve a problem that I have, or that someone else has paid me to have. I do so with the understanding that I will spend the least total number of hours possible on the lifetime of this problem. It is because I understand the virtue of laziness in a programmer.
As soon as the new GNU General Public License is completed, it will become my license of choice. In the meantime, I use the current version (GPL v2). I license the software under these terms, so that other people will have the option of making my software more useful for themselves.
In doing this, I exercise my essential freedoms, and accept the fact that others share these essential freedoms (they are, after all, essential). In exercising my freedoms, I have sacrificed nothing, and possibly provided something of value to someone else. But it is that person's freedom to make my software valuable to herself, not my responsibility.
The latter is a theoretically pragmatic argument (If more people use the software, it will be better) made by advocates of "Open Source" philosophies.
It is, simply put, not entirely true.
The siren song of the programmer is to solve generic problems (e.g. Object Relational Models or Full Stacks or Productivity). And in doing so, programmers often doom nascent efforts to poor performance, long development cycles, and, perhaps worst of all, frustration for the programmer.
Whereas solving specific problems well results in joy for the programmer, code that is written quickly and performs according to the programmer's need or skill, and code that may (or may not) be generally useful.
Over the long term, after enough programmers have done this, meta-programmers (e.g. RedHat or Apache or Ubuntu) can string together enough narrowly useful pieces to make a system that is generally useful. But systems that set out to be generally useful rarely are.
To me, the ethic of Free Software is a true ethic of freedom, and my chief responsibility is not to take these freedoms from anyone else.
Now that's pragmatic.
That, as usual, is a tangent.
I also drank the Free Software Kool-Aid. Richard Stallman is right. Open Source misses the point. But I think Richard also misses an important point, which I'd like to address: the development practices associated with "Open Source" are not, in fact, practical or pragmatic.
When I, a programmer, write software, I do so to solve a problem that I have, or that someone else has paid me to have. I do so with the understanding that I will spend the least total number of hours possible on the lifetime of this problem. It is because I understand the virtue of laziness in a programmer.
As soon as the new GNU General Public License is completed, it will become my license of choice. In the meantime, I use the current version (GPL v2). I license the software under these terms, so that other people will have the option of making my software more useful for themselves.
In doing this, I exercise my essential freedoms, and accept the fact that others share these essential freedoms (they are, after all, essential). In exercising my freedoms, I have sacrificed nothing, and possibly provided something of value to someone else. But it is that person's freedom to make my software valuable to herself, not my responsibility.
The latter is a theoretically pragmatic argument (If more people use the software, it will be better) made by advocates of "Open Source" philosophies.
It is, simply put, not entirely true.
The siren song of the programmer is to solve generic problems (e.g. Object Relational Models or Full Stacks or Productivity). And in doing so, programmers often doom nascent efforts to poor performance, long development cycles, and, perhaps worst of all, frustration for the programmer.
Whereas solving specific problems well results in joy for the programmer, code that is written quickly and performs according to the programmer's need or skill, and code that may (or may not) be generally useful.
Over the long term, after enough programmers have done this, meta-programmers (e.g. RedHat or Apache or Ubuntu) can string together enough narrowly useful pieces to make a system that is generally useful. But systems that set out to be generally useful rarely are.
To me, the ethic of Free Software is a true ethic of freedom, and my chief responsibility is not to take these freedoms from anyone else.
Now that's pragmatic.
Labels: development, freedom, software
// posted by David @ 9:51 AM 
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