And so should "open-source code is utility software".
Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in the world is just to provide a base on top of which one can write proprietary applications. Where do developers of open source end-user applications fit into this picture?
I maintain both types of open source projects. I, for one, am happy that we are trending towards more so-called "developer freedom" in open source. I never actually abandoned the concept of "software freedom" as defined by Stallman because I never bought into it in the first place.
Thanks...this is the best attitude I've heard. Instead of making people feel they need to take sides in the open-source vs free-software debate, better to just acknowledge that both are important and aren't necessarily in conflict.
They're not in conflict, per se, and they are indeed both important - but progress towards one of these goals has the advantage of serving the goals of megacorps, while the other one does not.
FWIW, I work as an open source developer on a strategic "infrastructure" project that my employer funds because having an open source base platform serves their commercial interests - and I'm very much okay with this, it absolutely is a good thing for them to be contributing to, but at the end of the day we're also a proprietary software firm. I'd just like to see more work go towards figuring out how to fund developers whose projects aren't of strategic interest to proprietary software companies than articles that keep making the assumption that all important open source software is libraries or utility software that ultimately would line up nicely with corporate interests.
> I'd just like to see more work go towards figuring out how to fund developers whose projects aren't of strategic interest to proprietary software companies than articles that keep making the assumption that all important open source software is libraries or utility software that ultimately would line up nicely with corporate interests.
To be clear, I do agree with that goal. I just tend to diverge with others on the means. That is, I don't agree with hacking the IP system to achieve that end. I'd rather see the IP system done away with entirely. (IP and software is near and dear to my heart, but IP itself is so much bigger than just software.)
Still, as enthusiastic as I am about the purity of Stallman's pure goals, let's not have the perfect be the enemy of the good. Freedom for developers isn't hurting anyone – if anything, it has resulted in so much software that, while free, also doesn't need to be astronomically expensive. Imagine how much you would have to charge for a web app if you had to rely on non-free software only. What would a stack like that even look like? Windows, IE, ASP, IIS, Oracle, a paid UI library (or equivalent dev hours) ... the tools itself would be expensive enough to make most of the software market disappear.
I'm self-employed, and I know my job wouldn't exist without free dev tools.
Stallman was right when he said that the Open Source movement would eventually abandon any conceptions of software freedom - it seems to me that we now have a whole generation of "open source" contributors for whom the only type of freedom that matters is the freedom of downstream developers, rather than users, and who seem to think that the role of open source in the world is just to provide a base on top of which one can write proprietary applications. Where do developers of open source end-user applications fit into this picture?