I admire Richard Stallman and believe that his efforts are among the most important contributions to practical ethics in the last 50 years...yet [and we knew there had to be one] the issue I have with the GNU license is that it is a license. It's use relies on all the same implicit threat of state sanctioned violence and its infrastructure as its closed proprietary opposites. The GNU license is meaningless without modern intellectual property focused trade agreements to provide teeth when there is a violation.
The GNU license is inherently litigious. That's the nature of licensing. Alternative licenses are also de jure, but some are de facto non-litigious by virtue of permissiveness. The primary contract for a GNU license is legal and the social contract is secondary...I'm not giving back when I am coerced by the threat of legal sanction into the act. Gifts don't come with strings attached, and it is reasonable for someone to hold the ethical belief that true giving means placing creative works in the public domain.
Which is to say that GNU lies on a spectrum and reflects some noble ethical values and not others. Among those ethical values GNU does not reflect are many that deem an intellectual property infrastructure backed by state sanctioned violence on behalf of wealth [e.g. music downloader prosecutions] worse than actions which GNU's copyleft prohibits.
I'd argue rather it's copyright law that is "inherently litigious", and that mechanism wasn't selected by Stallman. It was selected by those who began entailing it to source code, in contrast to the earlier ecosystem that RMS came up in: where hardware was often considered a commercial product, but software was near-universally treated as simple technical information of a similar order to academic papers. Most early manufacturers shipped the source code with the product, and were delighted if customers wrote or modified code, as it increased the value of their actual commercial product: the hardware.
I understand the view that state sanctioned violence is bad. But right now, this is not our biggest problem. Corporate violence is.
Granted, states do give corporation power by enforcing laws that suits them. But they also keep them in check: there are anti-monopoly laws, people aren't allowed to enslave themselves by contract… Let's get rid of corporations before we get rid of the state.
This is why I have absolutely no problem with the GPL. The only meaningful way to infringe it is to use GPL code to make proprietary stuff. Presumably to make money —wait, no, to extract money. The worst potential offenders would be big corporations, who can do many bad things with proprietary (or secret) software. I mean, just look at Gmail: its purpose it for Google to read your e-mail so it can send you more effective ads. (I know no Google employee will actually read your email. It's all automated. Which makes things worse: if you can search for unicyclists to sell them juggling balls, you can search for dissenters to rat them out.)
In our ongoing fight against power-hungry corporations, the GPL is at worst a necessary evil. We need state sanctioned violence to prevent the likes of Apple, Microsoft, or Monsanto from enslaving us all. It's a double edged sword, but it's the only one we've got. (I'd like to avoid contemplating the more… direct approaches for now.)
Indeed, Richard Stallman is self-described "not an Anarchist".
So? Anarchism has lots of neat ideas and is right about a lot of philosophical things. It's a daunting challenge to convince anyone that it could practically work. On a large scale, it remains only theoretical discussion divorced from reality.
The Hobbesian model of freedom sanctions sovereign violence solely for the purpose of keeping the peace. There is no higher level sanction based on morality. Proprietary software licensing and copyleft licensing are not ajudged against some platonic ideal but only upon their keeping or destroying the peace. There's no deductive proof of inherent goodness, only moment by moment induction. TANSTAAFL.
TANSTAAFL is only true in the broadest sense about opportunity cost, as in I can only live once. Any stronger interpretation doesn't hold true.
Anyway, philosophy philosophy philosophy. It is interesting, may or may not be valid, does inform real life… but it's not the same as discussing the actual details of practical life. GPL lives in real-world social context, less abstract than all this other stuff.
The GNU license is inherently litigious. That's the nature of licensing. Alternative licenses are also de jure, but some are de facto non-litigious by virtue of permissiveness. The primary contract for a GNU license is legal and the social contract is secondary...I'm not giving back when I am coerced by the threat of legal sanction into the act. Gifts don't come with strings attached, and it is reasonable for someone to hold the ethical belief that true giving means placing creative works in the public domain.
Which is to say that GNU lies on a spectrum and reflects some noble ethical values and not others. Among those ethical values GNU does not reflect are many that deem an intellectual property infrastructure backed by state sanctioned violence on behalf of wealth [e.g. music downloader prosecutions] worse than actions which GNU's copyleft prohibits.