Andrew John Hughes wrote a thoughtful response to my Sheffield talk and he now plans to do some talks of his own about freedom in the Java community.
A commenter to Hughes’s post named Lewis takes issue with all this freedom talk. First, he quotes a definition of freedom that boils down to “unconstrained,” then he points to restrictions in the GPL and concludes:
The BSD license (without the advertising clause) is as close as you can get to ‘free’.
Not that the GPL is a bad idea, just that it is in no way ‘free’.
I suppose if you define freedom in this way, Lewis is correct, though I think applying this definition confuses freedom with anarchy.
Software freedom isn’t just about a developer’s freedom to do anything she wishes with a piece of code, consequences be damned. The GPL implements freedom as defined in the four freedoms.
This isn’t dictionary freedom. It’s a philosophical and moral argument. Preventing free code from being locked up in proprietary applications is a way to protect everybody else’s four freedoms to build upon the code. It’s also context-sensitive freedom, which is why its definition doesn’t appear in general purpose dictionaries.
None of this is to say that the GPL’s view of freedom is always superior to Lewis’s dictionary definition. They are two different conceptions of freedom, and a preference between them is often a subjective matter.
James,
Fair distinction. I’m an academic, so in that nerdy spirit, I’d like to point you to a little paper that my co-author Scott Dexter and I wrote titled “A Comparative Ethical Assessment of Free Software Licensing Schemes”. The central question we discuss is precisely this one: which license is ‘more free’. This requires some careful unpacking of which freedoms are being curtailed, and whose, and also what notions of freedoms (positive and negative) are at hand. You can find the paper on the GNU Philosophy page but here is a direct link in any case.
Samir,
I have read your paper before, and I enjoyed reading it again. Thanks for pointing me to it.
The key paragraphs:
Of course, “more free” is a slippery concept because “free” is hard to pin down. The distinction you draw is worth noting, but the conclusion depends on the desirability of the consequences of the permitted freedoms. That desirability differs greatly, even among similarly situation software producers.
James, thanks for the read and comments(I hadn’t realized you’d already seen it). The difficulty you raise about evaluating the desirability of the consequences of the permitted is a real one. In a way, its the oldest problem of consequentialist ethics: fine, we’ve identified the goods; now, how do we assign them values?
The GPL is talking about ‘free as in freedom’. So if you talk about freedom you should consider the true meaning not something that fits for software. Remember? *Freedom*. Anarchy is freedom with *rules*, rules based on reasoning! While ensuring freedom, you’re restricting real freedom step by step instead of really supporting it.
>They are two different conceptions of freedom,
There aren’t different conceptions of freedom just many abuses of the term to fit some bewildering environments like software. This you will learn in the first year in philosophy. A dictionary or maybe the Wikipedia isn’t a real help to understand it and this is the problem of Stallman too, he misuses the term because he doesn’t understand it. A license without a copyleft has something to do with confidence. First the human being, then the rest. There is no software first or something similar if you’re talking of freedom. Stop the mockery, please or use something different than freedom.