My concern with free vs. open source software is this: free/libre software assumes the power is with the programmer, to make stuff that does battle with the closed source hordes, and bring justice. Nobody will starve, the good stuff will rise, and bad powers won't win. It's a pretty fantasy and I'd love to live in that world.
I use open source (MIT license) because I need the ability to give of myself to others, and because I don't think I have any real power and do risk starving and failing. If I try to make a stand for justice, and push around larger powers, I can be just sort of blackballed and end up marginalized.
The solution to that is the situation that's always existed in my industry, the music business. Exploitation. I can only thrive and see my ideas proliferate, if I allow some larger power to exploit me and get most of the benefit from my work. They get to take and not give, they get to make themselves rich at my expense, and if I want to not starve it's a negotiating process as to what crumbs they want to throw, and my weapons are more PR than legal pressure forcing the larger entity to comply. If I can make it seem advantageous to 'shout out' me and my work, by painting it as a PR bonus that doesn't have extra business consequences, I can get more crumbs. What's crumbs to a giant business might be all I would ever need to survive. The relative poverty levels are that wildly disparate.
Open source lets me give ideas and code to other small fry like me, and also lets the giant centers of power exploit me in this way: it costs them IP-wise so little to 'give credit' that it's pretty advantageous for them to interact with me. I chose the MIT license for this reason, and hope to establish a good library of cutting-edge audio DSP code that can grow and serve the needs of open source and the true free/libre community.
I don't believe anything I can do, can get me enough power as an individual that I could join libre and pressure giant corporations to change their ways. I've written the best wordlength reducer in the world, the best audio distortion algorithm in the world. Doesn't matter.
Power is not about performance and meritocracy doesn't exist: the highest-merit solution tied to a restrictive license is a meaningless historical sidenote. I will happily funnel ideas and code to free/libre software, but I won't survive unless I let myself be a lot more exploited, because power is impossible to fight.
It should be noticed that MIT licensed software is Free Software. There's a disagreement in the philosophy, but the problem is proprietary software, not MIT/BSD/Apache/etc.
It's open source. It does very little to force the world into more freedom. I feel I understand the libre folks' point of view, I'm just not in a position to do much about it.
Almost all open source licenses are Free Software, and vice-versa, MIT included. As long as it gives users the Four Freedoms, it's Free Software. What you're talking about is copyleft, which rms certainly prefers people use, but it's not mandatory to be Free Software.
Its clear that the music industry has a long history of exploitation and its an interesting comparison to the software industry. Record labels taking the product of the artist and giving crumbs or often nothing at all back to the artist (or in the past a large loan to be repaid).
But hasn't the law tried to catch up to those abusive tactics? An artist can split their copyright into multiple tiny pieces for specific use cases, often time limited, and there is even laws that gives the artist the ability to break a contract after a number of years. There is also very little "work for hire" that I can see where the record company owns the work and the artist just got paid once. Occasionally I see the odd article where an artist is in a constant legal fight with a company because they signed off on a one-sided contract and the product of their work happened to be worth millions.
I am trying to imagine what would happen if the software world would get the same protection as current day laws and practice for musicians. No more work for hire, software being split into "performance", "internal", "on-demand-download", "CD", "combined/synced with X", and so on. Here in Sweden we have state funded public radio and TV so maybe a stated funded repository where a small tax pie is distributed based on some form of statistics. In this world, what kind of licenses would be popular?
I use open source (MIT license) because I need the ability to give of myself to others, and because I don't think I have any real power and do risk starving and failing. If I try to make a stand for justice, and push around larger powers, I can be just sort of blackballed and end up marginalized.
The solution to that is the situation that's always existed in my industry, the music business. Exploitation. I can only thrive and see my ideas proliferate, if I allow some larger power to exploit me and get most of the benefit from my work. They get to take and not give, they get to make themselves rich at my expense, and if I want to not starve it's a negotiating process as to what crumbs they want to throw, and my weapons are more PR than legal pressure forcing the larger entity to comply. If I can make it seem advantageous to 'shout out' me and my work, by painting it as a PR bonus that doesn't have extra business consequences, I can get more crumbs. What's crumbs to a giant business might be all I would ever need to survive. The relative poverty levels are that wildly disparate.
Open source lets me give ideas and code to other small fry like me, and also lets the giant centers of power exploit me in this way: it costs them IP-wise so little to 'give credit' that it's pretty advantageous for them to interact with me. I chose the MIT license for this reason, and hope to establish a good library of cutting-edge audio DSP code that can grow and serve the needs of open source and the true free/libre community.
I don't believe anything I can do, can get me enough power as an individual that I could join libre and pressure giant corporations to change their ways. I've written the best wordlength reducer in the world, the best audio distortion algorithm in the world. Doesn't matter.
Power is not about performance and meritocracy doesn't exist: the highest-merit solution tied to a restrictive license is a meaningless historical sidenote. I will happily funnel ideas and code to free/libre software, but I won't survive unless I let myself be a lot more exploited, because power is impossible to fight.