Kia ora koutou
I don’t really want to get drawn into the GPL vs BSD debate. As I said in my original post, relicensing is not required, as long as all the essential code is under BSD/MIT licenses that meets the Free Software Definition (not “advertising clause” etc).
he FSF are primarily concerned with two things. User freedom and developer freedom. Their ideal is that everybody who uses a computer can be both, thanks to the availability of source code, but experience shows that protecting user/developer freedom requires more than that. Even Stallman agrees that we sometimes need to compromise, but he also points out that every compromise must be temporary, and in a service of our long term goal of being able (althugh not obliged) to use 100% free software for all computing tasks:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html
The FSF endorsement list is intended to show that 100% free software stacks are technically possible, and they exist. Making them more usable, on more hardware, is an ongoing technical and political challenge, part of which involves convincing hardware manufacturers that user freedom matters, and that users care about it.
Because I care about user freedom, I’ve been increasingly a GNU/Linux user since 2007, and I’ve helped hundreds of people learn how to use it, mainly using Ubuntu. Ubuntu used to be great but has become a bloated hulk, with a terrible user interface, and built-in Canonical spyware (“UbuntuOne”) that hijacks the good name the Ubuntu Foundation has built up. After setting up UbuntuOne because it came as part of Ubuntu, I find out the server-side software is proprietary, I’m furious. I feel betrayed, and manipulated into making a compromise without informed consent. So now I’m now looking for another free code OS to champion.
The reason I join the forums and made the original post is that I really like Haiku, and I’m impressed with what you’ve already achieved in terms of usability. I’ve blogged on this here:
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/blog/2012/07/07/a-japanese-poem-which-runs-like-a-song/
If Haiku R1 was endorsed by the FSF, I would very likely recommend it over Ubuntu, and other newbie-orientated GNU/Linux distros which FSF does not endorse. If a FSF-endorsed Haiku R1 had hardware support as good or better than any of the FSF-endorsed GNU/ Linux, I would very likely recommend it over any distro.
I am planning to set up a co-operative business selling hardware with free code OS preinstalled. I would like to be able to sell a free gaming console like the OUYA, portable media players, specialised boxes for audio production and video editing etc. Haiku may be as good or better than GNU/Linux for any or all of these functions, but everything we sell will contain only software endorsed by the FSF.
Ryan Leavengood wrote:
I appreciate what the FSF has accomplished and I agree with many of their ideas, but they are also clearly not pragmatic. Their list of “unendorsed” Linux distros is a laundry list of all the most popular distros… I think when one looks at the real world people tend to give back on their own volition when dealing with open source software, and they don’t need a draconian license to force them to do so (please don’t try to argue that the GPL is not draconian, it is.) <<
With all due respect Ryan, I’m not sure what “real world” you’re talking about. In the real world Cisco built a business on selling hardware running the Linux kernel. They did this because it’s much cheaper that paying developers to create a new kernel from scratch, or even to maintain it. Recently, Cisco pushed out a firmware upgrade which, without your permission, turns the Cisco router you bought and paid for into a dumb terminal for their cloud service, forcing you to use that service. That’s my definition of draconian, and I think it’s totally pragmatic to protect people from that sort of behaviour. GPLv3 is one pragmatic tool that can be used to do that.
This is the risk that “permissive” (ie weak) free software licenses open users up to. Yes it encourages companies to adopt your software. It encourages companies with no ethics, who will use your software without giving back, and use it to imprison their users, as Cisco tried to do with that firmware rollout. Cisco were eventually shamed into backing down by a massive public backlash, which implies that people do actually care about their user freedoms, and demonstrates the importance of the work that groups like the FSF do.
I see no reason to support Haiku, or encourage people to use it, if it opens them up to being assimilated by corporate Borg. Of course, being endorsed by the FSF doesn’t stop corporations being evil with your software, but it does guarantee that users have a key to any prison cell those corporations might try to build with it.
Ryan:
It is very difficult not to use binary blobs for hardware unless one manufacturers the system from the ground up and ensures only openly documented hardware is used in the system. Ideally a “HaikuBox” would be such a thing, but right now we have to deal with the hardware that people have, and that means binary blobs for firmware, primarily wireless cards. <<
You do not have to use binary blobs for this, nor make support for such hardware part of the core OS. There are other ways to make unavoidable proprietary drivers etc available as a temporary measure, until free code drivers can be written. As I understand it, the FSF asks that proprietary code not be included in the official version, nor offered by the installer. If Haiku R1 was endorsed by the FSF, I would encourage all the free software developers I come in contact with to support it, write native drivers for it, develop applications on it, and make distros of it. I suspect you would attract many talented free software developers to work on the core system, who currently feel frustrated and crowded working under the benevolent dictatorship of Torvalds or the GNU project.
Ryan:
As for the license, Michael Phipps specifically chose MIT when he started the project so that Haiku could be more commercial friendly. Maybe a GPL expert would argue that the GPL does not hurt commercial software, but I don’t think that is the common perception. <<
Phipp’s belief that using an MIT/BSd style license would encourage more commercial use of Haiku may have made sense at the time, but the evidence makes it clear that he was wrong. Even at the time, I’d wager there were more commercially-supported server packages run on Linux than BSD. Now we can see consumer hardware shipping with Linux-based OS like Ubuntu, and especially Android. When you factor in the millions of uncounted users who install GNU/Linux on their newly bought Windows desktop/ laptop, or a second-hand one, the market for computers shipped with GNU/Linux is obviously much greater than the availability.
I will happily commercialise Haiku if it achieves FSF endorsement, and I suspect there are many others who would do the same. So you now have the same reason to seek FSF endorsement as Phipps thought he did not to use GPL. I’m sure FSF would work constructively with you to come up with a roadmap for getting there.
Note: As an old hand at reconditioning second-hand computer equipment with free code OS, I would even advocate a carefully considered weakening of the endorsement standards, in recognition of the fact that not everybody gets to choose what hardware they use. I do advocate allowing distros to help newbie users install proprietary software where there is no free code alternative, provided:
a) the proprietary code is a separate package, in a separate repository
b) proprietary packages are added after-the-fact, not during installation
c) the installation of the proprietary packages warns people about the possible impacts of their freedom of using proprietary code
d) the system is set up to automatically replace proprietary code with free code as it becomes available and stable enough for production systems
Ma te wā
Strypey
