Comment by em-bee
4 months ago
Stallman’s open source movement
do you want to give RMS a heart attack?
RMS founded the Free Software movement to protect the users of software.
to redistribute power back into the hands of creators who were getting walled out of anything but proprietary work for an employer. If they were fired, they had nothing to show for years of work except a reference, since their deep expertise was essentially meaningless
ignoring the fact the big philosophical different between Free Software and Open Source, neither had the above as a goal. for the first decade or so of the movement, all Free Software and Open Source development was done by people in their free time. practically none of it was done at work. the exceptions are MIT and BSD projects which both predate the Free Software and Open Source movements.
on other words, developers always had the ability to do stuff in their free time regardless of the license. those that live in countries that allow employers to own everything had to fight their employers to be allowed to do so, and they still have to do that. the cases where employees are getting paid to work on Free Software or Open Source are rare, although they are less rare today than in the past because more companies release their sources. but again, this was not the goal at the founding. at least not that this should help the developers. the goal was always to support and protect the users, to allow them to share and modify the software they use.
The GPL he wrote is the basis of the reciprocity agreement that drove the open source movement, it is the legal mechanism that prevents commercial actors from taking over shared works, and locking other creators out of continued participation in their collective creations.
Stallman explicitly warned about working on proprietary software for an employer:
> “If I sign a nondisclosure agreement to work on a proprietary program, I am agreeing not to help you. I am agreeing to withhold information from you, and to refuse to give you a copy so you can learn from it.” This isn’t just about ethics toward the public — it’s about how such arrangements strip a developer of the ability to show, reuse, or build on their own work.
GNU Manifesto (1985).
The GNU GPL is in no way reciprocal, under it, code flows downstream to users, not back upstream to developers/maintainers. Its only if downstream devs/users are inclined to send code back does it reach upstream devs/maintainers.
I don't think you understand the passage you've quoted (without a link), and you seem to have accidentally added your own words to it (there's a close quote, but then more words.) That being said, I can't find the quote at all in the essay; did AI make it up?
https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
The closest thing I could find was this:
> Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.
So were users or "creators" his concern? I don't remember him ever giving too much of a shit about the happiness of creators, I wouldn't have approved. I don't (particularly) care about programmer's problems.
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edit:
I can't find the quote "If I sign a nondisclosure agreement to work on a proprietary program" on the entire internet.
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