On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:58:19 -0400 (EDT) Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
Le 2011-10-25 à 15:06:00, Julian Brooks a écrit :
I for one find all the license talk fascinating. I'm still smarting from Mathieu's response to the question 'what is free software? - answer " a set of licenses", from a while back. Whereas I like to think of it as an ethical and political manifesto/code of conduct, he's quite correct that yes it is just a bunch of licenses.
It's reductionist to call it just a bunch of licenses, but for certain aspects, it's all that matters. However, if we're thinking about why those licenses exist and why people use them, we have to think of people, manifestoes, and the events that led people to change their minds so that they would want to write manifestoes and licenses, etc.
It is both. You cannot have a legal instrument, a license or contract, that is free from values. All human values are necessarily political and ethical.
Even though they are not contracts, in simplest terms licenses invoke some payment of a debt. Somebody did some work. Repayment for that work could be made in promissory notes backed by a bank. Or by an agreement to observe certain behaviours. So licenses can stand in for a contract by which the parties basically agree that monetary compensation is not the kind of consideration required, but some other value, like recognising a copyright or propagating a freedom.
Let's put this in another light. A license bypasses the coercive power of money and goes straight to coercion. With GPL the author wants something in return, a behaviour. With BSD the author wants something in return, a different kind of behaviour. One is not a crusader while the other is a nihilist. You can see where the whole split in BSD and GPL philosophy arises now. BSD basically abdicates that power and by saying "Do what thy will" protects the value of the code. GPL says "Do what I will", which is to protect the wishes of the coder. On the one hand BSD puts product before producer, which seems systematic and anti-humanist, on the other GPL ignores the zero sum fallacy of a zero cost reproduction, because the loss to freedom by one is a loss to freedom for all.
Two conceptual precedents might be useful. The first is in Rousseau's social contract where he claims that freedom starts where the law begins. The other can be found in Marcuse's analysis of tolerance as a potential form of tyranny. Through these you can see that there are _no_ devices that grant, remove, or simply ignore the behaviour of others, that are somehow free from values. It is this Pre-enlightenment thinking, where the Law is an abstract eternal point of view, beyond and above society, that is out of date.
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