Hmmm… I suspect he was around for a long time. Hi, Eric. It is not only the hackerish sense of humor which transcends the barriers, eh?

“When a CD is purchased, for example, money is put down and a product is received. I submit that there is no proper lease/non distribution agreement. If there was, it would indeed be dishonest to violate an agreement voluntarily entered into.

A key moral issue here is the legitimacy of an agreement.

Most governments recognize something called ‘constructive notice’. For example, this means that if a business sticks ‘LLC’ or ‘Ltd.’ after its name and you become a customer or supplier, you are taken to have agreed that the owners can dodge their debts to you (‘limited liability’) if it asks the government for permission (declares bankruptcy etc.) To incorporate in this way is a moral choice made by the owners to join in this alliance with the State, as it is perfectly possible to operate without incorporation and there are good sized businesses which do not. In the US at least, churches are free to operate without incorporation also and an increasing number do so.

Another form of ‘constructive notice’ is the small print that comes with a product like a CD. Does this constitute a real agreement?

Of course not – it is one sided. You might just as well scribble ‘sold, absolutely’ on your own sales receipt and call that an agreement. On the internet, the same goes for ‘click here to accept terms.’ With no less moral legitimacy you could, prior to purchase, send an email stating your terms and that if they did not prevent the transaction, take it as agreed to.

It is perfectly acceptable in private business to enter into proper, signed or verbal, nondisclosure agreements. Software enhancements are often done in this way. But mass sellers do not require this, it would hit mass sales and it is practically impossible to prevent purchaser’s friends or third parties accessing and copying software or music/video.

Instead, everything is turned on its head through a government monopoly grant called ‘copyright.’ It is entirely involuntary. We are forced into an agreement, like it or not. But it is a lie: you never did agree not to copy.

This is the basis of a big business/big government alliance that affects many areas of life and business. It is one pillar of our modern hierarchical corporate state along with forced limited liability, monopoly central banking (huge loans to favoured corporations with money created from thin air), zoning, ‘eminent domain’ and other land control – and of course taxes, regulations and mandates. These and other factors have created the trend of big business getting bigger along with its ally, big government.”

The stance that people do good things because they are good ideas is a libertarian tenet. FOSS may not be a direct libertarian movement. It existence is proof of the veracity of libertarian philosophy applied.

What Galleleo political when he shared his discoveries? Was Newton? Should Einstein have payed money to the Newton family for using their Intellectual Property? Should Copernicus patented his view of the solar system, and demanded copyright on any drawing of the planets orbiting the SUN? What about the discovered methods of surgery or medicine?

This concept of exclusive owning thoughts, or ideas, or concepts is what is new to the human race, not that Open Source is such a radical new idea. The human condition has been FURTHERED throughout history by people working together, sharing and building upon one another’s intellectual work. If we stop that then we are doomed to go no further as humans than we are right here, right now today.

Open source just shines a light on how stupid, selfish and closed minded we have become in the world today.

Where would the sciences of physics, medicine, biology, engineering, mathematics be today if not for the sharing of ideas and intellectual works and building upon the work of those that came before? Why does computing have to be different than medicine or physics?

Thank goodness people didn’t have these selfish ideas throughout history or we would all still be rubbing sticks together to make fire to heat our mud huts.

Eric S. Raymond showed up!

“Is the Open Source Movement Libertarian?”

Yes

I agree that there is nothing openly coercive about MS restricting how its property is used. Since I personally object to the restrictions in the EULA, I am very glad that I have no reason to use MS software.

Maybe it’s because I take the MS EULA seriously, while the vast majority of people subject to the EULA have never read it. They “click through” without any attention paid to it other than as one more check-box on the way to the login prompt.

If MS tried to enforce its EULA in a “free market” court, I would ask how could they know the end user had read it at all?

Or in the other direction, I think there would be far greater rejection of the MS EULA _if_ people realized they were entering into a legally binding contract by checking that little “Yes” button.

I’m also not convinced that the EULA is enforcible simply from the fact that I only see it after I have purchased the product, taken it home, opened the box and begun the install. I believe that the well-documented obfuscation of the refund process if one does not in fact agree to the EULA when it is presented could well be a positive defense.

On an economic rather than legal issue, have you read the wonderful article “Windows Is Free” on the tlug.jp Tokyo Linux Users Group site?

http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:-Wu35Z9YUmUJ:tlug.jp/articles/Windows_Is_Free+tlug+windows+is+free&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

Sadly, the original article seems to have vanished, thus the google cached copy.

The gist of it is that, for many (if not most) non-commercial users, Windows is economically free. The Microsoft copy protection is easily broken, copied casually and universally.

Anyway, I found it a very interesting read from a relative value/utility standpoint.

Say that in an anarcho-capitalist society MS sold its products on the condition that the end-users adhered to the terms stipulated. The courts will enforce this contract. Where is the non-libertarian element in all this? You could say in the present regime MS would make recourse to State-owned courts and benefits from IP laws etc., but the situation I outlined would be perfectly justifiable.

Excuse me for a moment while I lay out my credentials. I wrote the
propaganda line that Tim has swallowed. I founded (or at least
re-invented) the modern open-source movement when I taught the
partisans of “free software” to use the language of free-market
economics and rational-choice theory (in the papers collected as The Cathedral
and the Bazaar). I am also a libertarian of long standing and of
a somewhat harder-core variety than my esteemed friend Michel Tiemann,
and was the co-founder and first president of the organization he now
leads.

Like all the most effective propaganda, “open source is just a
business decision” derives its effectiveness from being true. But it
would be equally true to say that the open-source movement is run by a
conspiracy of subversives who aim to show by example that a
decentralist, open, and voluntarist system of software production is
superior to a centralist, secretive, and coercive one — and that
hell, yes that’s a libertarian demonstration bearing on
deeper political questions.

As I tell my speaking audiences when the subject comes up: Yes, I’m
an anarcho-capitalist. No, you don’t have to buy my politics to
realize that open source is good for your business. But is what you learn
from the method is that you don’t need all the heavy coercive apparatus
of traditional management, that it in fact gets in the way of
deriving the most efficient results from your production inputs — then that
lesson is part of what I intended, too, and yes you should be
thinking about how it applies elsewhere.

That’s one way in which Michael’s claim is valid. Another is that the
theoretical roots of the modern open-source movement are deeply interwined
with Austrian economics and libertarian political theory. One of the reasons
I was able to explain the movement to itself in the late 1990s is because
I had been prepared for that job by nearly twenty years of thinking about
phenomena like Hayekian implicit knowledge and the conditions for emergence
of stable cooperation in ungoverned populations of autonomous actors.

I can be even more specific than that and say that David Friedman’s
The Machinery of Freedom and his style of consequentialist
argument from efficiency considerations was directly ancestral to both
the rhetoric and the conclusions of today’s open-source movement. The
link was through me as one of the movement’s two principal theoreticians,
and through many other senior open-source hackers (notably including
Michael Tiemann) who saw where I was going and, being libertarians
themselves, ran with it.

IP is an artificial construct, forced upon society. Open Source is society’s reaction to IP, a kind of self-defense.

Libertarianism on the other hand, is society’s reaction to the use of force in general, including IP.

So they’re different things:

• Open Source cures a symptom (IP)
• Libertarianism cures the disease (coercion)

Both are entirely voluntary.

Unlike, for example, the Microsoft End User License Agreement(s) which are legally binding and I have to agree with them before I can use their products, there is no such restriction on the use of F/OSS.

Unlike what I have to agree to in the MS-EULA, I can copy F/OSS as often as I like, put one “copy” on as many machines as I like, give it to whom I like, even sell it.

The only restriction on F/OSS is that I may not restrict anyone else’s use of F/OSS. If I make a change, and distribute it, I must allow those changes to be used just as I was able to use what came to me.

Libertarianism is, at its core, that coercion against others is wrong. That, even with the best of “ends”, the “means” of coercion are not justified.

I must allow, as it were, everyone else the same rights that I have.

Libertarianism has quite a bit to do with the ethics of FOSS practices. For example, would it be appropriate for Alice to prevent Bob from making copies on his own computer in retaliation for Bob doing the same to Alice? If the article being copied is under the FSF General Public License, then the courts will help Alice retaliate in that way. Since click-wrap licenses don’t always constitute contracts, FOSS licenses sometimes act as weapons to defend legitimate property in a way that non-FOSS licenses cannot.

Contrariwise, if you “buy” a copy of open sourced software you are much closer to “true” unfettered property ownership–arguably far closer than a typical homeowner is to ownership of their home, what with zoning restrictions, pollution laws and so on. You can take it apart, put it back together again, copy it, resell it, move it and so forth. Licenses differ slightly in their implications, but the general difference between any license that meets the Open Source Definition or the standards to be considered Free Software, and the industry standard in EULAs for closed software, is like night and day in this regard.

Surely if Libertarianism insists on the strong ethical implications of property rights, the distinction between open source and closed software goes to the root of such implications one way or another.

no. nor should you invite bill gates.

ask some respected people:

linus torvalds,
eben moglen,
richard stallman,
mark shuttleworth

you know the list

When an individual or group of individual creates a thing, whether it be a pair of shoes, a curling iron, a movie, or a piece of software, that person(s) is the rightful owner of the created thing. As such, he/she/they are free to dispose of it in any way that is agreeable to him/her/them. In the case of things that may be reproduced for profit, that disposal amounts to an agreement between the producer and the consumer. Each person who consumes the thing, whether in exchange for money, another thing, or nothing at all (as in the case of FOSS) is essentially entering into a contract with its producer, and the consumer and producer are both bound by the terms of that agreement.

With licensed software, music CDs, movie DVDs, or whatever, that agreement govern the acceptable use of the item by the consumer. This is a Libertarian concept in that the act of purchasing or otherwise obtaining the item constitutes a purely voluntary transaction between producer and consumer.

In this regard, FOSS is no more or less a Libertarian concept than any other voluntary transaction or agreement. The producer has chosen to voluntarily distribute the thing he/she/they have made with a minimum of (or possibly even no) conditions attached.

That said, FOSS can be said to be “more” Libertarian than closed-source software in that it doesn’t rely on patents to prevent others who may come up with the same idea completely independently from the patent-holder from profiting from their ideas. The independent entrepreneur is held hostage by the government-granted monopoly on the intellectual property of whom ever happened to get to the patent office first.