The GPL vs. Capitalism

Copyright © 1999 Pedro F. Giffuni

This article was motivated by the Restrictively Unrestrictive: The GPL License in Software Development article that appeared on the Daemon News previously. While this article clearly had a good intent and, as stated, reflected only the personal views of one BSD developer, it was clear to me that it didn't go far enough in explaining the evilness of the GPL license.

The GPL license offers a very beautiful dream, free, unrestricted access to software for the people of the world. No doubt this would be great, free technology for people in the third world countries (including me) and no more gigantic monopolistic companies telling you where to go today. I also believed in that dream, however I tried FreeBSD because I wanted to see how the traditional UNIX was. I could have tried NetBSD but I simply had a contact with FreeBSD first. FreeBSD has only one distribution and, of course, includes many GPL'd programs, something that shows without doubt that BSD hackers don't "hate" the GPL as a general rule, in fact, there is a sense of respect towards of the code written by the FSF and any comment against the GPL starts a never ending flame war in the lists.

I then decided to follow my ideals, and some years ago I pursued some email with Richard Stallman (RMS for short) on three issues:

1) The Free Software Foundation should support the efforts against crypto export restrictions in the US. It was suspected some linux distributions were exporting this code but there was no official statement on this.

He (RMS) agreed that such restrictions were against the spirit of free software redistribution. He included a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the Free Software Foundation's site.

2)During our email, he insisted I should use the term GNU/Linux, something that sounded perfectly logical although somewhat uncomfortable. I then asked if I could use the term GNU/FreeBSD and GNU/AIX (I used AIX with a complete GNU development system since those parts were unbundled by IBM) since I was using GNU components that were much bigger and equally important (at least to me) as the kernel.

RMS responded on both cases with a clear " no".

3) I commented that, given the FSF's objectives, FreeBSD was doing a better job than Linux.

He (and no doubt many readers) was surprised by this affirmation and asked for an explanation. I reasoned that since the objective behind the FSF was providing free software, and Linux was being heavily commercialized while FreeBSD was not, FreeBSD was nearer to the objectives. In those days, the newly born Caldera's distribution had a lot of commercial goodies and their base distribution couldn't be downloaded anywhere, I also commented that no one could stop the companies like Caldera from gradually replacing free parts of GNU/Linux with commercial elements until they would effectively replace the complete OS (I also mentioned the linux emulation in BSD in another context). To this final point, RMS responded that the only thing we could do was write more free software.

Nowadays I personally think that Richard Stallman is a good person but he is confused (I hope he thinks the same of me when he finishes reading this article :), and I am not going to analyze the answers RMS gave because that is not the objective of this article. I arrived, however, to two important conclusions:

1. the GNU Public License will not save the world,
2. there shouldn't be a universal license; different situations require different licenses.

The GPL is a long license; sometimes I think it was made so that people would get tired of reading it; something like those big contractas with small letters on it.Until here I had no real problem with the GPL, and since Microsoft was evidently afraid of the rebirth of UNIX (of course Microsoft considers everything a threat), I even considered it a good thing: like most things that are evil, the GPL seems beautiful on the surface. Of course I saw the truth later on...when I saw it and it was clear to me what people that adopted the GPL were doing to the other people. I was aghast. It was not communism or socialism, this was simply and plainly anticapitalism, a game of trying to break the system with it's own logical rules!

Of course no one cares that big software companies that exploit their developers and their customers die, but big companies will have better chances to survive against free software: small companies will simply die. Let's say that you are an independent software developer, such as a compiler writer, and you spend hours, or many years, developing your product; you will find it's very difficult, probably impossible, to compete against a free software product, as egcs, that has many more man-hours than your product.

In capitalist countries people live for money. Careers are expensive, technical people have to live off what they know. Who makes money out of free software? At first glance no one, that's why it's free. Some redistributors and support people make money out of it, but they surely make less than the vendors of commercial products. Free software vendors can offer better prices because they don't have to hire developers, not because they are particularly efficient redistributing software. Most importantly, authors won't receive anything or will receive a misery if they beg for it.

If you don't want money from your code, that's OK, but by releasing software under the GPL you are forcing other software writers to use the same poverty license even if they add significant features to your code. They must also take care in using different algorithms; no one wants to be sued for changing variable names and indentation from GPL'd software.

One of the most ridiculous reasons for adopting the GPL is..."oh but if Microsoft takes my code...", well, what makes you think they will? I understand they bought and paid their own TCP/IP stack, even when the free BSD version was available; they simply didn't want to give credit to anyone. If they take your code and do significant improvements everyone wins, if they don't do any significant improvements the resulting product will probably not sell well, and people can still get your sources; no one will "take away" free software from you.

Boy, I dislike Bill Gates and his practices, but admittedly he learned his dirty tricks in the same economical system, and he gives jobs to the people. If he could offer a good OS with full added value I would buy it, and I wouldn't have any problem with him, or any other developer, becoming rich from his work, in the meantime, Hotmail should have a "Powered by FreeBSD" logo.

It's also ridiculous to choose Linux over *BSD because of it's license: how many people would choose Windows NT over Linux if Microsoft adopted the GPL?? Linux users are usually confused, they adopt Linux because it's popular "and cool" and hide their ignorance in completely subjective reasons like the license or some technical merit that they heard about but they don't really understand.

All in all, Ken Thompson is right: people are choosing Linux, and the GPL, because it's an alternative to Microsoft. I hope this popularity goes by, otherwise I'd recommend Jeremy Rifkin's excellent book on what will happen in the next years.

Of course, this is all my personal opinion and some food for the thought, please don't email me to say that you disagree or how unfair I have been :).

Pedro F. Giffuni, pfgiffun@bachue.usc.unal.edu.co