Benutzer:TurBor/Stellungsnahmen/Why Free Software misses the point

Das ist kein offizieller Standpunkt der Piratenpartei Deutschland, sondern meine persönliche Meinung.
This is not the official position of the Pirate Party of Germany but my personal viewpoint.

Why Free Software misses the point of software

I have for a long time, even since before entering the Pirate movement, had a slightly uneasy feeling about the open source movement and the ideas it seemed to uphold. Thanks to Mr. Stallman I have now learned that what I really felt uneasy about was the idea of "Free Software", and his texts provided me with an excellent opportunity to pinpoint the flaws I have had a bad feeling about all that time.

I would like to make it clear from the start that I'm no computer guru like Mr. Stallmann and that my programming experience is limited to a small text-based bug-ridden adventure game I wrote in QuickBasic while in elementary school; however, as the discussion focuses on philosophy, not technology, that shouldn't lead to factual errors, while the perspective of the common user is exactly the point which I sorely miss in all of the FSF's fundamental papers.

Questions may surely arise when considering the concept of freedom used by the Free Software movement, and their use of the current copyright system to implement these freedoms has consistency problems as well, but these points can be considered to be technicalties. The fundamental flaw, however, lies in a complete misunderstanding of what software should do, and what its place in the world should be.

The crucial point can be found in Mr. Stallman's article, Why Open Source misses the point of free software, where he states: The idea that we want software to be powerful and reliable comes from the supposition that the software is designed to serve its users. If it is powerful and reliable, that means it serves them better and then attacks that supposition, saying that if the power and reliability are used to restrict the user's freedom, they actually become harmful. Well, that is simply not the case.

When I need a piece of software to do something, there is a number of requirements I place upon it: it has to do the job which I need it for, it has to be stable, to not damage my computer or my data in any way, and it would be good if high-quality support were available. Oh, and yes, I don't want to spend too much money on it. Period. Whereas the Free Software movement comes with guns blazing and all kind of arguments of philosophical and ethical nature which strive to protect the freedom of the user and thus to elevate software to a battlefield between good and evil, that same user considers software to be a tool - often a very complicated and vital tool, but a tool nevertheless. If I need a program for text processing, I'm going to use it for, actually, text processing - not poking around in its source code or modifying it, if for no other reason that I (like 99% of other computer users) simply lack the skill to do so. Consequently, I will choose the program which gives me the most bang for my buck, in the same way I choose any other tool and not consider any ethereal criteria of "freedom".

In his article Mr. Stallman refers to a freedom becoming "a theoretical fiction rather than a practical freedom ". He does not, however, see that most of his "essential freedoms" are exactly that: nice words with no practical implications whatsoever, as a program is acquired to be used, not to be modified or distributed.

Richard Stallman often laments that "few have ever heard of the ethical reasons for which we developed this system and built the free software community". Well, the explanation is quite simple: most users don't tend to think of software in terms of ethics any more than they tend to think of calculators or mobile phones in terms of ethics. It is a completely distorted world view which sees users copiously modifying and redistributing their versions of software: in reality, they simply want to use it. The Free Software Foundation does itself definitely no favor by clinging to their notion of "universal freedoms" while disregarding real users' needs.