On Fri, 5 May 2000, Richard Stallman wrote:
> The concept of inalienable rights, rights that you cannot cede because
> everyone should always have them, is a fundamental part of the legal
> system of the US and many other countries.
Yes. Now find me the section of the US Constitution, or the European
Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees you the right to MY source
code?
> For example, selling oneself into slavery used to be permitted in most
> parts of the world. But people eventually recognized that this led to
> less freedom for a large number of people--and eventually slavery was
> abolished. This is one example of an inalienable right. There are
> many others. For example, in the US a noncompetition agreement
> lasting many years is legally void--because it conflicts with the
> inalienable right to practice one's profession.
>
> Of course, being a slave is much worse than using a proprietary
> program. So am I not exaggerating by making an analogy between them?
> No, because it is not just an analogy--it is a counterexample. The
> "truly free" argument against copyleft applies just the same against
> prohibition of slavery, or any other inalienable right.
>
> That argument rest on an extremely general assumption: that *any*
> inalienable right is intolerable; that as long as you have any rights
> you cannot give up, you are not truly free. They reject copyleft as a
> special case of this general assumption. To disagree with copyleft is
> not an extremist view, but the general premise is one.
I agree that the "right" to give up your inalienable rights is a
fundamentally flawed concept. I just don't agree that your access to my
source code without my consent is such a right...
> People have a right to disapprove of copyleft; they even have a right
> to advocate legalization of selling oneself into slavery. But the
> people who use this argument against copyleft typically do not admit
> the extremist nature of their premise. They usually try to pass it
> off as uncontroversial, rather than a fundamental rejection of much of
> our legal system. At that point, their argument becomes disingenuous.
Yes. I agree there. The point at which we diverge, I think, is where you
start imposing restrictions on one person's freedom, on the assumption
that other people have certain rights over him.
My only real objection to the GPL is that it seems hypocritical: it denies
one person the right NOT to publish their source code, in order to grant a
third party some rights to this person's source. Using GPL software as a
user grants me rights; using it as a programmer removes them.
Why should I not have the right to decide whether or not to publish the
source code to my own software, simply because it depends on someone
else's? If I write Windows software, depending on Microsoft's proprietary
software, MS do not impose restrictions on how I license MY code; why
should yours be more restrictive?
James.
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