Free Software, Free Society

What Hacker News says

1. anthkMar 2026
   Read and share "Free Software, Free Society" now.

   Richard Stallman advised us about it long ago.

   Thank god Plan9 got relicensed into GPL. 9front might not totally free, but it's a step in case GNU+Linux gets utterly broken.

   And, yes, please, go try Trisquel (novice users), GUIX (experts) and Hyperbola (experts and protocol purists).

   Avoid every Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix service with nonfree JS.

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2. pxcSep 2024
   Yes. I was a bit sloppy in using 'VSCode' to refer only to the thing distributed at code.visualstudio.com but also treating derivative works of what Microsoft calls 'Code - OSS' in their GitHub repo as defective (more limited) derivatives of 'VSCode'.

   > The MIT license represents a different view on the social and technical goals of open source software. It's much simpler than the GPLs and only has one obligation for the user/redistributors: display a copyright notice. It's not as copyleft as the GPLs.

   The MIT license is a tool used for a range of purposes, not an expression of values. It doesn't 'represent a view' about how software should be developed or distributed in the same way that documents like, e.g., the FSF's account of the four fundamental software freedoms, the OSI's Open-Source Definition, or the Debian Free Software Guidelines do. It sits at a different layer. Moreover, all of those documents incontestably include MIT-licensed software among the licenses that embody their values-- none of those organizations or movements they participate in exclude permissively licensed software.

   That some source code is distributed under the terms of the MIT license only tells us a little bit about the way and extent to which it is or isn't aligned with the values and touted benefits of either the free software movement or the open-source movement. There are individuals (and organizations, if you count the contributor bases of large, relatively organized software projects) who are interested in software freedom and/or open-source development but averse to copyleft, but permissive licenses don't themselves exclusively support only one set of values and goals or constitute a statement of allegiance to other doctrines (and neither do copyleft licenses).

   And that's part of what makes statements of values and ideas that go beyond licenses per se, like the ones I cited but also books like Free Software, Free Society and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and the many shorter online documents one can find at FSF.org, EFF.org, sfconservancy.org, or even the OSI's policy advocacy work valuable: they transmit the things that copyright licenses cannot. They are reminders that adopting software and software development practices means making choices about entering into concrete relations of power, dependency, collaboration, and competition. The F/OSS licenses are instruments in service of meaningful choices about those things. And that's exactly the way that my recourse to things like the Open-Source Definition and the FSF's article What is Free Software was not to make a merely verbal dispute, arguing about what words mean, but a move to ground this discussion in the range of first-order values for which F/OSS licenses are instruments. That's something equally relevant and equally worth doing whether the licenses in question are maximally permissive (like the technically-not-a-license of donating a codebase to the public domain), strong copyleft licenses like AGPLv3, or something else like LGPL or MPL.

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3. atomicnumber3Nov 2022
   Well, "changed my life" might be a bit much, but "Free Software, Free Society" really changed how I viewed the field I was entering. I didn't really "get" why a developer would just give away code, but the combination of seeing firsthand the power of the libre ecosystem of code-sharing and reading RMS's philosophical arguments both helped solidify my position and also handed me logical tools to use to reason about it and defend my position.

   I read it as an e-book originally but ended up buying the signed copy.

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4. gdxDec 2020
   Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman
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5. jrepincNov 2020
   The book Free Software, Free Society collects one of the most important pieces: http://www.gnu.org/doc/fsfs3-hardcover.pdf
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6. nivenkosOct 2020
   I'd recommend reading the whole of Free Software, Free Society: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf (PDF)
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