Mark Blafkin concedes I’m right that the GPL respects the freedom of users to choose whether to use proprietary software alongside free software. But he insists I’m missing the big picture:
This brings us to one fact that Tim got blatantly wrong. Stallman HAS attacked the OpenOffice team for relying on proprietary code in the past. This article from NewsForge chronicles the dispute over OpenOffice’s reliance on Java code and the FSF’s plans to rewrite the code to remove any of those dependencies.
Despite what Tim asserts, Stallman is not content with promoting his goals merely through persuasion and cooperation. The GPL comes complete with the copyright equivalent of land use restrictions that limit what you (and now your customers) can do with that software. It essentially says that if you build a new barn on top of your land (aka GPL Software), you need to share your designs with the entire world. Does that REALLY jive with traditional libertarian beliefs? The GPL is designed to force anyone who uses that software to accept the ideology of the FSF either for moral or pragmatic reasons.
If you look closely, what I said was that Stallman has never “criticized efforts by the Open Office team to allow free software users to use Microsoft Word documents.” Stallman’s criticism of OpenOffice for building atop a proprietary platform makes perfect sense in light of his focus on users’ freedom. Free software built upon proprietary software is going to be subject to any restrictions that apply to the underlying proprietary software. Since Stallman’s focus is on preserving users’ freedom to use software as they choose, this makes perfect sense to me. Stallman objects to integrating free and proprietary software, because it runs the risk of undermining users’ freedoms. But he’s never objected to interoperability between free and proprietary software.
But let’s talk about the big picture. As I’ve said before, libertarianism is not “marketarianism”:
Libertarianism is about reducing state coercion. It’s not necessarily about increasing the role of the market in every aspect of our lives. Of course the market is one alternative to statism, and an extremely important one. But other decentralized, voluntary forms of organization are important too. Peer production is one such example. But there are many others, including co-ops, private universities, think tanks, unions (providing membership is voluntary), churches, and charities. Libertarians should be celebtrating these institutions as alternatives to the state, not attacking them as threats to the free market.
Mark is certainly right that Stallman is an ideologue, just as many vegetarians, pacifists, and lots of other people are ideologues. But as far as I can see, the free software movement (like vegetarianism) is an ideology that’s perfectly consistent with libertarianism. I’ve never claimed that Stallman is a libertarian—he’s obviously not—but I don’t see anything about his work on free software that conflicts with libertarian ideals. There are plenty of libertarians who are also free software partisans, just as there are libertarian vegetarians and libertarian pacifists.
To take an example at random, the Amish are a private, non-coercive part of civil society. The Amish impose all kinds of requirements on its members that I personally would find intolerable. Yet no libertarian would write long screeds about how the Amish are a threat to liberty. As long as Amish people have the freedom to leave, and as long as they aren’t lobbying to impose their restrictions on the rest of society, there would be nothing libertarian about criticizing the organization of Amish communities. Amish people are exercising their freedom to organize their lives as they choose, and that includes the freedom to eschew many things that most of us consider essential to a modern economy.
Precisely the same principle applies to the free software community. No one has to use free software. But if you do choose to use free software, you have an obligation to respect the norms of the free software community. The Amish aren’t unlibertarian because they’re not organized around the marketplace and the profit motive. The market and the profit motive are an important part of any free society, and libertarians defend peoples’ right to participate in it. But we also defend peoples’ right to choose not to organize their efforts along commercial lines. Libertarianism is fundamentally about freedom—about opposing coercion by the state. Free software is no more coercive than proprietary software, and so there’s absolutely no reason to consider it less libertarian.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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