Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

For almost all software (other than revenue-generating proprietary, which is more and more a special case), it's in the company's interest to go Free.

But internal advocates for going Free have to make a case for it. In my experience copyleft can help there.

If the decision is set up as "comply with the license, at a small cost" vs. "violate the license and take some risk" it's easier for that internal advocate to get the company to do the right thing than if the advocate has to argue for doing the extra work of a Free release, for questionable future benefits.

(When I was in the position of the internal advocate, I got the company to comply, but it was easier to do a source release of all the non-copylefted stuff at the same time, so it all went out. But would not have been possible without copyleft helping to frame the decision.)

> Nice to hear that everything has worked out for you! When people no longer have to throw their gadgets away or replace them out of frustration because the vendor has disowned or obsoleted them and won't let anyone else maintain the software those devices use, maybe they'll share your optimism, too.

WON'T let anybody else maintain them, or CAN'T FIND anybody else to maintain them? (And half the time you can't get the specs because the supply chain is so long that the "manufacturer" has no clue who to ask to get them :-(

My old Galaxy Aces are unsupported by Cyanogen, and as far as I can tell it's because nobody has the time/inclination/skill to bother :-(

Sad as it may be, when the manufacturer loses interest (usually after about 6 months), there are large swathes of (especially at the cheap end) hardware that nobody can be bothered to look after. There are, unfortunately, a whole host of practical issues here, not least that we are asking manufacturers to spend a lot of money with no return.

Cheers,
Wol

PS4 runs a proprietary FreeBSD derivative though, doesn't it?

> Is that the meaningful metric to use? The router firmwares were opened up, and projects like DD-WRT and OpenWRT exists because of the litigation. Only because of the GPL enforcement, no other reason, period. It is the sole reason why I have been able to use free firmwares on all my routers the last decade. I cannot fathom why you neglect that fact here.

So we won the first battle - and lost every one since ...

You're right. The FIRST lawsuit opened up the router firmware. The problem is (and Rob should know), he says that all the subsequent lawsuits have been a waste of time.

The problem is most routers now contain this free firmware, and are made by Chinese/Taiwanese manufacturers who take the same attitude to copyright as the Americans - they ignore it unless it suits their purposes.

I'm sorry, America, but how long is it since you were pretty much forced into signing Berne? *Half* a lifetime? How long is it since you *finally* outlawed the practice of patenting other peoples' inventions (Edison, Lemuelson, etc etc)? Twenty years? How long is it since the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (despite all the evidence that pretty much everything over ten years old is worthless)? When we see some integrity and honesty from Congress, maybe people will start respecting copyrights. We as the Free and/or Open Source community are very weird that way - we do (try to) respect copyright.

Cheers,
Wol

Not sure what the DRM situation in radeon/intel land is, but both of those drivers require proprietary firmware nowadays too. It's a slippery slope.

This is nothing new. Adam Smith, in _The Wealth of Nations_, Book I, Chapter X, Part II:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. "

NO NO NO.

Price fixing is where company executives collaborate and agree to act together. This would be if you knew that three of your competitors were planning to raise prices, but you did not know who.

Actually, in our case, salaries, I think this works the other way round :-) It drove salaries up. Which imho is insane but ours was not to reason why ...

The *idea* is to attract talent by paying high salaries. The *effect* is to pay more for crappier talent. If you want to attract the best talent by offering "salaries in the top quartile", every company that does that will get into a spiral of ever rising salaries. BUT you will end up poaching the same rotating pool of people with no company loyalty, questionable talent, and minimal corporate knowledge.

IF on the other hand, you give your staff decent pay rises, and promote internally, you'll find that the cream rises to the top. One of the biggest causes of *good* talent leaving is that people see no opportunity for personal advancement (which doesn't necessarily mean promotion). So if you aim to be an average payer, with a decent HR that does good succession planning, you'll probably find you outperform the spiralling companies quite nicely.

(If you want a cite, there was a study, sorry no details, that compared "return on assets" vs "CxO salaries" and found pretty much that - buying in expensive "talent" depressed returns significantly over a five-year period.

Cheers,
Wol