Why I Don’t Trust Non-Open Source Software
Today I’m going to explain in a dedicated entry, why I do not trust
programs that are not
Free and
open-source software (FOSS) and instead are more restricted. I have
previously told that story as part of
a
different essay, but it was easy to miss.
In any case, the BitKeeper
version control system is now quite obscure, due to the advent of quality
distributed open-source systems such as
Git
and Mercurial, but
some years ago it was used by many developers of the Linux kernel, and the
demise of its gratis version was in fact the impetus for the creation of
Git, and later Mercurial. Some time, before Linus Torvalds adopted it,
I ran into a limitation of CVS, an open-source version control system,
that was then popular, and was looking for an alternative, and after reading
an out-of-date article about BitKeeper (which said its source was available
under a mostly open source licence), decided to use it and its bkbits.net
service.
At first, I was quite happy using it for some of my projects, but then I
posted a question to the mailing list, asking where I can find the source,
which was implied to be available on the BitKeeper site. Larry McVoy
(BitKeeper's main creator and maintainer) answered by saying that they decided
for removing the source code, because some users modified it to remove the
restrictions, and allowed them to abuse the licensing of the gratis version
and prevent them from paying for the commercial version. He also noted that
availability of source, meant that, in practice, your software was Public
Domain, and that they provide the sources for people they can trust,
in private.
At that point, I figured out that I don't have an immediate need for the
source, and that perhaps in the future, I can win BitMover (= BitKeeper’s
parent company) trust and gain access to it. So I continued using BitKeeper.
That changed, however, when Mr. McVoy announced a licence change to BitKeeper
(while requiring all users of the gratis version to upgrade) that
I found
unacceptable, and caused me to seek a different alternative. This
caused an unpleasant exchange between me and the BitKeeper developers,
and made me lose some of the repositories I hosted on bkbits.net.
From that moment on, I realised that I cannot really trust non-open-source
software, because even if I am allowed to continue to use its previous version
after a licence change, then it may accumulate bugs or stop being runnable
on my systems, or stop being supported, and I cannot risk it. To quote
Richard
Stallman: “Every non-free [= non-FOSS] program has a lord, a master —
and if you use the program, he is your master”.
The end of the BitKeeper story, was that after evaluating a few open-source
alternatives, I settled on using the open-source Subversion, and later on
also started using Mercurial and Git. Furthermore, from then on, I often
refused to look at and evaluate proprietary programs. Lately, many open-source
developers have been infatuated with
Sublime Text, but
I am not willing to even try it, because it is not open-source, so I will
never have to depend on it.
Despite all that, I still license my original software under
non-Copyleft licences,
because the GPLv2 and the GPLv3 are incompatible, both
with one another, and with many other open-source licences, and because
I know of at least three different interpretations to the GPL (
GNU’s one in the GPL FAQ, the Linux kernel's one, and the draconian
Nmap
interpretation), and because I want my code to be of the maximal available
use without the need to consult a lawyer, and because I don't want to be
worried about how it will possibly be abused, when I don't care if it will.
I'm still using GPLed software, in the hope that I won't get sued.
To sum up, I do not wish to rely on non-FOSS, because it may mean these
software applications later becomes unavailable to me, in a similar
manner to what was the case with BitKeeper. I hope you can relate to that,
and if not, you may likely run into a similar situation in the future,
as well also the case for the Linux kernel project, with the demise of
the gratis BitKeeper altogether.
Syndicated 2012-11-19 10:34:13 from shlomif