Sometimes the left is as poorly thought out as the right...

It struck me when reading this interview with Richard Stallman that he sounds, at the risk of being flamed, frighteningly like GW Bush sometimes. Both men talk about "freedom" in an utterly abstract and totally useless sense. Bush says the terrorists hate freedom (either meaningless or not true, depending how you interpret it), and Stallman says that "non-free" software deprives people of freedom (also meaningless or not true depending on interpretation).

In what I've read about and by Stallman, I've never been impressed with him. His arguments are simplistic in a way that increasingly reminds me of GW Bush. He makes unsubstantiated arguments based purely on belief. People are not free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, nor should they be. I can't blow up somebody just because he pisses me off, much as I might want to. Nor do I have the freedom to access every piece of everything I own. I can't break open my car's dashboard and roll back the odometer, for instance. If I, or more relevently anyone, could do that, it would undermine the legitimacy of car sales. People understand that. There have never been protests about one's ability to change one's odometer arbitrarily. They understand it's in their best interest to be able to rely on an odometer's readout. And yet, that's a machine I own that I'm not allowed to change the internals of by law, and that's a good thing. It's also a very simple counter-argument to "free software" that none of Stallman's rhetoric has ever addressed.

I just want him to frame his argument for me at the very least. He speaks in slogans. Tell me what goal you're trying to achieve in concrete terms, and then explain to me why only "free software" achieves that goal. Saying it "inhibits freedom" is meaningless and annoying. There are arguments to be made for open source. Personally, my over-simplified opinion is that it ultimately doesn't matter whether the source is open or not. It's the interfaces that matter. So long as the interfaces are open, there's room for competition since different components will be interchangable. It's the lack of competition that you want to primarily be concerned with, at least in this case.

Stallman's arguments just always strike me as inane and poorly-thought out. He does a disservice to the open source philosophy. He promotes freedom as an unquestionable absolute the same way Bush does, and it's quite simply not an absolute. Life is full of tradeoffs, and there are things that are worth trading little wedges of freedom for. Trading my freedom to drop an anvil on someone gains me the safety of knowing I won't, in turn, have one dropped on my head. Putting money into a 401k and trading the ability to get to it now gains me a higher return on it and more money for when I retire. And when talking about software, trading the ability to tweak my system potentially gains me a variety of things including a company's ability to easily patch, configure, update, etc. a component I bought from them. What if Tivo had to try to roll out a new service for its boxes if everyone ran their own version of the Tivo software? It would be a nightmare, and it wouldn't work. Giving up your freedom to tweak your Tivo gains you the ability to have your Tivo be updated remotely and easily, which in turns means having the damn thing just work.

Anyway. I digress. I'm ranting in a semi-coherent manner. I just hate it when people assert nebulous, unsubstantiated opinions as arguments. It's like trying to argue with a 4-year-old whose only justification for anything is, "'cuz!"