[pp.int.general] Why Free Software misses the point

[Andrew Norton]

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On 5/12/2010 6:33 PM, Patrick Maechler v/o Valio wrote:
> As a direct answer to your article:
> While I agree that most users never bother to look at the code
> (including myself, even 'though I'm a CS student), I personally do
> prefer free software over proprietary for the same reasons as I do
> prefer a scientific approach to the world in contrast to a religious
> one(*). The mere fact that anyone is provided with the power to trace
> back what's happening makes free software way more appealing than
> closed/proprietary one.
> 
> Consider this:
> I have only a rough knowledge about scientific medicine. I don't think
> that I would ever bother to get into all details of this or become a med
> student myself; yet I would rather trust a medic than some magic healer
> which tells me that I'm not allowed or just incapable (by divine will?)
> to ever get his practices...

Ah, but the software is not making a diagnosis, it's providing a
service, a product. It's more like pharmaceuticals. 'heres the receipy,
anyone can make it and send it to us, and so anyone can check these
pills are what they're supposed to be"

I mean they could, but people won't. Worse, you've taken away any
accountability. Right now, if a software has a massive hole (let's take
the sony rootkit for instance) and it's clsoed sourc,e the company, sony
in this case, is responsible for it. They're ont he hook for the court
cases, the damaegs etc. Now imagine that software was open-source. Who's
on the hook for it now? Who is left accountable?

Want a real-world example? A year or two back, one of the (I think)
Vietnamese or Korean addons for Firefox contained a trojan. The addon
was distributed via the Mozilla site, and was undiscovered for months.
Did mozilla take responsibility for distributing that software+trojan?
No. They put the blame on 'someone' uploading the trojan'd version 5-6
months earlier at least.

> Now you might argue that magic healers are by default unsuccessful
> compared to medicine and the same does not apply to proprietary vs free
> software. However there are still diseases out there were this might not
> apply i.e. where we just lack the knowledge to develop appropriate
> medical treatment that is superior to obscure practices. Yet I would
> prefer the former one all the way if I have to, because there is a
> possibility for an open, critical debate.
> Also if my personal doctor dies I may feel sorry, but I'm not as afraid
> as if my magic healer dies, of whom no one knows how his practices
> worked in detail.
> 

The problem is that very few pieces of software are one-man-shows,
unless they're 'free'. And if the company goes, well that means no more
support, but the product still works, where the 'product' of your magic
healer is 'healing' which they can't do any more (it's a bad analogy).

When it comes to 'open' projects, Firefox leads the way, it's the poster
child. The problem is the performance lags behind chrome and opera, it
has had more exploits and bugs in the last year, than Opera and Internet
Explorer  (one article I read counted the exploits over a year, and
found that Firefox had more than opera, IE and Chrome COMBINED), and
they're not all that good about patching those bugs when they're found -
last time I checked (because secunia is down) there was still a few
unpatched exploits for Firefox2, that have been around since before 3.

Thunderbird, and openOffice are the only such pieces of software (beyond
mini-apps and codecs and such) that I put on my system. open source is
just too buggy, badly written in most cases, and bloaty.

People term closed source software as 'security through obscurity', but
the sad fact is, open/free software is usually security through
complacence. Taking the accountability out, means the buck stops with
the user. Unless you're checking the code yourself, in it's entirety,
it's not secure. It can be buried in plain sight, and since everyone
assumes someone else will check the code, very few actually do -
certainly in comparison with the numbers that give being able to look at
the code as to why they use it.

Andrew


> - pat
> 
> (*) Note: I'm somewhere between beeing a discordianist and an agnostic,
> behaving as practical atheist. I'm not opposed to spirituality itself,
> but to "infantile behavior" caused by organized religion.
> 
> On 05/12/2010 11:08 PM, Boris Turovskiy wrote:
>> Ahoi,
>> I've finally finished my critical article on Mr.Stallman's and the FSF's
>> viewpoint. It may be of interest for Pirate Parties which have
>> difficulties with accepting FSF's philosophical reasoning while not
>> knowing what their answer should be.
>>
>> http://wiki.piratenpartei.de/Benutzer:TurBor/Stellungsnahmen/Why_Free_Software_misses_the_point
>>
>>
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Boris
>> ____________________________________________________
>> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
>> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
>> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>>
> 
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general

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