By Rachel Chalmers
Yet another open source guru has spoken out against Apple’s Public Source License (APSL). The latest pundit to offer his perspective is Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the most notorious hard-liner of the source- available software community. Stallman does not approve of the APSL. In fact, he finds more fault with it even than Software in the Public Interest’s Bruce Perens, who first criticized the license last week (CI No 3,621).
According to Stallman, the APSL has three fatal flaws. The first is disrespect for privacy, since anyone who makes changes to APSLed software is required to publish those changes. The second follows from the first. As Apple is the body that gets notified of these changes, Apple has central control of all APSLed software. The third fatal flaw identified by Stallman is a concern already raised by Perens: Apple retains the right to revoke the APSL at any time.
Any one of these flaws makes a license unacceptable, Stallman asserts. Even if Apple fixed these, however, three further problems would remain. The APSL allows linking with proprietary files, gives Apple rights to changes and is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Overall I think that Apple’s action is an example of the effects of the year-old ‘open source’ movement, says Stallman, of its plan to appeal to business with the purely materialistic goal of faster development, while putting aside the deeper issues of freedom, community, cooperation and what kind of society we want to live in. Apple has grasped perfectly the concept with which ‘open source’ is promoted, which is ‘show users the source and they will help you fix bugs.’ What Apple has not grasped – or has dismissed – is the spirit of free software, which is that we form a community to cooperate on the commons of software.
These comments encapsulate Stallman’s belief that free software has a moral dimension, a belief that has brought him into conflict with others in the open source and free software communities. Publisher Tim O’Reilly puts it this way: At bottom, Richard believes that the rights of the users of software take precedence over the rights of the creators of that software. He thinks that software should be free, even if its creators don’t want it to be…
O’Reilly maintains that the creators of code should retain the freedom to decide which license best suits their individual needs. But there’s a further dimension to this disagreement, he explains, there’s a large group of us who just don’t see the moral dimension in free software that is so important to Richard… Do we make software free because we have to, or because we want to? I argue that we want to. The free movement of ideas always trumps restrictions on ideas in terms of innovation and quality.
It’s hardly surprising that businesses like Apple and IBM have shown a marked preference for the pragmatic, open source model of non-proprietary software development over the ideological position of Stallman and his allies. Whether big companies are cooperating with the open source community or co-opting it depends, it would seem, on the observer’s point of view.
