rms@prep.ai.mit.edu (Richard M. Stallman) (12/24/86)
1. I am not against competition. For example, I don't think there was anything wrong with hackers competing for who could make the better program. In this case, no competitor was striving to impede the other competitors. Thus it was constructive competition. No competitor could claim the credit for an idea invented by another, but each one could use and build on the others' ideas. Incentive to invent; no incentive to obstruct the use of inventions. This way brings constructive competition. 2. I'm not against profit either, or competition for profit. When grocery stores compete, you don't see one of them going out of its way to impede another from offering a service. So their competition is constructive, and as a result their profit does go in proportion to how much useful contribution each makes to society. May the best store win; and the others, get by. 3. However, when someone takes his own profit as an all-overriding goal, he can easily be tempted to do things that are destructive. If such practices are actually profitable, many may adopt them, and great harm can result. Thus the moto, "Crime must not pay". In destructive competition, it's no longer true that the competitors profit in proportion to the amount they contribute to society. Thus, one of the main arguments for competition loses its premises. To illustrate the how this ceases to be true, consider GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs as a free program does a lot more good for society (specifically, for users) than the exact same program would do as a proprietary product. (In addition to the fact that it's a better program this way because so many people help.) If authors were rewarded in proportion to the good they did, I would get more money for writing GNU Emacs and making it free than I would for trying to sell it. 3. It is true that in the GNU Emacs General Public License I am using the intellectual property laws. I do not think it is wrong to try to use existing institutions, even mostly bad ones, for a good purpose. I say often that my use of this institution does not mean I support its existence, so there is little danger that the intellectual property laws will be perpetuated out of consideration for my presumed support for them. 4. It is true that I designed the General Public License to stop people from doing certain things. Which things am I stopping them from doing? I'm stopping them from stopping lots of other people from doing certain other things, such as sharing copies of GNU Emacs. In other words, I am protecting the liberties of the public from the depradations of those who would like to restrict their right to share. I believe very much in personal liberty. But just as we must choose between the right to kill and the right to remain unkilled, we must also choose between the right to hoard software and the right to share software. That dilemma is well known. There is another, subtler one. If "support for liberty" is taken to mean "for any conceivable action, no matter how abstract, supporting the right to perform it", this widens the idea of liberty to the point of becoming trivial. What happens is something like a Russell paradox. For example, does eschewing the use of force to compel others require one to refrain from intervening to stop a would-be murderer? In a certain abstract sense it does. People who believe this abstract sense is the right sense become pacifists. A pacifist would place programs in the public domain rather than use a General Public License. I doubt that many of the people who criticize this aspect of the General Public License are pacifists. Does liberty include the right to sell off one's liberties? If so, pretty soon only the rich will have much liberty (in the more down-to-Earth meaning of the word) left. To prevent this result, the founding fathers invented the concept of inalienable rights. This is why both the government and I think it is not valid to sell oneself into slavery. It is misleading to call this a deprivation of liberty. When we say that we don't recognize the right to sell oneself into slavery, we don't mean that if a person says, "I am now John's slave and I will obey everything he says," then we should force him to not to obey. (A few people--deprogrammers--do think this is what it means.) But if, the next day, the same person says, "I don't want to be a slave after all; I want my freedom back," we may have to choose sides between him and John. When we deny his right to sell his rights, it means we take his side. It means we say that the former "slave" never lost his liberty: he freely acted the part of slave and later freely stopped. And that's exactly how I think about nondisclosure agreements and proprietary software licenses.