It started with a toot from the FSF:
Freedom means not #madebygoogle or #madebyapple, it means #madebythousandsoffreesoftwarehackers #GNU
This post is an expansion on my reply:
@fsf as an FSF Associate I’m happy to use software made by Google or made by Apple as long as it respects the four freedoms.
Yes to made by Google or made by Apple
The Free Software Foundation financially supports the Replicant project, a freedom-respecting operating system based on the Android Open Source Project. The same Android Open Source Project that’s made by Google. Google and Apple are both behind plenty of Free Software contributions, both through their own projects such as Android and Swift or contributions to existing projects like the Linux kernel and CUPS. Both companies are averse to copyleft licences like the GPL, but then both companies have large software patent portfolios and histories of involvement in software patent litigation so it may be that each company is actually averse to compromising the defensibility of their patent hoards through licences like GPL3. On the other hand, the Objective-C support NeXT created for GCC was the subject of an early GPL applicability test so in Apple’s case they could well be averse to “testing” the GPL any further.
Whatever their motivations for the stances they’ve taken, Apple and Google do contribute to Free Software and that should be both encouraged and welcomed. If they want to contribute to more projects, create new ones, or extend those freedoms to their existing proprietary code then we advocates of software freedom should encourage them and welcome them. Freedom does not mean “not #madebygoogle or #madebyapple”.
No to controlled by Google or controlled by Apple
While we in software development have never had it so good in terms of software freedom, with all of our tools and libraries being published as free software (usually under the banner of open source), the community at large has never had it so bad, and Google and Apple are at the vanguard of that movement too. The iOS kernel, Darwin UNIX system and Swift programming language may all be open for us to study, share and improve, but they exist in a tightly-controlled walled garden that’s eroding the very concept of ownership and centralising all decisions within the spheres of the two platform providers. This means that even Freedom Zero, the freedom to use the software for any purpose, is denied to anyone who isn’t a programmer (and in fact to the rest of us too: you can study the iOS kernel but cannot replace the kernel on your phone if you make an improvement; you can study Swift but cannot sell an iOS app using any version other than the one blessed by Apple at time of submission).
People often complain at this point that software freedom is only relevant to programmers because you need to be a programmer to study or improve a program given its source code, but that’s not the point. Open Source is only relevant to programmers. Having the freedom to use your computer for any purpose, and to share your software, gives two things:
- to some people, “I wish that my software could do this, it doesn’t, but I understand that it is possible to change it and that I could use the changed version” can be the incentive to learn and to enable their own programming skills.
- to others, having the freedom to share means having the freedom to share the software with someone who already knows how to program who can then make improvements and share them back with the first person.
Ignoring those possibilities perpetuates the current two-tier system in which programmers have a lot of freedom and everybody else has none. I have argued against the walled garden before, as a barrier to freedom. That is different from arguing against things that are made by the companies that perpetuate the walled gardens, if we can encourage them to change.
Welcome, Apple. Seriously.
The FSF has a long history of identifying itself “against” some IT incumbent, usually Microsoft. It has identified a change in the IT landscape by positioning itself as an underdog “against” Apple and Google. But it should not be against them, it should be with them, encouraging them to consider and support the freedom of their customers.
