I didn’t think for a minute that you were against FOSS personally, but I felt you had doubts regarding the ethics and motivations of the Free Software movement, which is why I stepped in to squash those. More on that in the links sent on Nov. 23 above by Amir Aharoni.

Also, I’m not writing it just for you personally, this is also for your other readers that may not be aware of this background, since it has indeed been a little overshadowed in the wake of the “linux vs. MS wars” the media likes to fabricate.

What I wanted to correct is the misunderstandings that the FSF is in some way against money or property rights, or that it’s out to get corporations for some political agenda.

The two messages you can basically take from their manifesto are:
1. “Think of coding as a commercial service rather than think of the compiled program as a a commercial product”
2. “In addition to protecting your rights, please protect the rights of the users”

Our community thinks it is essential that ideas and community take precedence over capital gain, because in the long run it’s the people, culture and ideas that count. Free competition is an excellent tool to promote growth in capital as well as knowledge, but not to the point it tramples personal freedom and advancements in science and ethics.

So when Stallman sat to consider balancing the rights of the owner against such important moral issues of cooperation and idea proliferation and improvement, he got to write the GPL. Some people get where he was coming from, others try to abuse it.

Because here’s the problem – to preserve people’s freedom of software, which the FSF considers to be as important as human rights in this day and age, they created a tool called “open source licensing”, which is useful to protect SOME of the ideals of the Freedom of Software in writing. However it’s not meant to be complete solution, nor does it protect all the rights and ideals, it’s JUST A TOOL. The same way that “elections” or “separation of branches” are some of the tools used to preserve democracy, but they can’t guarantee it.

So while it’s true that some companies try to be “loss leaders” and give away some bread for free (gratis) as a mean to kill off the competition, and some even tried to be even more competitive and fight free with Free (libre), it was absolutely not the intention of the FSF.

The funny thing is that even inside the community, people had to get to that realisation the hard way, and the best example is the Linux kernel itself: Linus Torvalds was always a practical guy, a good programmer but infamously full of hubris. When looking for a version control system he went against the suggestions of the masses and picked a proprietary product that happily hosted the source control for a while, until things hit some limits, and he understood that the lack of access to the system’s code and hosting resources meant he needs a new system. This time he did the correct thing and decided to pick out a FOSS tool rather than give in to another vendor that would have locked the project in a new way. He went a few steps further and wrote that new tool himself, called “git”, and the rest is history.

I hope this wraps it up regarding “ideology”, which is the real plane on which you need to check it against Halakha. The small details of the licenses and the way they are used and abused by individuals are as immaterial to the subject of this post, such arguments about “kutzo shel yod” like the financial outcome of the abuse of a license or FOSS product.

The reason I am zealous about this is because such arguments seem to pop up too often in the public life here in Israel. A few months ago many israelis were appalled to hear about a Haredi father who’s son’s life were saved due to donated organs, but declared in front of the dead boy’s father that the tora forbids his community to be donors themselves. In another case I remember a story about a volunteer in “Magen David Adom” who would ride ambulances on Shabbat to save the life of a Jew but not that of a gentile. So as you can imagine it’s annoying enough when any moral system clashes with my ideas of right and wrong, let alone my own ancestral one. Sadly I can’t really have a say when it’s about huge, deep concepts of life and death, but when it comes to judge other things that are dear to me, I can’t feel comfortable saying nothing.

So if I came a little too strong, I hope you can forgive It’s possible I’ve overdone it. But it was a small effort to show where Halakha can go naturally with my humanistic world view rather than against it. I try to help people take a step back, see the bigger picture and remember that in the not-so-distant past, Judaism used to be a lot more progressive, liberal and humanistic than some factions have taken it lately.

Seperately, I haven’t had the time yet to read R. Jachter’s paper on IP and the Halakha, but I hope to get to it too

Consider for example two companies who produces competing products – lets say cars, for example. Now company A comes out with a huge advertisement campaign for their car. One might argue that if company B now goes out and tries to sell their car – maybe for a lower price – is performing Hasagas Gevul. But the fact of the matter is that as a thinking individual I’m allowed to choose for myself which product I want to use at any given time. As it is said “All is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted” (Pirkey Avot 3, somewhere).

2. This company definitely employ Jews both in Israel and the US. Some of them work (occasionally) on Sabbath (maybe only on the US, maybe only the non-observant ones, not sure)
* Is it Kosher to buy software from them?
* Since using their software involves money (license fees), does it makes it a bigger sin?

3. The same company used the same unlawful tactics to force other companies out of the market. Among them were many companies producing software in the Holy Land, using our Holy Language (QText, Einstein, Dagesh…)
* What is your opinion? Are these acts more illegal from a Jewish point of view or from a civil point of view?

Just asking…

[yes, I am sarcastic if anyone missed that until now]

I really appreciate your opinion and consider it very useful for me. Your comment is good food for mind to think further. So, I think I will compile some new ideas in future topic and we’ll talk about it more.

I can think up quite a few cases where an obviously bad Psak Halacha could not be undone, and people suffer. A later generation Posek then gives some sort of a reinterpretation to the Psak, that adds an “obvious” small exception or some other “insight” into the older Posek’s words that practically cancels the first Psak. Ridiculous? To me yes, but imagine if you could not change or interpret any such Psak once the older Posek dies or just refuses to discuss it, and that ALL the Halakhot were law, could you live your life in such a situation? That’s the outcome of Proprietary software. This is why you are allowed to choose, to think, to ignore a few rules if you find they keep you away from what’s important to you and to your community.

At this point I’ll just say that if I continue to develop this analogy it will become a messy argument against religion, so I’d better stay on the topic

So back to Free Software: Greasemonkey, rsync, ssh, pgp, ReiserFS and a few thousand other products, libraries and algorithms that were born in an open source or Free source environment – were all created out of necessity or academic interest. Some give Samba as an example for an unlawful project, but Samba was created for interoperability, not necessarily to compete against NT (and it doesn’t). More often than not, you’ll see that people are simply left with no choice but reimplement a tool and reinvent wheels to get something to work the way they want it.

The long and expensive PR campaign of Microsoft’s gang left the world believing that software can only be created and used as a product, that “fair use” is for anarchists, and that the same laws that were drawn for atoms can be applied to (or indeed enforced on) binary bits. In the meantime people seem to forget that Microsoft rarely ever sold a single product to a client, I can think of 3 or maybe 4. Most of what MS has done in ~35 years of existence is sell licences, i.e. contracts, and in them they included many limitations and impositions that are probably going against quite a few laws in the many countries they do business in. I know the MS EULA includes parts that will not hold water in an Israeli court, and there are others that are probably not even enforceable in the USA. Is that greed seen as a good thing by any Jewish laws? I am pretty sure the entire capitalist system’s state today goes against one or two of the “7 deadly sins” of Christianity as well

But let’s get back to the bakery across the street. What if that baker barters with the community to provide him with the flour, energy for his oven and food for his family, is it still bad that he gives them “free” bread? And what about selling better bread for the same price as the other guy? Or maybe he’s selling at half the price because the other guy is hiking his prices and selling at a 90% profit margin? Surely free competition is a right…

And if he has a “magic box” that produces endless loafs of bread, should he be outlawed for using it for the good of the community? Well, here again is what I meant about Atoms and bits not really being the same thing.

Free Software programmers and inventors DO get paid. Maybe not always directly and almost never proportionally to their work’s installation numbers, but there are many other ways to earn a living from it, such as selling maintenance contracts, consultations, customizations, faster fixing of bugs, even getting discovered by an employer and getting a job offer. Other reasons why people do it is to get practice at certain types of applications/tools/languages/frameworks so you can find a new job, etc.

I see a problem not in hurting competition, but in competition with no price for work. It sounds like little bit unfair towards those, who earn money by this.

One of the biggest problems, to my mind, is that FOSS is following big software developers, but not leading, not innovating. Sure, there are some spheres, where FOSS leads without any problems (Apache, OpenSSL etc), but first it was just a replica of an idea, already implemented. So, it looks like opening another bakery on the same street and giving bread for free.

As I said before, I am not struggling against OpenSource, even more – I stand for it. But I have some doubts and thoughts on ideology and I am looking for clear vision, that nothing wrong with it from point of view of my moral principles.