Luis Villa’s Blog / freedom ‘for users’- which users did you mean, exactly? (or, of users, user-deployers, and user-consumers)

Description

“Free software… refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software…”

–Free Software Definition, emphasis mine
“closing the [ASP] loophole would infringe on certain peoples rights and he [Moglen] didn’t see any way to preserve everyone’s rights…”

– Eben Moglen, as paraphrased here [http://blog.snaplogic.org/?p=65]

[The rest of this post is not based on any conversations with FSF/SFLC folks on this issue, but merely on readings of essays/interviews/etc., and so their position here may represent a bit of a strawman. To the extent that the representation is inaccurate I apologize and will strive to fix it if someone points out the inaccuracies. That said, if it is a strawman, it is a useful strawman which helped me sort out my own thinking on the subject.]
who has the freedoms and the rights?


In one of my GPL posts [http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/06/26/gpl-v3-the-qa-part-1-the-license/], I mentioned that I thought that the question of ‘who holds the rights’ is a critical distinction between the ‘free’ and ‘open/pragmatic’ licensing camps. To the free camp, rights are held by users; and to the open/pragmatic camp, rights are held primarily by developers- who then grant most (but not necessarily all) rights to users. I thought I’d dig a bit more into that notion, particularly into the question of what a ‘user’ is in this day and age, because I think it helps explain the current dilemma around free software as deployed over the web.
who ‘users’ used to be
FSF has always insisted that “users” are the locus of all rights. In practice, to FSF, “users” has really meant “the people who install the software”- what I’ll call “user-deployers” or “deployers”, in comparison to “the people who use the software”- what I’ll call “user-consumers” or “consumers.”
In the beginning, this was not problematic- anyone who deployed free software also consumed it, so giving rights to all deployers also gave rights to all consumers.
As free software got more popular, this got a little more complicated- deployers were often systems administrators in an organization (who had full rights to modify the code) and the software was used by consumers in the same organization. These user-consumers were given the binaries but were not given enough permissions to install new versions of the binary, or access to source (though they could presumably obtain them for their personal, non-work PCs if they were skilled enough.) And so there was a gap between the rights of deployers (who could modify) and consumers (who could not)- a small gap, but a gap nonetheless.
In practice, this worked OK. The interests of user-deployers and user-consumers were not perfect aligned, but they were pretty close- deployers mostly wanted consumers to get things done and get out of the ...

Original URL

http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/08/07/freedom-for-users-which-users-did-you-mean-exactly-or-of-users-user-deployers-and-user-consumers/

http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/08/07/freedom-for-users-which-users-did-you-mean-exactly-or-of-users-user-deployers-and-user-consumers/