Why free software is bad

[Schol-R-LEA]

Actually, the dominance of English is primarily a reflection of the Anglo-American economic hegemony, though it really started the when the British Empire came to be the main trading and shipping partner of almost everyone in the world circa 1820-1890.

It is also a reflection on the fact that English is a hot mess of a language. No, this isn't a rant about 'worse is better' again; the relevance in this is that English, by starting out as an agglomeration of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, and medieval Danish (plus a dollop of Late Latin and sprinkles of Koine Greek and Classical Attic Greek for flavoring), basically got its speakers into the habit of stealing every other languages' vocabulary and grammar whenever they found it convenient to do so. Not even Japanese - which has a long history of taking loanwords from Chinese, Korean, and even Sanskrit, as well as Dutch and English more recently - is so swift to adopt other languages' words as English is.

The result is a massively sprawling and ugly language, but also a language that has shadings and nuances that most other languages can't even begin to approach - and while nuance is often a Bad Thing when clarity is paramount, it does make English hellaciously expressive.

For better or worse, we're stuck with it for now, especially perennial monoglots such as myself - I have tried to learn many other languages, but in the end I never had either the focus or the need to get very far with any of them.

[Rusky]

I wonder who made the FSF the authority to define terms on this subject in the first place...

For me, one of the essential freedoms in "free" software is the ability to use (parts of) that source code in a different project without being forced to bow to some wild requirements regarding how I may or may not licence my larger work.

I believe the FSF is the authority because they came up with the term. The movement was a reaction to fewer and fewer people releasing their code as public domain, and Stallman wanted to preserve a particular set of freedoms for end users, not necessarily developers. So saying the GPL takes away developer freedoms is perhaps missing the point- that was its goal in the first place.

I do think it's valuable to have infrastructure-level code be freely reusable without imposing licensing restrictions (and apparently the FSF agrees somewhat, as they wrote the LGPL), but I definitely appreciate a developer saying "if you want to use this code, you need to share what you do with it." That's not all that "wild" or unreasonable, especially if your goal is to create a fully open system and prevent, say, IBM from running off with it and competing with you without giving you anything in return.

I'm firmly in the same camp as Solar here. If the GPL makes software free at the cost of discouraging innovation, yet the ISC license, which minimizes legal boilerplate made unnecessary by several international treaties and encourages open use, reuse, and continuous development of software is considered non-free, then I don't think the people whose lawyers decided that was a fair proclamation should be allowed to define "free" for other people.

The FSF classifies ISC, CC0, etc. as "free," just not "copyleft." Further, the FSF's goal isn't to encourage innovation per se, but to preserve a particular set of freedoms. They'd be rather upset if the only people with the resources to innovate were all working on proprietary software, with the rest of us at their mercy. That's why they got started- we take for granted things like free toolchains today, but I'm not sure we'd have them without something like the FSF.

[Kazinsal]

The term "free software" was in use before GNU. Stallman and his followers redefined it as something that meets their goals and for some absurd reason people allowed it.

I would be satisfied with GNU swapping "free" for "libre" and giving the rest of us "free" back.

[onlyonemac]

freedoms for end users

One of the main ideas behind free software is "users are developers". Obviously most users never contribute anything, but the idea is to blur the lines between the "developers" and the "users" and remove the perception in the users' minds of an elite group of developers with one-way communication to the users, and many users do give back in some way whether it's filing a bug report, glancing over the source code to suggest where the bug may be located, submitting a patch to fix the bug, or becoming a regular developer for a project.

I would be satisfied with GNU swapping "free" for "libre" and giving the rest of us "free" back.

In general usage the term "libre" is gaining popularity for the exact reason of avoiding ambiguity but I guess it will be a while before GNU adopt it as they tend to be somewhat old-school when it comes to open source software (not a complaint; just an observation).

For the record, while I acknowledge that it may not be the most suitable licence for everything I do believe that the GPL is a valuable licence that has its place as it is often important to prevent commercial reuse of code in a way that puts the original developers at a disadvantage. For example, if you produce some code that a company decides to invest in, if you've used the GPL then that company will either have to release their modifications to your code (thereby allowing you to incorporate them yourself and benefit from them) or will contribute to your project directly (thereby allowing you to benefit from their modifications and possibly get paid to continue developing and/or manage the project on behalf of the company - if it's popular enough); if you've used a licence without this restriction then the company may well keep their modifications to your code to themselves, so your project won't benefit from their improvements and their project could easily overtake yours leaving you and your users to lose out (and you're not going to get paid to keep working on the project).

[Solar]

Actually, the dominance of English is primarily a reflection of the Anglo-American economic hegemony...

Actually, the dominance of English on the internet is primarily a reflection of 1) how primitive it is, and 2) that it was the language used by the builders of the first major telegraph networks, and by extension, 3) was the language used by the majority of people building the first computers. That's why telegraphs, and computers, have an easier time representing the rather primitive English (26 letters and you're done), compared to e.g. Chinese, Arabic, or Indian scripts (all of which have a comparative, or superior, number of people speaking the associated languages).

That most of the "big" internet portals are, and were, US-based also helped.

[Rusky]

I'd say the fact that English speakers were the ones who built the telegraph networks, the first computers, and the "big" internet portals is a pretty good indication of their economic hegemony. If those people spoke, say, Japanese, I'm sure they would have figured out a solution for the text encoding problem.

[embryo2]

Well, I know Greek (obviously, because I'm from Greece), and French (we learn it at school). Both of these languages, especially Greek, are by far superior to English.

French? How the word "Napoleon" can be translated?

Actually the school level of a language knowledge is usually too poor to make any decision like "it's superior to...".

And may be you can provide an example where english is too bad?

[alexfru]

Every language has its good and bad parts. When it's your native language, you don't notice the bad parts. When you learn a foreign language, you can clearly see them by comparison (either in that foreign language or in your own, the former being more likely because of the natural bias). I like Spanish a lot for its straightforward pronunciation (for the most part) and overall regularity (exceptions and irregularities do exist, obviously). However, it comes with many verb forms (AFAIR, ~100 for every verb), which take quite a bit of time and effort to master. And there's one other thing you may not realize. Words have very typical part-of-speech endings without much variation in some cases, e.g. infinitives always ending in -ar, -er and -ir. This regularity (and especially the lack of the ending vowels, which are preserved in Italian (not sure "preserved" is the right word, I'd need to familiarize myself with Latin to see if it's preservation or something else)) complicates rhyming. OTOH, English with its more chaotic nature and shorter words is just right for poetry and songs as you can almost always come up with a rhyme. And it uses less space and needs no diacritic marks (except when you want to be extravagant and write naïve and coöperate and maybe jalapeño). Of course, you have to pay for this "chaos" and deal with finer aspects of pronunciation.

[Kevin]

Every language has its good and bad parts.

I would call them more interesting and less interesting parts.

As for expressiveness, your native language is always the most expressive one... I don't think anyone who isn't natively bilingual can make a meaningful comparison in that respect (and even bilinguals usually have a stronger command of one language than of the other).

[glauxosdever]

Hi,

And may be you can provide an example where english is too bad?

Sure.

Let me say "read". Does this lone word mean anything? I read? You read? We read? They read? I/You/We/They read in the present, or in the past? In Greek, for example, for each one of these cases, there is one specific grammatic form which usually means something, even with no surrounding words.

I know you asked for one example, but there is more. Consider "relative". Is it relative (adj) as in relation to something? Is it relative (noun) as in member of family? Consider "free". Is it free (adj.) as in price? Is it free (adj.) as in freedom? Is it free (verb) as in to make someone free? In Greek for example each one of these translates to another word. Sure, sometimes the Greek language has such ambiguities too. But in that case you can just use another word (there are plenty of them), instead of spelling out what do you mean when you used the ambiguous word.

Also, in Greek a sentence can be spoken with many different word orders, which essentially changes where the focus of the sentence is.

PS: We need to split this topic.


Regards,
glauxosdever

[Schol-R-LEA]

Actually the school level of a language knowledge is usually too poor to make any decision like "it's superior to...".

Describing a real-world language as better or worse than another is a ridiculous notion, period. While I agree that English is (to use my earlier phrase) a hot mess, that doesn't make it better or worse than any other languages, just different.

[alexfru]

As for expressiveness, your native language is always the most expressive one... I don't think anyone who isn't natively bilingual can make a meaningful comparison in that respect (and even bilinguals usually have a stronger command of one language than of the other).

I think you don't have to have equal command of native and foreign languages. If you're sufficiently good at a foreign language and can appreciate its expressive forms, you should be able to make a meaningful comparison. It's somewhat like with music. You may not play any instrument yourself or you may play just a little, but you may "understand" (or rather feel) music and be able to compare genres, pieces and performances. Listeners are common people, non-musicians for the most part, right? You can develop a taste for new stuff. In my early days in the US I couldn't make much sense of stand-up shows. The language and the word play were simply beyond my abilities at the time. Fast forward to now. I'm still no comedian myself (never wanted to be one), but I do now understand and appreciate this form of art/entertainment and I have clear favorites. Heck, I even watched The Colbert Report for a couple of years regularly simply because it provided a dose of word play, while otherwise being a pretty silly and non-informative program. Stand-up in Russia was and is different, in part because Russian does not allow for the kind of word play as does English. So, while it's common to hear Russians say that the Russian language is "great and mighty" (often in the ultimate sense with all other languages being inferior), I must respectfully (or disrespectfully) disagree. I simply know enough English to know a tad better than those who perpetuate that belief. At the very least, there's more than one great and mighty language and English is one of them. But I digress. What do you think of this, I mean, if one can appreciate or understand stuff, can they not meaningfully compare its different manifestations without being pros at it at the same time?

[DavidCooper]

And may be you can provide an example where english is too bad?

Sure.

Let me say "read". Does this lone word mean anything? I read? You read? We read? They read? I/You/We/They read in the present, or in the past? In Greek, for example, for each one of these cases, there is one specific grammatic form which usually means something, even with no surrounding words.

A simple spelling change would fix that: iread, youread, weread, etc. - if we simply turn these into single words of two syllables each, the language is instantly "improved" (though it becomes harder to read). The endings that many languages have on verbs were independent words originally, but over time they typically developed into different sets of endings to tie in better with the sounds of the root word they're tagged onto. In some cases people may start using personal pronouns in addition to the endings, and then the endings can degrade and become ambiguous, to the point that the separate personal pronouns have to be used most of the time, and ultimately the original endings can disappear (which they have almost completely done in English). These changes may come about for a many reasons, such as a person of high status speaking in an unusual way which others then immitate to make themselves seem more grand, or it could be driven by poetry and song where artificial new forms can become established and popular.

What languages are all good at though is getting ideas across efficiently: if a language is too slow at communicating some kind of important idea, someone will soon innovate and create a fix for it which will spread widely and become a standard part of the language. It's the same with ambiguities: where there are difficulties in understanding things, new words are quickly invented to clarify things and they catch on because of their utility. Non-native speakers have more difficulty with ambiguous words because they don't know the rules as to which meanings need clarification in different contexts or types of phrase, and they miss all the subtle wording differences around the ambiguous word that native speakers use to flag up the differences.

Also, in Greek a sentence can be spoken with many different word orders, which essentially changes where the focus of the sentence is.

It can be done fine in English through stress, though that's not so easily to show in writing. The reality is that all natural languages have solved the problems they need to solve for the people who use them. There are some languages that don't have numbers, such as Piraha, but the people who speak that language (who are also known as Piraha: they live somewhere in the Amazon) didn't need numbers and had no drive to develop any. Now that they are interacting with the modern world and need to deal with things like money, so they are quickly taking on Portuguese numbers. If the Piraha language survives long enough into the future, these will likely evolve to become distinct Piraha words. Languages adapt to the speakers' needs and rapidly eliminate any deficiencies. It's hard to make up new words, so they generally borrow from other languages instead when another culture introduces them to some new kind of idea which is beyond the capabilities of their own language.

There are certainly some serious disadvantages associated with some languages, but it's rare for this to affect spoken communication. Chinese and Japanese are much harder to learn to read, and the dreadful spelling system used in English is extremely costly too, but that's not a defect in any of those languages: it's the writing systems that are to blame. Some languages are harder to learn than others because of the multitude of different forms of most words as they inflect in various ways, and that means some languages take ten times longer to learn than others if you want to speak them perfectly, though they aren't so much harder to learn to understand, which means children aren't at any great disadvantage: it just takes them a bit longer to get on top of all the word endings when they're speaking.

Are some languages more efficient than others though? Well, some use twice as many syllables as others to get the same amount of information across, but people simply speak twice as fast, going at the speed their brain can translate their thoughts into words (or the speed which other people can interpret them). The loss in clarity that comes from gabbling fast is cancelled out by the extra information stuffed into all those extra syllables which gives the listener multiple ways of identifying each word.

In short, natural languages are all good at the task they're used for in the societies where they evolved, and whenever new ideas are hard to handle, languages soon adapt to be able to cope with them efficiently.

[jojo]

A simple spelling change would fix that: iread, youread, weread, et

He meant the ambiguity between 'read' past and present tense.

[DavidCooper]

A simple spelling change would fix that: iread, youread, weread, et

He meant the ambiguity between 'read' past and present tense.

Look back at the context and you'll find that you're wrong. But if you want to call attention to the ambiguity with the tense, it's not an ambiguity in speech but merely one of writing. (That leads on to other ambiguities, of course, with "red" and "reed", but they're different kinds of words which rarely lead to confusion: "the book was red" tells of its colour, while "the book has been read" is the construction used when discussing whether anyone has read it.)