The GPL As Collective Action

Programmers, like many groups of subject experts, are widely afflicted by the -belief that all other fields of expertise can be reduced to a special case of -programming expertise. For a great example of this, watch programmers argue -about law (which can obviously be reduced to a rules -system, which is a programming problem), -consent -(which is obviously about non-repudiatable proofs, which are a programming -problem), or art (which is obviously -reducible to simple but large automata). One key symptom of this social pattern -is a disregard for outside expertise and outside bodies of knowledge.

I believe this habit may have bitten Stallman.

The GNU Public License presents a simple, legally enforceable offer: in return -for granting the right to distribute the licensed work and its derivatives, the -GPL demands that derivative works also be released under the GPL. The intent, -as derived from -Stallman’s commentaries -on the GPL and on the social systems around software, is that people who use -information systems should, morally and legally, be entitled to the tools to -understand what the system will do and why, and to make changes to those tools -as they see fit.

This is a form of collective action, as implemented by someone who thinks of -unions and organized labour as something that software could do better. The -usual lens for critique of the GPL is that GPL’d software cannot be used in -non-GPL systems (which is increasingly true, as the Free Software Foundation -catches up with the “as a Service” model of software deliver) by developers, -but I think there’s a more interesting angle on it as an attempt to apply the -collective bargaining power of programmers as a class to extracting a -concession from managerial -- business and government -- interests, instead. In -that reading, the GPL demands that managerial interests in software avoid -behaviours that would be bad for programmers (framed as “users”, as above) as a -condition of benefitting from the labour of those programmers.

Sadly, Stallman is not a labour historian or a union organizer. He’s a public -speaker and a programmer. By attempting to reinvent collective action from -first principles, and by treating collective action as a special case of -software development, the GPL acts to divide programmers from non-programming -computer users, and to weaken the collective position of programmers vis-à-vis -managerial interests. The rise of “merit”-based open source licenses, such as -the MIT license (which I use heavily, but advisedly), and the increasing -pervasiveness of the Github Resume, are both simple consequences of this -mistake.

I’m pro-organized-labour, and largely pro-union. The only thing worse than -having two competing powerful interests in the room is having only one powerful -interest in the room. The GPL should be part of any historical case study for -the unionization of programmers, since it captures so much of what we do wrong.

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