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-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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