Code vs. Content: Using/Revising Form vs. Using/Revising Findings

Richard Poynder has done another penetrating and informative interview -- this time of Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation, and Copyleft.

Richard Stallman is a remarkable person and has made and continues to make invaluable contributions to freeing software to be creatively developed and used without proprietary restrictions.

It is important to understand what it is that Stallman stands for, in order to see that it is not the same thing as Open Access (OA) (although of course it is fully compatible with and in harmony with OA):

What Stallman means by "free" is free to use, develop and distribute. His main target is software code (though he has a more general view about all forms of property). Stallman opposes anything that prevents software from being further developed, improved upon, and distributed. (N.B. He does not oppose the selling of software; he opposes the hiding of the code, and the outlawing of its re-use and revision.)

Please note, though, that he states very clearly in the Interview that he understands that scholarly/scientific articles are not like computer code, meant to be modified and redistributed by others. This is a profound and fundamental difference, and if you don't grasp it, you invite all kinds of confusion and misunderstanding:

The right analogy between research findings and software is at the level of the content of the research findings, not the form (i.e., not the code, not the text). The text is proprietary, but the content is for everyone's use, and re-use (with proper citation to the source). Software code, in contrast, has no content. It is the code itself that Stallman is talking about modifying and redistributing.

The one small point of commonality (as opposed to mere analogy, at the content level) is the question of mirroring rights for OA texts: Stallman thinks it is not enough to put OA content in one's own IR; he thinks you have to make sure to formally grant explicit mirroring (and, presumably, caching and harvesting) rights with it too.

I don't agree with Stallman on this one tiny point; I think all the rest of the uses pretty much come with the web/OA territory right now; I'll start worrying about it if/when google ever needs a license to harvest freely accessible web content. Right now, too much OA content is still missing, and worries about having to renegotiate rights are part of what keeps it missing. So let's forget about that for now.

The disanalogy between the OA movement and the Free Software movement is, of course, that whereas the publisher charging for access to the text is fine, the author also wants to provide toll-free access to his own final draft, in order to maximize its usage and impact: The authors of peer-reviewed journal articles are not interested in royalty revenue (whereas some authors of software code might be) because any toll-barrier at all preventing a would-be user from having access to their work costs the author in terms of lost research impact, research progress, and even further research grant income and other possible rewards.

I think this disanalogy is easy to understand, but it too needs to be made and kept quite explicit in everyone's mind.

I close with just a logical point on the question of "free" in the sense of free-of-charge and "free" in the GNU sense of free-to-revise/redistribute: Is it not a bug if a hacker (i.e., a programmer, in Stallman's good sense, the original meaning of "hacker") can write software code, sell it (in the hope of making an honest living), but the very first customer who buys it can make a trivial revision (or none at all) and then give the code away to one and all (or even make a tiny improvement, relative to the total work that went into the original) and start selling it at a competing cut-rate price?

I just pose this as a kind of koan for the putative free/free distinction (I'm sure others have thought of it too, and there may even be an answer, but I cannot intuit it offhand); and if the distinction does not survive it, then what has to go: the freedom to sell or the freedom to revise/redistribute?

I ask this only in a spirit of genuine puzzlement, because I really admire what Richard Stallman advocates and stands for.

One could also ask whether Richard Stallman's sense of "freedom" really scales up, beyond software, to all forms of human product, as he seems to believe. How many people could earn an honest living from their creative work that way?

Eprints of course has been GNU Eprints from the outset.

Richard Stallman AmSci Postings:

Re: Garfield: "Acknowledged Self-Archiving is Not Prior Publication"
(Tue Sep 10 2002 - 00:34:39 BST)

Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
(Tue Jul 23 2002 - 05:01:11 BST)

Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
(Sun Jul 21 2002 - 21:15:17 BST)

Re: Ingenta to offer OAI eprint service
(Sat Jul 20 2002 - 01:35:08 BST)

Re: Association for Computer Machinery Copyright/Self-Archiving Policy
(Tue Mar 19 2002 - 08:43:38 GMT)

Re: Copyright FAQ for refereed journal authors
(Fri Oct 15 1999 - 21:59:43 BST)

Re: Copyright FAQ for refereed journal authors
(Thu Oct 14 1999 - 16:44:57 BST)

(See also replies, and google search "amsci stallman")

Stevan Harnad