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Open Source and The Social Contract |
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Tuesday, 09 March 2004 |
Open source products like Linux, Apache, Perl, *BSD, and friends used to make the news as a competitve threat to the establishment. When Amazon saved millions or market share for Apache grew the media took notice. Recently, open source started making news for a new reason - open source as social engineering.
Not social engineering in the destructive social Darwinism or racist sense, but in the enabling way of the bill or rights. Understanding the difference is important. Both are forms of social control but the difference lies in your faith in humanity. Revoke rights if you lack faith in people and rely on rules to do the work. Grant rights if you have faith in people and let them make their own rules.
This commentary published by the BBC even goes as far to draw an analogy between the ColdWar and the Linux versus Microsoft battle. Probably a stretch, for one thing the Cold War centered around the threat of violence ("mutually assured destruction"). The open source movement is more akin to the passive resistance of Ghandi or Martin Luther King. In any case, the point is clear - more is at stake here than what operating system ships on the next computer you buy or how many millions Microsoft may or may not have funneled into SCO.
A lot of open source people like to talk about "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". For a long time, I struggled to understand the difference and why it is important, but I think I've finally got it (the FSF's philosophy page was helpful here). "As in beer" refers to price while as in speech refers to the recipe itself or the essence of the thing. Open source advocates, especially those that favor the GNU public license instead of the BSD license or perl artistic license, place the highest value on the "as in speech" component of a product. Giving away free AIDS drugs to African nations does good, giving away the research and processes to produce the drug does a lot of good.
This is where proprietary and open source software diverge philosophically - the conflict of duties to exploitation and innovation. Proprietary proponents believe secrecy and legal protections (in the form of patents and copyrights) are necessary to protect the ability to exploit intellectual property. Open source people prefer to rely on natural curiosity and necessity to foster creation and believe the benefits of sharing outweigh the incentives created by protection.
A recent commentary at OSDir discusses one way advantages of invention are conferred in a market economy - a commodity. Even the Wall Street Journal sees fit to publish a discussion of the balance of innovation and exploitation in software.
Benjamin Franklin would likely favor the open source perspective, and refused to patent any of his own inventions saying, "As we enjoy great advantages from inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
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