Free Software

"Free Software is a set of principles designed to protect the freedom of individuals to use computer software. It emerged in the 1980s against a backdrop of increasing restrictions on the use and production of software. Free Software can therefore be understood historically and ethically as the defence of freedom against a genuine threat."

- Rob Myers [1]

Definition

The term free software is defined by the Free Software Foundation at http://www.fsf.org/.

From the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software:

"Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. Freedom from such restrictions is central to the concept, with the opposite of free software being proprietary software (a distinction unrelated to whether a fee is charged). The usual way for software to be distributed as free software is for the software to be licensed to the recipient with a free software license (or be in the public domain), and the source code of the software to be made available (for a compiled language)." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software)

Description

Summary of the impact of Free and Open Source Software:

"The FOSS phenomenon is the subject of numerous political, economic, and sociological studies, all reacting to the potential for radical change it embodies. These studies focus mainly on four claims.

First, FOSS is a novel technology for producing software: it "represent[s] a new mode of production--commons-based peer production" (Benkler 2002) and is "a critique of existing laws, contracts, and business practices . . . [with] the potential to explicitly change the 'political-economic structure of society'" (Kelty 2002). Therefore, it is supported by new microeconomic, political, and personal dynamics that may shed light on other areas of economic productivity and modes of collaboration. This new mode of production serves as the basis for examinations of its historical antecedents, parallels from other (sub)cultures, and potential application to other domains of inquiry and cultural and scientific production (Ghosh 2005). The novelty of FOSS, for these investigations, is that it contrasts with the economies of exclusionary property relations, supported by weighty legal structures, that characterized the pre-existing software industry. From the perspective of software engineering, FOSS's proponents tout the superiority of its bazaar-like development model over the rigid cathedrals of proprietary software houses (Raymond 2000). Economists, in turn, are concerned with how this method of production functions, examining the personal motivations and microeconomics of its workforce (Lerner and Tirole 2001), and political scientists investigate the governance schemes that support successful FOSS projects (Weber 2004). Inevitably, some of these claims of novelty are also the subject of critique (Fitzgerald 2005; Glass 2005; Rusovan, Lawford, and Parnas 2005).

Second, FOSS provides a social good that proprietary software cannot; for example, FOSS may be the only viable source of software in developing nations, where programming talent is abundant but prices for proprietary software licenses are prohibitive. Countries such as China and India have seen in FOSS an opportunity to draw upon their wealth of programming talent to provide the technological infrastructure for their rapidly expanding economies. Microsoft's substantial investments in Indian education initiatives may be prompted by worries that free software might fill indigenous needs instead (Chandrasekhar 2002). FOSS has been cited by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a key element of achieving economic independence from the global North (Leonard 2006). At the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, the Youth Camp focused largely on FOSS issues (Juris 2005). This enthusiasm for FOSS extends to the industrialized First World as well, as many members of the European Union adopt it for governmental administration (Europa 2003).

Third, FOSS challenges many central concepts of intellectual property. Its novel copyright licensing schemes have prompted much debate about the foundations, both ethical and economic, of apparently well-established notions such as property and ownership (Dixon 2003; St. Laurent 2004). The emphasis on continual innovation—hailed as the key to FOSS's superior software engineering—puts it into direct conflict with the ideologies of patenting. FOSS forces debate on the distinction between ideas and their expressions that is fundamental to patent and copyright law (Davis et al. 1996; Swann and Turner 2004). Indeed, a new cottage industry of legal analysis and application has sprung up to deal with the questions evoked by FOSS's licensing schemes and its opposition to software patents. This is in no small part driven by corporate concern about whether FOSS can coexist with existing business practices.

Finally, FOSS is a threat to the corporate status quo. This facet of FOSS has been trumpeted vigorously by open source advocates, who argue that open source software is a new and better way of doing business: one that should, as a result of free market competition, supplant much (though not all) of the proprietarily-licensed source code produced and sold today (Dibona, Cooper, and Stone 2005; DiBona, Ockman, and Stone 1999; Raymond 2000). Such advocacy reflects a broader optimism about the ability of FOSS, with other novel modes of industrial organization, to subvert dominant industrial structures. Stakeholders in the status quo are demonstrably aware of this threat, as the leaked "Halloween Papers," revealing Microsoft's sense of the threat of free software, dramatically show (Raymond 1998). To most outsiders, the FOSS community seems remarkably hostile to proprietary software giants. But this adversarial position is fragmented: while some developers indeed hope fervently for the downfall of Microsoft, many seek only for it to show us the code." (http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~bcfoss/DL/DLintroduction.html)

Discussion

Richard Stallman on the difference between free software and Open Source Software

"Some of the proponents of “open source” considered it a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by citing practical benefits, while avoiding the [gratis interpretation and sidelining the ethics and social value of a free hacker culture]. Other proponents flatly rejected the free software movement's ethical and social values. Whichever their views, when campaigning for “open source” they did not cite or advocate those values. The term “open source” quickly became associated with the practice of citing only practical values, such as making powerful, reliable software. Most of the supporters of “open source” have come to it since then, and that practice is what they take it to mean.

Nearly all open source software is free software; the two terms describe almost the same category of software. But they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution." (http://communities.libre.org/philosophy/saylibre)

How is Free Software related to Open Source?, see at http://www.anat.org.au/stillopen/blog/2007/08/19/open-source-ideologies/

The term Open Source is defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Getting Paid for Free Software Development, some key distinctions

Stefan Merten proposes a research program on the influence of 'paid free software development':

"A useful survey needs to make sure that those projects are considered as much as the big ones are.

• Careful consideration of paid time

What people puzzles mostly is that there are Free Software developers which are paid by their companies for their development efforts. Or to be more exact: That they work for Free Software during their paid time. However, that people do something during their paid time does not say everything about the relation of their employers to what they do - think of coffee breaks for an example.

I think there are a number of types of Free Software development during paid time which needs to be distinguished:

• Non-official work

That is when people work on Free Software on their spare time without knowledge of the management. This can be the case when you use a certain Free tool during your job and improve it as a side effect to your normal work and give the improvements back to the community. This also applies to Free tools developed during a job.

• Half-official work

There may be times when people are not working on a job project because there is no order at the moment. In these times management may give people the opportunity to work at their own projects which may be Free Software. Google even has an official 20%(?) share of such time.

• Non-competitive work

If you work in the software sector then you know that often there are tools you use but which are not of competetive interest to you customer. For instance in a big company you may develop a Wiki engine for the Intranet but the core business of the company is in a totally different sector - such as finances for instance. In that case the management may allow that in-house development be public Free Software.

• Competitive work

This is the case when a company officially engages in a Free Software project because it has manifest interests in this project. For instance if a processor vendor engages in the Linux kernel to make it run on his processors. Then the employees not only officially work for the company in the Free Software project but also this is relevant to competition.

Only in the last case I see the danger of alienated influences from paid labor. And even then it should be distinguished whether these influences are more useful or more harmful for the community.

• Careful consideration of non-paid time

If develop Free Software during non-paid time then it seems to be clear that this must be based on Selbstentfaltung. However, there might be cases where people during their non-paid time they do things in the interest of commercial interests - be it in their own interest or in the interest of their company.

A useful survey must try to make a distinction here as well as it does for paid time.

• Different commercial interests

It would also be useful to distinguish between the source of commercial interests. Is it because a developer wants to learn something or her employer wants her to do so? Or is it because the developed Free Software should fulfill a mission critical commercial interest."

Key Books to Read

1. Decoding Liberation

More Information

See our entry on the Free Software Principles and visit the site of the Free Software Foundation

The vision of Oekonux on free software is here at http://www.oekonux.org/introduction/blotter/

Rob Myers keeps a directory of Free Software Applications at http://robmyers.org/wiki/index.php/Free_Software_Applications

David Wheeler maintains a reference page on Free Software and Open Source Software.