While readingRichard M. Stallman's Free Software, Free Society,
I paused to think about the number of times I have seen friends burn an
installation CD. On most of these occasions, a professor
required proprietary statistical software for a course he/she was
teaching and students responded by sharing the software.
What my friends did was illegal and they knew it was illegal when they did it.
I guess one could argue that the software companies weren't harmed.
After all, students become addicted to the software and(after
graduation)beg their employers to purchase licenses for it. Notice however that that argument is a justification for breaking the law.
If we loosely define anarchy
as "a state of lawlessness" or "non-recognition of authority and
order," then proprietary software fosters anarchy. Proprietary software breeds an environment, in which people do not feel
guilty about breaking the law. That's not a society that I want to live
in!
Fortunately, there is an alternative: Free Software.
In Stallman's formulation, "Free Software" is a matter of liberty, not
price. Think of "free" as in "free speech," not "free beer." Free
Software comes with four freedoms:
the freedom to run the program for any purpose
the freedom to study the source code and adapt it to your needs
the freedom to redistribute copies
the freedom to improve the program and release improvements to the public
To ensure that the software remains free, the GNU General Public License (GPL)
requires that -- if you distribute copies or modified versions of the
software -- you must pass along the same freedoms to the recipients of
the software.
For the freedom to study the source code to be meaningful however, you
must pass along the source code in order to pass along the
freedom.
Critics of the GPL object to passing along the source code. They
would prefer to keep the source code a secret and sell their own
modified versions for profit.
I have no objection to someone making a profit, but I do object to
someone violating license agreements. After all, if a proprietary
software company expects society to respect its license agreements,
then that proprietary software company must also respect the GPL.
More importantly however, there's a lot of money to be made by distributing Free Software. The GPL expressly encourages you to
sell the software for as much as they're willing to pay. In practice
however, the freedoms to use,
modify and distribute GPL software enforce competition in software
development and the competition drives the price of the software to
zero.
So how do Free Software developers make money?
Many developers make their money by selling
complementary goods: support, installations, customizations and
training. For examples, take a look at SourceForge's Marketplace or consider the fact that corporations write most of the code for GNU/Linux. They're not doing it for charity. They're doing it to sell product! I
won't argue that Free Software is more profitable than proprietary
software. All else equal, a monopoly provides a higher rate of return
to its shareholders than a firm in a competitive industry. Nonetheless,
one can make a profit by distributing Free Software. Finally,
there are very few things you can do with proprietary software that you
cannot do with free software. In fact, Free Software is often better
than proprietary software because so many people (and corporations)
contribute code to Free Software products and because the Free Software
market is so competitive.
In summary, Free Software fosters competition among software developers
(enabling us to create a high-tech future), it provides a return to
shareholders and it prevents our society from sliding into anarchy.