A few weeks ago I went to see a talk by Richard Stallman on “The Free Software movement in Ethics and Practice.” Stallman based his talk on what he calls the four freedoms of software. Here’s a summary (from Wikipedia).
- Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
- Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
- Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
- Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
As the talk progressed, it became increasingly obvious how outdated the premises of his philosophy are. His ideas were formed in the early 1980s, they come from a world where software was run on a single computer, deriving its value from its own hardware and data. They come from a world without internet. The idea that control of source = control of program simply isn’t true anymore.
An Illustration: Facebook is not a bunch of code. It is a community built on top of a bunch of code. Facebook could be completely “free software” and it wouldn’t make a smidgen of difference to my freedoms. Perhaps I should clarify that I am arguing that the value of the program is the value of the software as you may want to use it - the value of the program ‘facebook’ is the value I currently receive by visiting www.facebook.com. Its source code just happens to be its only readily redistributable component. For the sake of argument, suppose I download the server software and get it running.
- I would not have freedom 0: I could not run the program for any purpose. For example, I couldn’t run it to send my friends messages. Because I would have no friends.
- I would not have freedom 1. I could study the program, but I couldn’t modify it. No amount of tinkering with my personal copy of the facebook server software will affect the official one. So I’ll still have to use the official one because all my friends are on it.
- I would not have freedom 2. I could give my neighbour a copy of the software, but it would be equally useless to them.
- I would not have freedom 3. I could improve my deployment but it wouldn’t help the facebook community at all.
The idea that a user should be able to modify any piece of their computing environment is based upon a fundamental oversight: Stallman doesn’t realize that the value created between devices now far surpasses the value inside any device. People generate value. That’s why nobody has tried to pirate Twitter.
As cloud computing increasingly becomes the norm, the principles of The Free Software Movement will continue to fade into anachronism.
This leads into a different discussion about business models for software, Open Source and pirating. I’ll leave that for another post.
One last clarification: I think Open Source is here to stay. Open Source is great. Like Stallman, I draw a clear distinction between Open Source and “free software” based on the principles of The Free Software Movement. The former is a development strategy. “Free software” is an obsolete philosophy.
4 Comments
While I agree with you in principle, consider wordpress, its value is not derived from community, and we (both you and I) build our blogs on it.
Is this post not more valuable now that you’ve commented? I hope you think you’ve added something
Blogs almost by definition derive their particular value from community interaction and sharing - otherwise they would just be personal journaling.
But maybe a better example would be a computer game with little online component, like World of Goo. Almost all it’s value is ‘instrict’ (and so it was pirated like mad).
But the point I was trying to make is that Stallman advocates a world where ALL software is ‘free’ (according to his freedoms) and that is impossible. It’s a quantifying question: I’m arguing that not *all* software can be ‘free’, not that ’some’ software can be free. There exists ‘free’ software. But it’s not social.
playing devil´s advocate, i would say that calling free software an “obsolete philosophy” might be going a bit too far.
you contend that the communal nature of software like facebook precludes you from making private modifications, but that need not be the case. one could imagine providing an infrastructure for the implementation and deployment of private facebook plugins, or even a per-session instantiation of private facebook binaries based on user login preferences. inter-version compatibility would of course be an issue, but the onus there would mostly fall upon you convincing your friends to adopt your changes (note that they would not have to abandon the central facebook deployment to do this though).
of course it´s not clear that such a plugin/private binary approach would allow you to implement any and all changes you could imagine (e.g., a nifty “annihilate” button to permanently destroy other users´ accounts), and your changes may require the consent of the community before they are adopted, but your freedoms need not be entirely annulled. perhaps with communal applications the flavor of free software must change from one of anarchy to democracy.
but you´re probably planning to address all this in the next post anyhow…
Jake, nice to hear from you! And you make a good point. You clarified what I was trying to get at with the ‘annihilate’ button example, it really is the communal data that is generating the value in these social applications, and it is the integrity of that data that needs to be protected. Perhaps the access to data could be governed freely and democratically - I suppose it doesn’t even need to be centralized - but it would still need some sort of control. This is to say I couldn’t do whatever I pleased ‘freely’. But you put it well, maybe it must change from anarchy to democracy, though it does sound a bit more like communism (in the best sense
)
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