I was reading an email message and someone suggested that "there is a tension building in society between a sort of hippie type common ownership and the non-feeling corporate profit machines." I thought it odd that they left out the OTHER community, which I'm a part of who as individuals or small non-faceless businesses have developed software or hardware products for which they seek to make a decent living. We are the alternative to the non-feeling corporate mega-profit machines.
The simple truth is that we've ALWAYS had quite a variety of "open source" readily available. Microsoft itself would have been SOL if Gates hadn't had access to the DECUS "tape" which had all sorts of development tools, including a BASIC interpreter, all available to most college students (including myself) for *FREE*. I myself learned a lot in school from code that was freely available. In fact the complete source code for the entire OS and development tools for the PDP-10/TOPS-10 were readily available to people like me. In fact, some of my code ended up on a DECUS tape because someone else started working on it and passed it on and finally submitted it for global distribution (a variation of the TECO text editor that supported just-in-time machine-code compilation of TECO macros, called XTEC). Believe me, there was quite a community back in the 1970's, well before the PC.
I have absolutely no objection to anyone else developing their own code and offering it up for free public consumption. I've always licensed the source code for my products, at a very nominal charge. But I do strenuously object if anyone starts insisting that all code should be free and that somehow selling code is inherently evil. And I further object to attempts by fanatics to try to force governments to use ONLY "open source" software. Whether in business or government, "TOTAL cost of ownership" should be the standard, not initial acquisition cost of the software. What I've seen some people trying to do in Washington and elsewhere is NOT what I would call an "open" approach.
Be clear... the members of this group are first and foremost entrepreneurs seeking to earn a profit. That said, I'm sure every one of us has benefited and even currently uses "open source" in some form. I don't think any of us in any way object to "open source" or community efforts to produce software, but when "open source" advocates cross the line and try to actively eliminate the market for profitably producing software, then that's a little bit too far.
The assertion of a connection between freedom of expression and sharing of ownership seems rather bizarre ("I think there is an underlying commonality between the freedom of expression and information that started blogs and the sharing of ownership of Open Source software"). Maybe someone could explain such a connection might be made. For myself, I feel that I have unlimited freedom of expression in terms of what software I can design and produce, so I fail to see why sharing the ownership of what I do would somehow increase in any way the degree of freedom to express myself. Sure, there may be a few odd patents or copyrighted works that I might stumble into along the way, but ALL patents and ALL copyrighted works can be worked around. Some of us come from a culture which believes that "Where there's a will, there's a way" and "Necessity is the mother of invention." Personally I think quite q good percentage of the so-called "open source movement" are simply too lazy or too improperly trained to try to really innovate and have fallen into a rather useless mode of merely copying the function of the work of others. Imagine if all the talent that's been squandered on Linux had instead been focused on doing something CREATIVE.
I do at least partially blame the schools for not training CS students to be creative. Maybe I was simply lucky to have some high-powered Bell Labs guys teaching graduate classes when I was in school.
Your so-called "tension building in society between a sort of hippie type common ownership" is more of a myth than a reality. MySQL is a very popular product and the company seeks very much to make a profit from it. Technically it's "open source", but the company insists that they "own the code". I met and talked with their CEO at a venture capital conference in Boston back in the Fall. They actually have some sort of hybrid, dual license. But the point is that they are a sterling model of how to get the TRUE benefit of open source (access to the code so that you can fix bugs and add your own extensions) coupled with a traditional profit motive.
Back to the myth... Yes, there is a vocal minority (including Lessig of Stanford and Felten of Princeton) who actively oppose intellectual property. I don't think I'd characterize either Lessig or Felten as a "hippie". And I wouldn't characterize their underlying motives as being community-oriented either. Amplifying something I mentioned earlier, there have ALWAYS been people doing software for other than a profit motive, long before cheap PCs and cheap development tools arrived on the scene. Be clear about something: There have always been Midnight Engineers, people who develop hardware and software without pay, and they've always had "The Freedom to Tinker" (regardless of what Felten claims). And then they decide whether they're going to think of it as merely a hobby and give their design away or seek to turn it into a business.
What I strenuously reject is this notion that seeking to make a profit from selling software is somehow evil and shameful and to be avoided like the plague. Is there some tension? Sure, but it's mostly the result of a vocal minority of grandstanding professors (and Richard Stallman who is probably simply annoyed that he's not a professor) seeking to get some attention for their pet projects. And at one point when I was in Washington I encountered some lobbying by Nader's organization. Yes, a little tension is there, but it hasn't risen to the level of "tension building in society".
And finally, in the "There's no free lunch" category, if something is "free", it only appears to be free and that's because somebody is subsidizing it, whether it be a hardware company (such as IBM) or some under-utilized software development talent. And whenever you see these types of economic dislocations, you seriously need to ask yourself "How am I ultimately paying for that which is offered as 'free'?".
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Updated: January 30, 2006 09:03:01 PM -0500
Copyright © 2005 John W. Krupansky d/b/a Base Technology