A brief notice: I am a huge fan of free (as in speech) software. Don’t hang me without reading this – all of this.
On the GNU Foundation’s website is an article by Richard Stallman, one of the open source movement’s more vocal celebrities, entitled Why Software Should Not Have Owners.
Stallman became somewhat of an MVP by being well-heard. His voice was one of the major so-called war drums in the movement against proprietary software, but has now become an obvious target for naysayers, due to his tendency to embellish arguments with somewhat melodramatic language. Examples are found all over the aforementioned article, including:
It’s elementary that laws don’t decide right and wrong. Every American should know that, in the 1950s, it was against the law in many states for a black person to sit in the front of a bus; but only racists would say sitting there was wrong.
I find this comparison – open source opponents v. racists – unnecessary. I believe it actually hurts our case, as it is no secret that those who lack logos tend to go for pathos. In Stallman’s soap-box moment, the attempt at pathos can quickly turn to bathos (For those of you who have forgotten English 102, bathos is, in Twitter form, drama turned humorous or ridiculous due to overstatement or hyperbole).
I believe software should have owners. I believe Stallman’s argument, the views of most proponents of the open source movement, and the opinions of many proprietary pushers are incorrect. For those who have not yet gained the wisdom only discovered as a 19-year-old, the world is not black and white. Pagan religions teach this, Buddhism and Hinduism (and presumably Taoism et al., though I do not know for sure), Christianity, Islam, and Judaism… They all teach this. In fact, splitting such as this is associated with Borderline Personality Disorder.
Nor is software black and white. Some software should be open source. Most of the software available today should be open source. Even in this case, however, software still has an owner: the users. Who owns the code? No one individual. But, as GNU says on most of its website, open source is about the community – society in general – maintaining their freedoms. The community is the owner. The software has entered the public domain. Similar to Mozart’s Requiem or any celebrity’s career, the world owns this software.
Sometimes, software should not be open to the public. I am an American and have been raised on laissez-faire, so forgive me. I believe competition is a good thing, because this is the mother of invention. We never would have achieved space exploration (or at least, it would have gone much more slowly) had we lacked the desire to pioneer. If every software company has the same code, there will be no difference. Sure, they will contribute to a massive group project, but there will be no drive behind it. There will be no motivation to push out new updates. There will be no competition.
Some great innovations and lessons can be found within the software cracking community. Many individuals endeavor to stroke their egos by being the first to provide a torrent to a cracked version of the latest PhotoShop. People stay up all night digging through pages of scribbling on DRM and checkpoints just to figure out how to get an iTunes purchase on more than a few computers. This is how some people learn: the kinesthetic challenge.
Maybe it could be different, though. Maybe someday, there will be a few forks of a dominant open source office suite. Maybe GIMP will be absolutely mind-blowing, Flash will be passe (web designers rejoice), and Adobe will die. Maybe the cracking method of education will be the task of improving algorithms in artificial intelligence or decrypting 64-bit encoding. Maybe every software developer will somehow manage to make a living off selling custom versions of their open programs, like Stallman claims to have done.
But maybe it should remain the way it is. I find the rants amusing.
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