Economists often joke that they spend their time trying to understand a “miserable science.” And who can argue that it isn’t miserable that firms can’t do things like reduce pollution emissions unless there is sufficient economic incentive? Surely the CEO of an energy company would rather be helping rather than hurting the environment, it’s their air too after all. But the CEO knows that everybody else in the industry is playing by the rules of game theory and that if his/her firm spends the money for cleaner air, they won’t survive in today’s market driven by cost cutting and profit seeking. Capitalism seems to inhibit good will in almost all cases except one, open source and free software.
Richard Stallman was the maverick who back in 1984, went against the grain of economic incentive with his use of the General Public License or GPL. By ensuring that information and programs would be available to all without any profit seekers attempting to exclude any users through prices or any other means he laid the foundation for open source and free software. The notion that an almost entirely decentralized process of production fueled by goodwill can be so successful against more traditional production models is surprising, but entirely true. The whole network isn’t small either, 70% of web server software relies on the free Apache Web server software. Clearly free software cultivates superior products and services in the case of computer usage, but why is that? And why does it work?
Open source software is a honed factory for revised and refined programs. This model based on “small incremental improvements to a project by widely dispersed people” has the edge over any centralized program production because there are almost no constraints for how many times a product can be revised. Even if the revisions are small or even take a step backwards, on the whole the product turns out better because of the mass participation by programmers who have a genuine interest in improving the world of computing as discussed on page 2 of Yochai Benkler’s in depth look at social production. The motivations for contributing to open source software are practical ones, but not so much principled ones.
Fundamentally, open source software and free software aim to do the same thing. However if the motivations for contributing fall into the latter category of the afore mentioned reasons, then the contributions support the free software movement. This movement supports the betterment and free use of software because it would be socially wrong to withhold this from some or all of the public. There are a number of debates about which movement is better for computer usage, but both movements are aimed in the same direction. In fact open source software was developed in response to free software to clear up the ambiguous term “free” and to objectify the goals of more democratic program development. Open source software distanced only later itself from free software because as an ESR official put it in an interview in 1998, “in the battle we are fighting now, ideology is just a handicap. We need to be making arguments based on economics and development processes and expected return.”(Salon.com)
While proponents of free software and open source software argue over the benefits of more pragmatic or more social foundations for their movements, both are having positive effects on the media world. Somehow these decentralized and highly democratic production models are thriving in a world of capitalism, and that is the overlying good of both open source and free software.
Outside sources consulted:
http://cs-exhibitions.uni-klu.ac.at/index.php?id=224
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