If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

Powerful, Reliable
software Can Be Bad

The idea that we want software to be powerful and reliable comes from the supposition that the software is designed to serve its users. If it is powerful and reliable, that means it serves them better.

But software can only be said to serve its users if it respects their freedom. What if the software is designed to put chains on its users? Then powerfulness only means the chains are more constricting, and reliability that they are harder to remove. Malicious features, such as spying on the users, restricting the users, back doors, and imposed upgrades are common in proprietary software, and some open source supporters want to do likewise.

Under the pressure of the movie and record companies, software for individuals to use is increasingly designed specifically to restrict them. This malicious feature is known as DRM, or Digital Restrictions Management (see Defec- tiveByDesign.org), and it is the antithesis in spirit of the freedom that free software aims to provide. And not just in spirit: since the goal of DRM is to trample your freedom, DRM developers try to make it difficult, impossible, or even illegal for you to change the software that implements the DRM.

Yet some open source supporters have proposed “open source DRM” software. Their idea is that by publishing the source code of programs designed to restrict your access to encrypted media, and allowing others to change it, they will produce more powerful and reliable software for restricting users like you. Then it will be delivered to you in devices that do not allow you to change it.

This software might be “open source,” and use the open source development model; but it won’t be free software, since it won’t respect the freedom of the users that actually run it. If the open source development model succeeds in making this software more powerful and reliable for restricting you, that will make it even worse.

fear of freedom

The main initial motivation for the term

software can only
be said to serve
its users if it respects
their freedom.

“open source software” is that the ethical ideas of “free software” make some people uneasy. That’s true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might prefer to ignore, such as whether their conduct is ethical. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may simply close their minds to it. It does not follow that we ought to stop talking about these things.

However, that is what the leaders of “open source” decided to do. They figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom, and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to “sell” the software more effectively to certain users, especially businesses.

This approach has proved effective, in its own terms. The rhetoric of open source has convinced many businesses and individuals to use, and even develop, free software, which has extended our community—but only at the superficial, practical level. The philosophy of open source, with its purely practical values, impedes understanding of the deeper ideas of free software; it brings many people into our community, but does not teach them to defend it. That is good, as far as it goes, but it is not enough to make freedom secure. Attracting users to free software takes them just part of the way to becoming defenders of their own freedom.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, some even offering copies gratis. Why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, to value freedom as such rather than the technical and practical convenience of specific free software. To spread this idea, we

have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the “keep quiet” approach to business can be useful for the community, but it is dangerous if it becomes so common that the love of freedom comes to seem like an eccentricity.

That dangerous situation is exactly what we have. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom—usually because they seek to be more acceptable to business. Software distributors especially show this pattern. Nearly all GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backward from freedom.

Proprietary add-on software and partially non-free GNU/Linux distributions find fertile ground because most of our community does not insist on freedom with its software. This is no coincidence. Most GNU/Linux users were introduced to the system by “open source” discussion, which doesn’t say freedom is a goal. The practices that don’t uphold freedom and the words that don’t talk about freedom go hand in hand, each promoting the other. To overcome this tendency, we need more, not less, talk about freedom.

Conclusion

As the advocates of open source draw new users into our community, we free software activists must work even more to bring the issue of freedom to those new users’ attention. We have to say, “It’s free software and it gives you freedom!”—more and louder than ever. Every time you say “free software” rather than “open source,” you help our campaign.

 

Further Reading

1. Joe barr wrote an article called “Live and Let License”

(see http://www.itworld.com/LWD010523vcontrol4) that gives his perspective on this issue.

2. Lakhani and Wolf’s paper on the motivation of free software developers (see http://freesoftware.mit.edu/ papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf) states that a considerable fraction are motivated by the view that software should be free. this was despite the fact they surveyed the developers on sourceforge, a site that does not support the view that this is an ethical issue.

 

Richard Stallman ( rms@gnu.org) is the author of the free symbolic debugger gDb, the founder the project to develop the free gnu operating system, and the founder of the free software foundation.

copyright © 2009 richard stallman Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.