In the United States we’re enjoy our hot dogs, beers and fireworks over this weekend, but take a moment to think about open source software. Admittedly in my case doing so will be due to poor life/work separation skills, but there’s a much better reason. Remember that the “4th of July” is officially “Independence Day” and a celebration of Freedom, which, too, is at the root of open source software.
Celebrating Free(not as in beer)dom
Lawyers and pragmatists will tell you that open source software is simply software with a particular type of license. True, but the license came about as a means, not the end. Richard Stallman, the open source founding father (with support from attorney Eben Moglen), cleverly conceived of the GPL license as a way to subvert the tyranny of those who would license software under proprietary licenses and thus take away the freedoms Stallman believed were inherent in software.
Furthering the parallel to the birth of our nation, you will hear the GPL license referred to as “the de facto Constitution for the Free Software movement.” The Free Software Foundation, modern day dumpers of metaphorical tea in Boston Harbor (albeit without the native American garb) says, “‘Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price.”
Stallman started his software career at the MIT Media Lab and grew up at a time when freely sharing software was the norm. What really torqued him off was when the EMACS (still an extremely popular text editor) code he’d written ended up under a commercial license from a company called UniPress. His genius was in turning the “suits’” (i.e. corporate types who commercialized softare) legal weapons back on them and creating a license that would preserve what the free software types refer to as the “four freedoms.”
The Four Freedoms
They are, of course, numbered 0-3:
(o) The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
(1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
(2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
(3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.
Free software purists are against commercial proprietary licenses. While truly appreciating from whence they come, my perspective is that authors of software should have the freedom to decide how their software will and will not be used. You want your software to be perpetually open? Great, a license from the GPL family is a terrific mechanism for ensuring that. If you want to eliminate any impediments to usage of your code, use a permissive-style license.
We have a market of consumers out there free to decide amongst the melting pot of software options. They should use open source components that fit their needs from a variety of perspectives: function, security, community, etc) as well as licensing. (And they need to closely manage all of this, but that’s a story for a work day.)
On the 4th, keep your hands off the keyboard, but as you are sipping a free beer, take a moment remember the roots of Independence Day and raise your glass to celebrating free(not as in beer)dom.
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