On the ethics of Open Source / Free Software

[tractarian]

Is free and open-source software (FOSS) unjust?

A few other threads have questioned the morality of purchasing Windows and other Microsoft products, mainly from a pro-life angle (with smatterings of the usual Microsoft-bashing). Everywhere I look on the 'Net, proprietary software is on the defensive; the ethics of non-free, closed-source software is sometimes defended but always questioned. Meanwhile the morality of the Free and Open Source Software is never mentioned, except by proponents who equate their philosophy as the one an only ethical way of producing and distributing computer software, and all other models as falling short of their ideal.

Therefore, I find it important to redirect the question back at the philosophy underlying FOSS, not to be contrary (and certainly not because I’m a secret agent working for Microsoft!) but because I don’t see anyone else doing it. (I found one all too brief exception.) In next post I’ll lay out the blatantly Thomist foundation from which I am thinking, and in a third I’ll have some more concrete objections to the foundational ideas used to justify FOSS.

 

[tractarian]

My first starting point, universally ignored by everyone I have ever read or spoken to in the study of Computer Ethics but essential in Catholic ethics, is: consent, including mutual consent, is not the sole criterion for the morality of an act.

Secondly is a simple definition of justice, necessary to answer the question. Aquinas defined justice as steady and lasting willingness to give to others that which they are entitled to, his right (jus), that which rightfully belongs to him (ST II-II,58,A1). As such, the matter of justice is two or more persons, and external goods, each in their proper proportion (II,58, A8 and 10). Although as a virtue it resides in the will, not subject to anyone’s scrutiny but God’s, just and unjust acts nonetheless can be measured more objectively than any other virtue, because it is based on the movements of the will (actions) and not feelings (II-II,58,9). The particular act of justice is to render to each person that which is rightfully his own (II,58,11)

Specifically, commutative justice “as may be seen chiefly in selling and buying, where the notion of commutation is found primarily. Hence it is necessary to equalize thing with thing, so that the one person should pay back to the other just so much as he has become richer out of that which belonged to the other.” (II-II,61,2)

 

[tractarian]

Suppose Dave the developer produces a small but useful bit of software. He makes the binaries (useful.exe, installation files, etc.) and the source code files (from which any person can create the binaries themselves) freely available on his website, though he also offers to mail people a CD of the program for like $4. Bill the business man gets the software – he even forks over the $4 because he’s a nice guy – and the software is so useful to his business that it increases his profits by tens of thousands of dollars. Dave never complains.

Is this situation against commutative justice? There is real, tangible value in Dave’s work – the hours he spent producing the software, unpaid, and the value of the software itself, proven by Bill’s return-on-investment. (An investment that for most people would be $0 since paying for the CD was optional. Even if Dave required payment for a copy, it could be purchased once, and then Bill could legally offer all the source code for free on his own website, allowing everyone else in the world to get it for nothing. That sounds outrageous to people accustomed to proprietary software, but by definition, that is how FOSS is meant to work.) No matter how the value of the software and/or the work put into making it, that is value Dave will never see. Ergo, something rightfully his is not being rendered to him. Dave’s consent in the matter is irrelevant; suffering an injustice willingly (or in ignorance) doesn’t make it stop being an injustice.

 

[erbo]

Hence it is necessary to equalize thing with thing, so that the one person should pay back to the other just so much as he has become richer out of that which belonged to the other.

This is a topic I’m really interested in.

I do believe that FOSS is just, and I think your analysis fails to take voluntarism into account. The organizations that produce the free software are doing it voluntarily, not out of coercion. They wish for their software to be freely available (in binary and source form) such that others might use it. To me this seems no more unjust than a Catholic charity giving out “free” food to the poor.

Are there any other aspects of the argument that you would like to consider?

 

[tractarian]

Last of my “intro” posts before I leap into discussion.

The strictest (in terms of disallowing anything resembling proprietary software) of the Free and Open Source schools of thought, embodied by the GNU General Public License and championed by the Free Software Foundation, has as its starting point four essential freedoms that the software developer, and all subsequent distributors, must safeguard for the user (it makes no distinction between a user who is also a developer and a mere “end-user”, unlike Microsoft and many proprietary software companies who do make this distinction).

1. 
   *]The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
   *]The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
   *]The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
   *]The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
   
   (I notice that the term rights is never used, just “freedoms.”) By requiring these 4 freedoms to be irrevocable, one consequence is that Bill cannot acquire Dave’s source code, develop it further and then turn it into proprietary software; in arguments over FOSS it seems all agree that would be unjust, so I won’t consider that scenario.
   
   A lot of the theoretical discussion and practical legal matters have involved copyright law, which treat software (as source code and/or as 1s and 0s in a computer) as information, a technological extension of the printed word. Some legal matters have also dealt with patents, which treat software (as algorithms, the detailed set of steps performed by the software, regardless fo the actual source code or files on a computer) as inventions, a modern equivalent of the lightbulb or a new kind of bicycle seat.
   
   As an application developer, the second paradigm of software-as-tools makes more intuitive sense to me. I guess I view myself in the same genus as the guilds of artisans and craftsman of old. I make things the fact that the raw material I work with is abstract 1s and 0s instead of wood or metal shouldn’t make as much a difference as many suppose. The fact that it is relatively easy to copy and change those 1s and 0s (outside of the Star Trek universe we can’t yet replicate and reshape physical matter so easily) has legal implications, but if software is in the same ontological genus as a thermometer or an egg whisk, the same ethics should apply, right?
   
   1. 
      *]I cited a brief philosophy paper above that demolished this premise. If I claimed the freedom to use fertilizer for any purpose, no restrictions, then I could make a bomb out of it. Might be illegal to use the bomb, but by that principle it couldn’t be illegal for me to make one. Same principle would apply to the variety of legal household materials needed to make meth. This is the first example of “if it isn’t ethical for “real” things, it isn’t ethical for digital things.”
      *]One notable difference between my “digital things” and “real things” is that with the latter, there is no (or very little) separation between the source and the thing itself; if I buy a new Honda engine, I possess all the parts necessary to assemble a Honda engine. As far as I know, it isn’t considered illegal or unethical if I disassembled it, learned how it worked, and reassembled it differently to make it work a bit differently.
      *]This is the most obvious one. Robin Hood “redistributed” things so he could “help his neighbor”, but everyone recognized that helping has theft. If I made copies of the dollar bills in my wallet and redistributed them, it would be counterfeiting which is a 7th Commandment issue, and had I a Star Trek way to zap an exact copy of my Honda into being help my neighbor, the same moral issues would apply.
      *]Dealing with this one is what patents are for; it is a prudential judgement whether a modification is different enough from the original so as not to be making a profit from stealing the original design. This fourth “freedom”, however, assumes a priori that it is never stealing, no matter how much or little original work was done by the distributor (the third freedom already covers the case of zero modifications).

 

[praise_Jesus_1]

Some software code has to be open source… otherwise we wouldn’t have code examples to learn from.

Remember: a developer has the choice what license to issue their code under. If they want it to be free then let them have their way.

The issue I have with the “all open source is bad” view is that we could use some of these arguments and twist them around.

i.e. What if an author quotes what some person said at a public gathering? Do they have to pay the person who said those words? The author is using this quote as a premise for their book. And the author is making all this money off of the sales of the book which wouldn’t be possible unless this other person spoke those words.

 

[tractarian]

I think your analysis fails to take voluntarism into account. The organizations that produce the free software are doing it voluntarily, not out of coercion. They wish for their software to be freely available (in binary and source form) such that others might use it. To me this seems no more unjust than a Catholic charity giving out “free” food to the poor. Are there any other aspects of the argument that you would like to consider?

Indeed, volunteerism is the first counter-argument I expected, and one that I wasn’t sure how to answer.

For one thing, I am not attacking FOSS so it isn’t my object to refute defenses of it.
From my point of view, I see some problems with FOSS, and the burden of proof is to exonerate it.

Secondly and most especially, I am not contending that either any developers or distributors or users of FOSS are committing any formal injustice (any personal sin). I should have qualified what I said earlier about an injustice remaining so with or without consent with what the Summa discusses (II-II, 59, 3, ad 1) about whether it is even possible to “suffer an injustice willingly” – with the consent of the one deprived of something that is rightfully his, a material injustice is done but not a formal injustice.

I don’t see the two situations as being precisely equivalent. Acts of mercy and charity are obviously just acts (but even then there can be social considerations beyond a transaction between two individuals i.e. the oft-cited case of giving change to a known drug addict) whereas commutative justice in its most typical cases concern buying, selling, working and getting paid, fulfilling a contract’s agreement, and so on. There is nothing about act of giving food to the poor that could be construed as deserving external compensation, but the act of writing a program is not inherently charitable in at all the same way. Besides, much FOSS has commercial uses: Linux servers contribute to the productivity of for-profit companies and the value of those servers can be many thousands of dollars to the company, even if the vast majority of the source code of those servers is under a GPL license, making it likely that a large amount of that code was written by “volunteer” programmers in their spare time.

Compare the two statements: “I am willing to labor, heedless of receiving any compensation, that the poor may have food and clothing.” And “I am willing to labor, heedless of any compensation, that corporations may have larger profits because they didn’t need to pay for the products I helped create.”

 

[tractarian]

Some software code has to be open source… otherwise we wouldn’t have code examples to learn from.

I am all for as much code as possible being open source – that’s how I learn good coding too.

Remember: a developer has the choice what license to issue their code under. If they want it to be free then let them have their way.

True, but it is possible for a license to be defined poorly, illegal, or unjust; some types of licenses do get struck down in court for those reasons. I’ll hit upon FOSS as a potential social problem (not an individual sin on the part of any developer or user) in a minute.

The issue I have with the “all open source is bad” view

This last bit I take objection to because it seriously skews what I am trying to discuss. I have never, in my entire life, heard of a human being to held an “all open source is bad” view…and I have many colleagues who work at Microsoft. Not even Gates or Ballmer are ever that extreme (tho they’ve had choice words for some specific projects like GNU or Linux, which are not my topic either!) I have, however, encountered and read articles from many, many people who take the “if it’s not free and open source, it’s evil” view. I want to turn the tables a bit, because the ethics of proprietary / closed-source has been talked about ad nauseum, but I am not satisfied with always giving FOSS a free pass, as though its upstanding ethics were self-evident: it is far from self-evident to me, and I want to see it proven or demonstrated, not simply assumed.

 

[tractarian]

I’ve considered software-as-a-tool regarding patents, and critiquing the “Four Essential Freedoms” foundation of the free & open source philosophy. Tho I wish someone else would do a better job than me; I’m no whiz at thought experiments and I can’t be the only person who has tried some like those above. I mean, the GNU General Public License (and other licenses like it; GNU is the most “extreme” in its anti-proprietary methodology and the one with the most manifestos & essays written to defend its underlying philosophy) is this thing that has a significant economic and social impact on a lot of people, even though it “runs in the background” most of the time. And it happens to be based on a code of ethics as far as I can tell cooked up in the mind of one man, Richard Stallman, author of the License and most of those manifestos and essays. Are we all expected to greet his contribution to information technology with no reservations, no inquiries as to whether the philosophy behind FOSS is, y’know, true? Whether the four “freedoms” he insists upon do correspond to rights that, y’know, actually exist?

I am a Catholic, but the main reason I am posting these questions here and not on an IT-related forum is that our Catholic worldview is much more friendly to the idea that ethics and rights are real and not just the sum of what we decide they are. I was a big fan of GNU software, until I recently started reading the philosophy behind it (linked to in above post) and found that the Free Software Foundation’s (i.e. Stallman’s) assertions about what is and is not ethical have little or no bearing on any precedents in ethics, philosophy or even law: he started from a clean slate, invented his 4 freedoms, and proceeded from there. It’s entirely synthetic, and I mean that in the same sense that Modernist philosophy is synthetic, which is hardly a complement. Whether the free software school of thought was set up that way deliberately to invent a new ethos to replace the old (shouldn’t be surprising, coming from 1970s America) or simply out of ignorance of any traditional Western thinking about ethics of business, trade, property and creative works (also wouldn’t be surprising, coming from Computer Science / A.I. grad students at MIT) it should raise red flags against accepting the FSF’s ideals; it just may be that “free and open source software” is to computer ethics was the '60s revolution was and is to sexual ethics.

I can’t be the only guy in the world who would like to see this dissected according to some school of thought that existed before 1973 or whatever. Some postgraduate smarter than me has already thought through these issues, and there’s a philosophy or theology paper out there that earned him or her a M.A. or PhD. I already went looking for it on Google and came up with next to nothing. Maybe I need to learn how to do real university library research (something we were never taught and never needed while earning my B.S. in CompSci )

 

[flyingfish]

until I recently started reading the philosophy behind it (linked to in above post) and found that the Free Software Foundation’s (i.e. Stallman’s) assertions about what is and is not ethical have little or no bearing on any precedents in ethics, philosophy or even law: he started from a clean slate, invented his 4 freedoms, and proceeded from there. It’s entirely synthetic, and I mean that in the same sense that Modernist philosophy is synthetic, which is hardly a complement.

I don’t really understand why this bothers you so much. Why is it relevant whether or not there is a precedent in ethics for this? If there is a precedent, that just means someone else invented it out of thin air at some point in the past.

It’s not really surprising that there is no precedent for this, considering that this technology didn’t even exist in any meaningful way until then.

Maybe you can find similar ideas in the concept of libraries and learning. Take mathematics, or any science that’s been around for a while. When Newton invented calculus he didn’t put a copyright on it, but he could similarly say “look my methods are a tool, you better pay me every time you use them, and in fact I’m even going to hide how they work from you and you better not try to find out.”

Academics don’t work for free, they get a salary, but they don’t copyright and hide the contents of their ideas/methods.

What is so offensive to you about a philosophy of sharing knowledge, ideas, and algorithms free of charge? Is that why you wrote the OP, because you have personal objections to open source? I don’t understand your motivation.

 

[markomalley]

Is free and open-source software (FOSS) unjust?

A few other threads have questioned the morality of purchasing Windows and other Microsoft products, mainly from a pro-life angle (with smatterings of the usual Microsoft-bashing). Everywhere I look on the 'Net, proprietary software is on the defensive; the ethics of non-free, closed-source software is sometimes defended but always questioned. Meanwhile the morality of the Free and Open Source Software is never mentioned, except by proponents who equate their philosophy as the one an only ethical way of producing and distributing computer software, and all other models as falling short of their ideal.

Therefore, I find it important to redirect the question back at the philosophy underlying FOSS, not to be contrary (and certainly not because I’m a secret agent working for Microsoft!) but because I don’t see anyone else doing it. (I found one all too brief exception.) In next post I’ll lay out the blatantly Thomist foundation from which I am thinking, and in a third I’ll have some more concrete objections to the foundational ideas used to justify FOSS.

I like the idea of FOSS. By the way, you may wish to consider both Sun and IBM as big corporate supporters of the principle.

FOSS supports a distributionist economy, far more than the monopolistic Microsoft and Apple (Apple is 100 times worse than MS in this regard, by the way). Individual developers can build their product and try to sell the product or sell their services supporting that product. Thus it supports the social principles of subsidiarity and participation. Support for the concept thus supports the social principles of solidarity and the common good.

Just something to consider.

 

[praise_Jesus_1]

I must apologize about my comment, I was under the impression you held an “all open source is bad” opinion and I am mistaken so I offer my apologies.

As for the intricacies of the wording in the licensing… well I can’t offer much there as I’m not 100% with all the wording or implications.

I do like the idea of open source software though. And I’m happy Newton, Leibniz and all of our past mathematicians let us use their ‘tools’ for free.

 

[Greg27]

I don’t have much experience of computer ethics but I do have some knowlege of intellectual property and commercial law (in particular I have in my law degree done a course on patent law).

It seems to me people purveying open source software wish to give software products without requiring consideration (i.e. money) to be paid in exchange. In my view there is nothing wrong with this in the moral or legal sense since they are just making a donation or gift, the same as say, giving something to a church for free.

There would be a problem in my view if this involved infringing on a legitimate intellectual property right (such as copyright or a patent held over a software program, or copying a program illegitimately and then passing it on to third parties). As such this is a form of stealing and it would be a wrongful infringement on the rights of others. Courts quite regularly and rightly enforce copyrights and patents, which ensure those who make a living from developing the products protected by these rights to make a living. However these rights can be sometimes used unjustly or with unjust results, such as denying access to life-saving treatments to poor people (i.e. pharmacutical patents) who can’t afford medicines. But these problems should not be an excuse (which I often see reported in intellectual property case outcomes) that such rights in themselves are evil and people are free to disregard them and engage in piracy or rampant disregard for these rights.

An interesting documentary I saw highlighted the problems that arise when IP rights are disregarded. In the 1990’s in Asia and also in Eastern Europe, a massive criminal industry arose in counterfeit goods and software. This process extended to medicines and drugs, with tragic consequences, as innocent consumers in many countries died or were crippled from fake medicine or faulty consumer goods. It is for good reason that laws are in place regulating intellectual property and trade practices and the standards required in any product to be used in a practical manner. Without such laws, there is a risk of criminal or dodgy operators moving in to exploit the gullible, ignorant, and the weak.

In my understanding Christian moral theology teaches that contracts must be honoured strictly and in good faith, a principle reflected in the commercial law of many countries. There are some situations where contracts can be voided if it can be shown it was induced by duress, mistake or fraud, or there is an equitable ground (such as undue influence) that mandates a contract should not be enforced. In the realm of computer software, I don’t think it would be a good thing if the free donation of software undermined the livelihoods of computer programmers by lowering prices to an unfair level. Likewise, trade practice and commercial laws which madate certain standards in all products to protect the consumer need to be recognised and protected.

I think the sharing of knowledge is a good thing, but it must be respectful of the rule of law and also of ethical considerations, which I think have already been well addressed in the existing posts.

 

[tractarian]

I don’t really understand why this bothers you so much. Why is it relevant whether or not there is a precedent in ethics for this? If there is a precedent, that just means someone else invented it out of thin air at some point in the past.

I believe “there is nothing new under the sun” so in my book “there is no precedent for this” is another way of saying “this is complete bull****”. :nope:

It’s not really surprising that there is no precedent for this, considering that this technology didn’t even exist in any meaningful way until then.

So what? In law, in practice, people are treating software with existing precedents, they’re just doing it haphazardly with two different, possibly overlapping and sometimes contradictory precedents: either software is “information” liable to copyright (or not), or software is “invention” liable to patents (or not).

Maybe you can find similar ideas in the concept of libraries and learning. Take mathematics, or any science that’s been around for a while. When Newton invented calculus he didn’t put a copyright on it, but he could similarly say “look my methods are a tool, you better pay me every time you use them, and in fact I’m even going to hide how they work from you and you better not try to find out.”

As I said earlier, from my point of view as an actual software developer, I think I have more in common with a mechanical engineer than a scientist: at the most fundamental level, I build things. Other types of engineers have the right to protect their “inventions” so why should software developers be treated so differently? Because the things they/we build aren’t “made out of” physical materials? True, if software is “made of” anything at all it is information, the stuff of thought itself. But I don’t like the comparison to Newton; a real computer scientist can discover a new algorithm, publish it in a respectable journal and be treated like any other scientist, but that guy is light years away from a software developer; some developers will see that differently. I think I am stating the the case fairly.

Academics don’t work for free, they get a salary, but they don’t copyright and hide the contents of their ideas/methods.

Well there we go: not everyone with a college degree is an “academic”; some people get a degree in chemistry to be professors but most serve some industrial purpose. People recognize and respect that distinction in just about every professional field except Computer Science, and that frustrates me. (As you can probably tell!)

 

[tractarian]

FOSS supports a distributionist economy, far more than the monopolistic Microsoft and Apple (Apple is 100 times worse than MS in this regard, by the way). Individual developers can build their product and try to sell the product or sell their services supporting that product. Thus it supports the social principles of subsidiarity and participation. Support for the concept thus supports the social principles of solidarity and the common good.
Just something to consider.

Yes it is!
“Individual developers can build their product and try to sell the product or sell their services supporting the product” in both a FOSS or proprietary situation, so I’m afraid don’t see your point. It has been argued that individual developers can do it better with a proprietary model than open source alternatives, and counter-argued that open source is economically better (interesting that both leftists and capitalists have argued that open source is better for their preferred economic models…but that’s a whole 'nother can of worms), and I admit all those as prudential arguments not ethical ones, interesting as that argument is.

I don’t see how anything you said applied to Distributionism *more than *or ‘as opposed to’ Capitalism, but I do think you’re right on all points.

 

[flyingfish]

As I said earlier, from my point of view as an actual software developer, I think I have more in common with a mechanical engineer than a scientist: at the most fundamental level, I build things. Other types of engineers have the right to protect their “inventions” so why should software developers be treated so differently? Because the things they/we build aren’t “made out of” physical materials? True, if software is “made of” anything at all it is information, the stuff of thought itself. But I don’t like the comparison to Newton; a real computer scientist can discover a new algorithm, publish it in a respectable journal and be treated like any other scientist, but that guy is light years away from a software developer; some developers will see that differently. I think I am stating the the case fairly.

You were wondering about precedents, and before computer technology was developed the best comparisons to software were probably mathematical algorithms for solving some problem.

I don’t know if a comparison to mechanical engineers is a better one. If a mechanical engineer designs and builds a car, no one is going to call a criminal a guy who buys said car and takes it apart to see how it works, no one is going to call him a criminal if he decides to make cool looking additions/improvements to the car and then give/sell it to his buddy.

There isn’t really a very good analogy to copying a product of mechanical engineering and sharing it with your friend. I’ll admit I don’t know patent law, but if you invent some device (say a really fancy can opener), and then I decide to copy your idea, build a similar can opener an give it to my friend as a birthday present I don’t think I would be breaking any kind of law.

Well there we go: not everyone with a college degree is an “academic”; some people get a degree in chemistry to be professors but most serve some industrial purpose. People recognize and respect that distinction in just about every professional field except Computer Science, and that frustrates me. (As you can probably tell!)

Right, but I’m pointing out there is a way to reconcile what is presumably your desire to protect the salary of the software developer with people’s desire to modify/understand/share the software.

It doesn’t have to be seen as a product, you as a software developer can be hired to make software and paid for your work. If you will, people who need the software can collectively pitch in to pay you and your coworkers. But once the software you were hired to make is made, everyone can see the code, can learn how to program from seeing how it works, can make changes to it and so on.

 

[markomalley]

Yes it is!
“Individual developers can build their product and try to sell the product or sell their services supporting the product” in both a FOSS or proprietary situation, so I’m afraid don’t see your point. It has been argued that individual developers can do it better with a proprietary model than open source alternatives, and counter-argued that open source is economically better (interesting that both leftists and capitalists have argued that open source is better for their preferred economic models…but that’s a whole 'nother can of worms), and I admit all those as prudential arguments not ethical ones, interesting as that argument is.

I don’t see how anything you said applied to Distributionism *more than *or ‘as opposed to’ Capitalism, but I do think you’re right on all points.

Part of the open source model are open standards for interoperability. In addition, open source allows other developers to independently make improvements independently or to adapt the technology for other purposes. In addition, even with proprietary closed-source software, the existence of open standards allows for others to have a ‘good idea.’

For a really good example, consider ‘shapeware.’ Or consider CUSeeMe. The first was a really outstanding small-shop proprietary piece of software that was gobbled up by a giant (MS). The other was originally an open source video conferencing technology that was closed and then gobbled (by Cisco).

The one thing that open source requires is for the market to act ethically. That is somewhat problematic when much of the consumer base considers open source to be “money for nothing.” It’s also a problem, but not as big a one, when some folks use the forum as a mechanism to inject malware of various varieties.(Caveat emptor)

I never said anything about distributionism being opposed to or better than capitalism. I did say, FOSS supports a distributionist economy, far more than the monopolistic Microsoft and Apple. I don’t see distributionism as being opposed to capitalism; I see it as being opposed to monopoly. It’s small-shop capitalism.

The virtual monopolies exhibited by the few big software firms out there is what I am opposed to much moreso than whether software is proprietary or open. But the only real alternative in most cases (OS’s, office automation, db engines, etc.) is open source.

 

[tractarian]

My issues/concerns with FOSS boil down to this: the strongest arguments for it seem invalid unless one first accepts the idea that software (and/or digital media in general) is special and that special rules apply to it, never before seen in the history of mankind. I say that just because a thing has no technical precedent does not mean it has no precedent in ethics. I think I already stated the truism that just because copying and modifying software is much much easier than “copying” and modifying a physical device should, if ethics is placed above convenience, have no bearing whatsoever on whether or not doing so is moral. Does anyone disagree with that in principle? — had I some sci-fi ray gun that could make a copy of a car I just bought and give it to a friend, I think the car company would be within their rights to sue me or even get me sentenced for some crime.

I concede that the closest actual precedent for computing is mathematics; all the first computer scientists were actually mathematicians. So I may be wrong; maybe developers in the grand scheme of the universe are more like mathematicians or academics than they are like other craftsmen. That would mean a very sharp disconnect between my profession in theory and how I experience it on a day-to-day basis, but in that case I would, also, concede that as merely an oddity, not a philosophical dilemma (or at least not an ethical one). Perhaps in that case, I would be happier moving to a profession where I am allowed to call a spade a spade (maybe I’d be a gardener ).

The pragmatic reasons for free software and open source software (which are not always the same thing) are pretty good (thanks for clarifying the Distributist argument), but since I chose to approach this whole issue as a skeptic, I have no qualms about the idea that everybody may be jumping on the wrong bandwagon (I already agreed as much that the idea of applying the concept of copyright to software is the wrong track, despite all the case law devoted to it thus far).

An earlier post focussed in on GNU’s “Four Freedoms” as the particular source of my (so far unique) scruples about FOSS, and I’ve noticed so far most of the counter arguments are about Open Source but not FOSS. Perhaps that’s a good thing, and it means that Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation is the fringe extreme of what is actually in practice a more moderate school of thought regarding intellectual property.

The philosophy of FOSS teaches that software cannot have an owner any more than a math equation can have an owner. Read thru their philosophy articles for yourself, and you’ll notice how consistent their ethic is: anything that entails some social contract between developer and user or vice-versa is rejected, in the name of “social cohesion.”

Choosing to contribute to a FOSS project, or (to a lesser degree) to install & use free/open-source software, is more than just a decision about technology or economics: it is a decision to particpate in and further a certain ideology. I should think one must evaluate one’s own personal understanding and agreement/disagreement with that ideology before stepping off the cliff and participating in it. Am I off base here?

 

[tractarian]

Setting aside a $ value to the software itself, which is really subjective no matter if it’s proprietary or FOSS, there is still the labor involved in designing/coding/testing/debugging/releasing the software. Once again I’ll use an analogy from the more concrete non-digital world.

Suppose a visionary administrative assistant (hereafter AA) decided that there was something special and unique about the work she did, and that the previous norms of labor and employment were unsuitable for administrative assistants, and that their services must be entirely free. Doesn’t matter why; what matters is the course of action taken and its wider effects.

She starts a movement, many other AAs get onboard, and now a significant amount of the secretarial work being done is at no charge to the offices. It’s great for small businesses and startups who may’ve had trouble affording an AA’s salary, but big companies are doing it to (in fact by the numbers, even more Free AA is done at larger companies than at smaller ones or at non-profits).

There are still many AAs left who need to do their work for pay, not as an exciting hobby or only for the satisfaction of a job well done. They find work (most of them anyway) because the professional associations of AAs still have a great reputation, many aren’t aware of the availability of AAs, and other factors. But given already high unemployment rates, it remains a fact that every 40 hours of AA work that was done for free is filling up a week’s real job position, something some other AAs desperately need to make a living.

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This analogy is obviously imperfect (and a little silly; I originally wanted to use some kind of manufacturing job as my example, but manufacturing as a job market is already dried/drying up in America for other reasons) but I think it illustrates how free labor can be a social problem. Plenty of the free software has little or no commercial value, but a lot of it does, and that means that a consumer (individual or company) will pay to have that software made, at a rate determined by the market (note: the innards of Capitalism are also off-topic for this thread). If I am an application developer (and it just so happens that I am) and someone else performs work that I could have done, well it’s one thing if it is because he was hired and I wasn’t. But if the work was done as part of some free / open source project, that isn’t work going to a different developer, that is less work available for the entire pool of developers, see what I’m getting at? It artificially depresses the IT industry’s capacity to create jobs.

Both the Free Software Foundation, and some posters on this thread , have no objection to developers getting paid for their work in fact I’m pretty sure everyone is in favor of that. The situation *de facto *is still that a heckuva lot of development happens that could be paying that isn’t. Maybe that situation has benefits for society and even for the market that outweigh this kind of “labor deflation” (sorry I don’t know the real economics term for it).

 

[flyingfish]

Setting aside a $ value to the software itself, which is really subjective no matter if it’s proprietary or FOSS, there is still the labor involved in designing/coding/testing/debugging/releasing the software. Once again I’ll use an analogy from the more concrete non-digital world.

It’s all true, but I think that if you go that route you should also be prepared to allow scientists and mathematicians to own their discoveries. There is no less (and perhaps a lot more work) that goes into scientific research. And there is no question that Newton’s invention of calculus is far, far more valuable than any computer program, and if anyone should have been able to get filthy rich of intellectual work it was Newton.

Why do we say that software or design plans for a car are intellectual property, but general relativity or the big bang theory or the theory of genetics are not?

Why do you decide to draw an arbitrary line between what looks like science and what looks like engineering? Even if scientists discover things about the world (arguable if you can say that about mathematicians), their theories are still models for reality and are their creations just like your software is your creation or the plans for an airplane is the creation of the team of engineers that made them.

Intellectual property seems very problematic to me, because human intellectual effort is not done in a vacuum. Every engineer relies on countless scientists who developed the theories the engineer is applying, as a software developer you are relying on the work of countless other people who developed the languages, the styles of programming, the ways of thinking etc. Yes you do your independent work and contribute, but so do scientists, and no one allows them to copyright their research much less make it illegal to find out what their methods are.

I don’t think the Open Source people want you to work for free, at least as I understand it. It seems to be more about how the software is treated once you create it. It seems their issue is that you’re not allowed to the code for the software and to modify it yourself (as you would be able to with any scientific theory, say), that you’re not allowed to learn from it. That is one issue. The other issue is copying and sharing, which again can be resolved if the salary of the developer is not tied to the number of copies sold but if they are paid to create the software by those who need it. (Which is what happens in practice anyway, since the company you work for pays you a salary to work, but itself owns the thing you made and makes additional profit from it that you never see.)

Open source seems to be more of a philosophy for the kind of life we want to have as human beings. Should all human beings be able to access all human knowledge? Or should some knowledge be private, patented, and locked away from those unable to pay for it? This issue is much less cut and dry than what you might think. Last I heard, biotech companies were patenting gene sequences, so much so, that they have been trying to get researchers to pay them royalties for doing research with them. By the way, some of those gene sequences are in your body as far as I know. So in the future, if you decide to mess around with your own genes, are you going to pay some corporation fees because they own it?