by Bertrand Meyer
Note: This is the text of the article entitled “The Ethics of Free Software” printed in the March 2000 issue of
Software Development Magazine.
The movement in favor of free and open-source software has recently reached
a highly visible status, not only in the computer profession but in the
popular media, with mass-circulation magazines as widely available as Time
and Newsweek giving prominent coverage to such heroes of the movement as
Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds. Although comments on free
software in its various form have been overwhelmingly laudatory, little
attention has been made to justify this positive assessment and, more
generally, to explore seriously the associated ethical issues.
In this article I will try to correct this situation by taking a close look
at the moral issues raised by free and open-source software.
1. ABOUT ETHICS
It is useful first to define a basis for this discussion by recalling some
principles of ethics. I will stay away from controversial issues and focus
on generally recognized ideas.
- Ethics is about right and wrong. Human beings are equipped with an
ability, partly innate and partly acquired, to judge human actions as
morally good or bad. This does not mean that “right” and “wrong” mean
exactly the same for everyone, simply that everyone possesses a notion of
right and wrong.
- In spite of the diversity of moral views, ethics includes a universal
component. The differences are not only individual (my next-door neighbor
may find repellent a behavior which to me is perfectly acceptable) but also
cultural: for example in Western countries we find it normal that a woman
should show her face in public, a conduct that in some parts of the world is
considered immoral. But many principles are culture-independent. Killing an
innocent person, for example, is not morally acceptable, regardless of your
culture. This discussion will assume that there are a number of such moral
absolutes and will ignore more specific principles.
- Ethical rules may be rated as more or less important. Most people would
accept all of the following as consequences of moral imperatives: do not
litter a public park by disposing of a paper napkin on the lawn; if you are
sitting in a bus and see that an obviously tired elderly person cannot find
a seat, cede yours; do not steal from the corner grocery store; do not kill
the next person that you see walking peacefully down the street; do not send tanks,
troops and aviation to invade your
neighboring country. But some of these are more fundamental than others,
meaning in particular that corresponding violations are more repulsive than
others (perhaps, for these examples, in the order given).
- Human beings have both good and bad impulses. A society in which everyone
is evil all of the time would be impossible to manage; but in no society is
everyone good all the time.
- One should judge people on their actions. Intentions can sometimes provide
extenuating circumstances, but what counts is what people voluntarily do,
not the reason they have, or invoke, for doing it. Hell is paved with good
intentions. Aside from other reasons, limiting ourselves to judging deeds,
not thoughts, is easy to justify on purely pragmatic grounds: you can
observe my actions, or at least their results; you cannot tell whether my
excuses are real or imagined.
- Not causing unjustified loss of human life is one of the universal moral
imperatives.
- Not damaging someone else’s reputation through misrepresentation is
another.
- Not acquiring someone else’s legitimate property against his will is yet
another.
- Justly remunerating someone else’s services is related to the preceding
one.
The word “justly” makes the last principle perilous to apply in practice,
since fairness is a subjective concept. Since this discussion is only about
ethics, we cannot resolve the issue fully because this would involve
economics (in a market economy, fairness is a tradeoff between demand and
supply). You, my publisher, may offer me $100 for my latest novel, adding
that it’s really boring and you are doing me a favor, whereas I, having
spent five years on it and being convinced that the result
is—frankly—brilliant, scream that anything less than a million would be a
moral outrage. Ethics won’t bring a resolution here, only economics and the
strength of our respective negotiating positions. But if I accept your
proposal and the next day you sell the rights to Steven Spielberg for $10
million, many people will consider that you have done me wrong ethically.
An area perhaps more directly related to ethics than economics is the law.
In an ideal world, there might be perfect identity between the legal and the
moral. But not in the real world. What’s legal is not necessarily moral: it
is not very moral to say nasty things to your mother on her birthday, but
you’re not violating any laws. What’s moral is not necessarily legal: not so
long ago Southern US states forbade a white person from bringing a black
acquaintance into a “whites only” public place, contradicting the obvious
moral imperative that one should not discriminate against people because of
the color of their skin. It would be exaggerated and cynical to infer that
there is altogether no connection between ethics and the law; but at most
what the law will give us (even if we exclude obviously immoral laws like
the last one cited) is a general indication, rather than an absolute
criterion, of practices deemed socially desirable, partly for moral reasons
and partly for others.
2. ABOUT FREE SOFTWARE
Even among the proponents of Free and Open Source software the definition of
these terms is a constant source of controversy. For example the GNU project
(at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html) chides
Eric Raymond’s Open Source initiatives for attempting to trademark the term
“open source”. It also criticizes many providers of free software such as
Apple (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html), the Berkeley Unix
Software distribution (bsd.html in the same directory) and Netscape
(netscape.html) for not observing the exact GNU definition of “free”, or
using license terms different from those of GNU. It would thus be futile to
attempt to provide a comprehensive definition here. The scope of this
discussion is, however, clear. We are interested in software that:
- Is available from at least one source without payment (which does not
preclude other sources from offering it for payment, for example to people
who want a distribution on CD rather than downloaded, or require commercial
support).
- Can be used for commercial as well as not-for-profit development, even by
people who have not paid for it. (There may be some restrictions on
commercial uses, for example the requirement that additions to the free
software be free too.)
- Can be obtained in source code form.
Until it arrives at a more precise set of definitions (in section 3), this
discussion will use the term “free software” to denote products that satisfy
the properties listed above. Note that this is not the definition promoted
by the GNU project, which, as we will see, uses “free” in a much stronger
sense. The intent is not to fight over terminology, but simply to make do
with the limited number of terms in the English language. In addition, the
rapidly growing interest in “free” software extends to many products that
would not be considered free under the GNU definition, but fall well within
the one above.
The growth of free software has indeed been remarkable in the past few
years. One of the most visible results has been the Linux operating system,
developed under the leadership of Linus Torvald and nominally available at
no cost (although usually installed from a CD obtained, for a price, from a
commercial company). Other widely used free tools —- some having for-a-fee
variants too —- include the TEX and LATEX document processing utilities, a
quasi-standard for preparing theses in computer science departments; GCC,
the GNU project’s C and C++ compiler; Apache, the dominant Web server; the
FreeBSD operating system kernel, a Linux competitor; the EMACS and VIM text
editors. Through these and other products, the free software movement has
already established an indelible mark on the computer industry.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this movement is the world-wide
availability of often talented software developers willing to contribute
their time, energy and creativity to free software. It is this pool of
enthusiastic contributors, willing to work even without immediate monetary
reward, that has led in part to the general feeling of goodwill surrounding
the free software community.
It should be pointed out, however, that the existence of a community of
dedicated, well-intentioned and sincere defenders of a cause is unrelated to
the ethical value of that cause. As an example, one of the tragedies of the
twentieth centuries has been the diversion of the energy and passion of
countless honest and idealistic volunteers towards support for Soviet-style
communism, a regime that cause tens of millions of deaths, uncounted cases
of human misery, and the destruction of civil society in entire countries.
This example is obviously not a comparison with the free software community,
simply a reminder that no idea can be justified on the basis of the quality
of its supporters. The observation works the other way too: bad people can
defend good causes. A corrupt and dishonest politician may sincerely support
principles of democracy and freedom. His personal failings do not disqualify
the ideas of democracy and freedom any more than the Nazi regime’s
impressive building of autobahnen disqualifies the merits of freeways.
3. THE ECONOMICS OF FREE SOFTWARE
The term “free software” (with the earlier definition, implying availability
at no cost) is almost always a misnomer since software is produced by humans
and in modern societies no human can live without money; so even if no one
paid for the software someone must have paid the software developer. In
practice the only possible cases are the following:
- The software developer may have a personal fortune freeing him from the
monetary concerns of most of his fellow human beings. Although this case may
have occurred in connection with free software, I am not aware of any
example. We may treat it (if it arises) as a special case of the next one.
- The software developer may have other sources of income, paid by an
employer or client as compensation for services unrelated to the free
software. The developer may then, in his free time and using his own
resources, without direct or indirect participation of the client or
employer, and without violating agreed restrictions on external activities,
develop products that he makes available as free software. As will be clear
from the other cases, this is in the only case in which it is really
appropriate to talk of “free software”, although this term is in fact too
weak; here one should more accurately talk of Donated software.
- Many public institutions such as universities will release for general use
most of the software developed by their employees (although, as universities
around the world are being pressed by the purse-string holders to enhance
their economic value, and recognize the economic potential of the software
they develop, this generous attitude is not as universal as it used to be).
In this case the software may be free to its users but it was not free to
produce. “Free software” is a misnomer; one should talk, in the case of
public universities, of Taxpayer-funded software. For example the GNU Eiffel
compiler was developed at the University of Nancy by employees of that
university who (in contrast with commercial Eiffel vendors, who need paying
customers to survive) get every month a salary from the State, whether the
users are happy or not with the product. This is a typical case of
taxpayer-funded software.
- Companies may find it beneficial to release some of their software
products without asking for a fee. The goal may be: favorable publicity; an
attempt to establish the company’s chosen solution as the standard, thus
gaining a competitive edge and moving technologically one step ahead of the
competition; a desire to get rid of maintenance costs and efforts by
offloading the work to unpaid (or more commonly paid by someone else)
volunteers; a sincere effort to help the community; several of the above. In
this case we should again not talk of free software; the phrase should be
Privately funded software.
- It may be useful to define a special case of the previous two for
situations in which the developers were not officially required by their
supervisors to develop the software, but did it anyway on company time, or
using company resources, or both, and were then authorized to release for
free. For example Richard Stallman’s description (at
http://www.april.org/actions/rms/10111998/texte.html [1])
of the origins of
his EMACS editor, one of the most visible early examples of free software,
makes it clear that this happened as part of his job as systems programmer
at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology. Although this is very close
to the previous two cases, we may use the more specific terms
Taxpayer-sponsored software and Privately sponsored software. Even the icon
of free software, GNU, started in the same way according to Richard Stallman
(on the page just cited):
“So I resigned from MIT and I started to write the GNU system in January of
1984. Fortunately the lab’s director allowed me to continue using the lab’s
computers. I assume that I could have found machines elsewhere, since the
EMACS program I had written was rather respected, but that way I didn’t have
to look.”
The story goes on to state that Stallman “resigned”— presumably meaning
that he stopped using the MIT’s machines, since it appears from the above
that he had already resigned —- because “sometimes, universities take
software written by their employees to sell them as proprietary products”.
(What a shame indeed: that a university would think it has any rights at all
on products developed by people it pays, on machines that it owns!)
The categories identified here—donated, taxpayer-funded, privately funded,
taxpayer-sponsored and privately-sponsored—seem to exhaust the economic
possibilities; they provide precise and accurate terminology, more useful in
practice than the catch-all term of free software.
[1]: The reference cited is a transcript of a lecture given in Paris by Dr.
Stallman, in French, in November of 1998. The citation, as well as two later
ones from the same source, is a literal translation into English.
4. VOICES FROM THE REVOLUTION
Many of the contributions of the free software community are admirable.
Highly disturbing, however, is its widespread slander and hatred of the
commercial software world.
The best-known figure of free software, Richard Stallman from GNU and the
Free Software Foundation (FSF), professes an absolute refusal of any notion
of commercial software. Software should be free, period. A few samples from
the GNU and FSF web pages include:
- “Signing a typical software license agreement means betraying your
neighbor: ‘I promise to deprive my neighbor of this program so that I can
have a copy for myself.’” (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html.)
- “When a program has an owner, the users lose freedom to control part of
their own lives.” (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html.)
- “The system of copyright gives software programs ‘owners’, most of whom
aim to withhold software’s potential benefit from the rest of the public.
They would like to be the only ones who can copy and modify the software
that we use.” (Same URL.)
- “I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people
are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is
sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the
cost of impoverishing all of society. One person gains one dollar by
destroying two dollars’ worth of wealth. I think a person with a conscience
wouldn’t do that sort of thing except perhaps if he would otherwise die.”
(BYTE interview, http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html.)
And so on (there are countless other examples). These are extremely strong
indictments, based on moral terms. They are morally unjustifiable. Nowhere
in the hundreds of pages of GNU and FSF literature is there any serious
explanation of why it is legitimate, for example, to make a living selling
cauliflowers, or lectures (as a professor does), or videotapes of your
lectures, but criminal to peddle software that you have produced by working
long hours, sweating your heart out, thinking brilliantly, and risking your
livelihood and that of your family.
This absence of rational justification for the extremist view that all
commercial software is evil is all the more striking given that some other
parts of the GNU/FSF literature can be serious and reasoned. Its criticism
of software patents, for example, is often cogent, and takes the trouble of
presenting the opposite view to refute it. As soon as the discussion is
about free software—and that’s where it is much of the time—argument
yields to irrational excommunication.
The only stated justification for the indictment of commercial
software—apart from nostalgic reminiscences of how nice life was in the
early days of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and how horrible
it became when printer manufacturers started distributing the software in
binary form, a tale that may elicit sympathy from the reader but hardly has
any universal moral value (I too remember fondly when you could get access
to US National Parks for free by just showing a foreign passport, but that
doesn’t mean the National Park Service has suddenly turned evil)—is that
software is different from other wares since it can be reproduced so easily.
But this does not stand a minute’s scrutiny. The difference is a matter of
degree, not nature; software reproduction always
costs something, even if it is as little as a dollar for a CD, ten cents of
network connection time for an Internet download, or the marginal cost of
using up more memory. With a good scanner or photocopier, you can reproduce
a book, too, for very little money these days. Yet another example is TV
signals from satellites, which unlike software are in fact truly free to
reproduce once you have paid for your own antenna and receiver. We may
grumble at having to pay for a mere wave in the ether, but is it immoral?
Most people don’t think so, accepting instead that it would be immoral to
obtain the contents of the signals without economic compensation to the
people—producers, actors, technicians—who worked on the programs they
contain.
In any case the idea that a low reproduction cost should imply a free
product has no rational basis. In fact no known moral law implies that
purchase cost should even be related to production cost. I may find
ridiculous the idea of paying eight times as much for a BMW as for a Toyota
Corolla if I guess that it costs far less than eight times as much to
produce; but that doesn’t make BMW guilty of moral horrors. The issue is
economic (how much is prestige worth to the buyer?), with no ethical
consequences.
A social philosopher preoccupied with fairness might argue that, as every
American is entitled by birth to an affordable car, denying it is a moral
outrage; but this is unrelated to the issue since Toyota’s cheaper prices
are presumably due not to superior social awareness but to a self-serving
business strategy—the decision to target a different market.
The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software. (To
be precise, I have not found any example of something else whose selling
they find immoral; satellite signals might seem a logical candidate.)
Computers are OK; services are OK. But if the work of your life is a great
software package, trying to make a living out of selling it —- unless you
also give it away, an immediate business-killer —- is a moral abomination.
It should be pointed out here that history suggests the reverse moral lesson
.. Until the 18th century, writers were ripped off by publishers. The gradual
imposition of a copyright (due largely in France to Beaumarchais, author of
the Barber of Seville and the Marriage of Figaro as well as smuggler of arms
to the American revolution) was a major moral correction, re-establishing
the rights of the creators. The new idea was that the “software” (the
abstract contents) had a value, not just the “hardware” (the actual paper,
leather and ink making up a physical book). One of the first authors to
benefit from this new economic order was Voltaire, who used his great
wealth, arising originally from the sale of his books —- his software —-,
to fund his lifelong fight against tyranny and injustice. The extremist
free-software view would have us return, for software, to a
pre-eighteenth-century world: you can make money from selling CDs, but
cannot protect the contents of those CDs!
The GNU and FSF use of moral terms to indict commercial software providers,
without any moral basis, relies on a perverse distortion of language. The
authors take pains to explain that “free” means not cost-free but available
for modification by anyone. This is acceptable: after all, the word “free”
is ambiguous in English, whereas other languages distinguish between liberty
(as in libre) and zero cost (as in gratuit). It is common, in scientific and
technical discourse, to use a term from everyday language in a specialized
sense, as long as you state your definition precisely and stick to it. But
the use of “free” and “freedom” in the GNU literature is far from neutral.
Much of that literature is in effect a pamphlet demanding “freedom” for
software developers. The GNU license itself reads not like a license but
like a manifesto against the evils of proprietary software. These passionate
speeches, based on a specialized notion of
“freedom”, use the universal appeal of this word, derived from centuries of
mankind’s struggle for freedom in the usual (political and moral) sense of
the term, to defend the authors’ own agenda, based on a narrow and
controversial notion of freedom.
This distortion—the hijacking for private purposes of a word that holds
such a sacred aura for most people—is highly unethical.
Extreme analogies are another dubious rhetorical device. One of the first
comments one encounters in the GNU pages (http://www.gnu.org) is a
comparison to the Soviet Union:
“All four practices [of the Software Publishers Association, to prevent
theft of software] resemble those used in the former Soviet Union, where
every copying machine had a guard to prevent forbidden copying, and where
individuals had to copy information secretly and pass it from hand to hand
as “samizdat”.”
There is a comic side to such pronouncements; hearing the epitomes of
capitalism —Microsoft and the like—accused of sovietism by a group that
advocates collective property of all software seems bit far-fetched. In fact
Bob Metcalfe, in a recent InfoWorld column, did not hesitate to write that
“Richard Stallman is a communist”. I do not actually think such comments
are particularly useful; the best way to counter the sometimes outrageous
attacks of the most extreme “freedom” advocates may be to keep a cool-
headed, rational attitude, and not try to match their antics. (Dr. Stallman
himself said, in response to a Byte interviewer, that he is neither a
socialist nor a communist.)
It would all the same be a mistake to portray that group as slightly
eccentric do-gooders. Their propaganda is a campaign of hatred against
people whose only “crime” is to want to make a living out of the wares they
produce. A recent encounter with Richard Stallman illustrates this attitude.
Mutual friends had thought it a good idea to bring him and a commercial
software developer to a dinner party in a restaurant. The software
developer, curious about the idea of free software and interested in sharing
ideas with a creative colleague with a different background, tried to open a
friendly discussion with: “I am a commercial software developer, but I
appreciate much of your work and have in fact recently changed the terms of
our free software license as a result of your observations”. Unfortunately,
he never in the entire evening got past the “I am a commercial software
developer” part, which triggered an explosion of abuse to the effect that in
such a case there was not even anything to discuss, commercial software
being the most horrible thing on earth and a denial of everyone’s right to
freedom. The rest of the evening, needless to say, was extremely painful, as
no one likes friendly overtures to be met with violent rebuke. It also led
the commercial software developer, who until then had been not unreceptive
to the quasi-universal eulogy of free software, to a much more carefully
researched assessment of the pros and cons of the movement.
It is unfair, of course, to judge an idea from the character of its
proponents. But in the case at hand the connection is close, as Dr. Stallman
is the living icon of the free software movement, widely admired, imitated
and idolized (almost like a sect leader) by his followers; he is also listed
as the author of much of the GNU literature—the only one, in fact, in the
documents that I have seen. So his attitude shapes much of the free software
community’s perception of commercial software.
That perception is that commercial software is evil. In fact, one of the
catchy GNU links is entitled “Is Microsoft really the great Satan?”. The
page to which it leads (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/microsoft.html) gives
the answer. In short, yes indeed, but don’t just pick on Microsoft; anyone
else who “denies users their rightful freedom” (i.e. sells software) is just
as satanic.
5. A SKEWED MORAL PERSPECTIVE
The preceding citations indicate that free software advocates condemn
commercial software vendors (meaning most of the industry) on the basis of
moral absolutes. As later citations will show, they present themselves as
generous benefactors of humanity. What is striking is the reduction of all
software-related moral issues to one aspect, a special notion of “freedom”,
as if nothing else mattered. This leads to pronouncements that would be
funny if they weren’t also scary at times. Dr. Stallman writes at
http://www.april.org/actions/rms/10111998/texte.html:
“[…] scientists used sometimes to be able to cooperate even when their
countries were at war. I read that once American soldiers who landed on an
island of the Pacific Ocean, during World War II, found a building with a
note saying: ’ To American soldiers. This building is a marine biology
laboratory. We put all our samples and reports in order so that US
scientists can go on with our work.’ Because, for them, they were working
only for humanity. Not only for Japan. They wanted their work to be useful
for humanity, regardless of the outcome of the war. But today we live in a
state of civil war between small groups, in every country. In which every
group acts to stop the others, hinder the others, hamper the others. It’s
sad.”
This view of ethical problems is appalling. In the absence of a reference it
is not clear where the anecdote comes from; but to cite as an ideal, without
so much as a qualification, one alleged act of scientific chivalry from a
country whose troops conducted World War II as an series of atrocities, and
to claim that the situation of today’s peaceful industrialized societies is
“sadly” worse (a “civil war”) because some selfish people refuse to share
the source of their software, shows a noxious contempt for the hierarchy of
ethical values. What would a survivor of the horrendous Singapore POW camps
think of Dr. Stallman’s little miseries resulting (as described just a few
lines down from the above extract) from computer manufacturers that
“took the X Window system [originally free software from MIT], compiled it
for their system, and distributed copies as a proprietary product with
exactly the same lack of freedom as with Unix.”
This is the danger of single-issue proponents: they lose all sense of
perspective and start thinking that their perceived “moral” problem is the
only one that counts.
In one person’s case this loss of perspective leads to extreme consequences.
Eric Raymond, another of the leaders of the free software movement (who
prefers the term “open source”) uses his Web page to proselytize for gun
rights. Here we move from the politically naive to the revolting. Only one
quote will suffice, although readers interested in this propaganda can find
heaps of it at http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/guns/gun-ethics.html and
neighboring pages. The title is Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun: What
Bearing Weapons Teaches About the Good Life; note the reference to ethics.
It starts:
“There is nothing like having your finger on the trigger of a gun to reveal
who you really are. Life or death in one twitch —- ultimate decision, with
the ultimate price for carelessness or bad choices.
It is a kind of acid test, an initiation, to know that there is lethal force
in your hand and all the complexities and ambiguities of moral choice have
fined down to a single action: fire or not?”
Such balderdash would be easy to dismiss if it were not highly visible from
the author’s Open Source pages (I came across it when looking for Mr.
Raymond’s touted essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”) and didn’t have any
ethical implications.
This text will be hard to understand for people who don’t live in the US.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of that country is that a minority of gun nuts
(a term that Mr. Raymond actually applies to himself), supported by an
all-powerful lobby, the National Rifle Association, has managed to terrorize
Congress into maintaining loose gun laws with no equivalent in the rest of
the civilized world. The official pretext—the Constitution’s Second
Amendment, devised in the late 18th century to establish a popular,
Swiss-style militia guarding against the return of oppressive power—is
preposterous for many obvious reasons: there is no Swiss-style militia in
the US (guns are used for pleasure and, of course, for killing ordinary
people); the US political system has a remarkable combination of checks and
balances making the imposition of a dictatorship rather unlikely; the
historical exceptions to this observation—such as McCarthyism and
institutionalized racial discrimination—were not, if memory serves us well,
met by armed resistance from an outraged citizenry; and a real aspiring
dictator would have means of oppression, such as missiles, tanks and perhaps
nuclear weapons, against which even the sophisticated guns on which Mr.
Raymond roves ecstatic in his Web pages would be rather powerless.
But the result of such lunatic ravings, supported by the indefatigable NRA,
are clear to everyone: a murder rate higher than in any other first-world
country, an endless race between police and criminals for ever more lethal
weapons, free availability of murderous devices in the infamous and barely
regulated “gun shows” of the Western US, 12-year-olds trained in weapons
since kindergarten who go on shooting rampages with guns borrowed from the
family cupboard. Month after month, the reports of death and devastation,
most avoidable with the common-sense rules in place in other countries, hit
the headlines. To which the gun nuts respond with the old saw: “Guns don’t
kill people, people do”. (Sure. Sure. Try murdering fifteen of your
co-students and five of your teachers in a few minutes with a kitchen
knife.)
This advocacy of practices that directly lead to assassination and other
tragedies is an example of immoral behavior. People who are callous about
human life cannot and should not be hailed as moral examples, whatever the
alleged generosity of their views on the far less momentous issue of
software distribution. Is it right, one might ask, to make a connection
between Mr. Raymond, who is only one person, and the rest of the free
software community? The answer is yes, for at least three reasons:
- His propaganda is prominent in his Web pages, one of the most frequently
accessed sources of information about the free software movement, to which
the media’s references draw countless unsuspecting visitors.
- Eric Raymond has been one of the most visible proponents of the Open
Source movement, widely interviewed and cited. He is a public person; his
views, unless disavowed strongly and publicly, inevitably commit the rest of
the movement.
- They have not indeed, as far as I know, been strongly and publicly
disavowed by the rest of the movement. Richard Stallman, whose differences
and competition with Eric Raymond are widely known, has not—again to my
knowledge—dissociated himself from the gun propaganda.
It is high time for Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds to state publicly
that they do not endorse the views of the gun lunatics, and that their
cherished notion of freedom has nothing to do with the freedom to kill
children and other innocents. That this has not happened is a sign of the
distortion of the moral values of the free software movement. Given the
choice between
- a society where all software would be proprietary, and civilized measures
would be in place preventing (for example) a disturbed white supremacist
from buying a police gun without any background check at a gunshow, then
going to a Jewish day camp in Los Angeles to shoot at everyone in sight (a
tragedy that happened just a few weeks ago);
- a society where all software would be free and Mr. Raymond’s views on gun
“freedom” were fully realized, any ethically-conscious person would choose
the former. The free software advocates must recognize that some issues are
more important than who owns software, and that human life is one of them.
6. THE QUALITY CONCERN
One issue that is less important than human life (except that it may
ultimately affect human lives) but has obvious ethical resonances is the
quality of the software a programmer produces.
Isn’t it relevant, for an ethics-preoccupied software engineer, to worry
about this aspect? Is it more or less important than software ownership?
In a way, it is unfair to take the free software advocates to task on this
issue because part of the success of offerings such as Linux and GCC has
been their reputation for quality, and the often repeated comment that, if
you find a bug in one of these products, you will have a much easier time
reporting it and getting it fixed than if you try calling Sun or Microsoft
customer support about a problem with their proprietary, binary-only
products. With open source you benefit—so the explanation goes—from the
collective ability of many people to dive into the code and find out what’s
wrong.
This reasoning is largely correct, at least for some of the major free
software products. Linux and GCC are widely praised by their users. Yet not
all is rosy. Like commercial software, free software is —- surprise —- of
very variable quality. You find the best and the worst. ISE’s own experience
with free software has included both kinds. Recently, we have had more than
our share of the second; we have had to cancel one major project, and
reengineer a product completely, after wasting many person-months
and disappointing customers, because of the deficiencies of two separate GNU
products (the GCC compiler for Windows and the editor under GTK). In both
cases the scenario was the same: fixes to well-known bugs being promised and
promised again; everyone waiting for months and months, until it becomes
clear that nothing will happen; in the end, having to write off all the
affected developments. Since no one is in charge, and you didn’t pay for the
products, there is no one to blame.
Even in products that are good or excellent overall, the distribution of
work among many people may mean a high degree of variation between
components of a product. One person who doesn’t share the general enthusiasm
for Linux is Ken Thompson from AT&T, co-creator of the original Unix and
recipient of the Turing award (the “Nobel prize” of computing). In a recent
interview he couldn’t contain his scorn for the quality of the Linux code:
“I’ve looked at the source, and there are pieces that are good and pieces
that are not … My experience and some of my friends’ experience is that
Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is
worse.” (IEEE Computer, 32, 5, May 1999, page 61.)
In a different case, the newsgroups comp.risks recently published a report
of rather horrendous and elementary C errors found in a quick and simple
check of the source of the FreeBSD operating system (see
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.18.html#subj9.1).
Even though the GNU products are often good, the licenses which accompany
them are no better, in the warranties (or rather absence thereof) they offer
to the user, than commercial software. A typical quote, from
http://www.gnu.org/software/year2000.html:
“The Free Software Foundation does not provide warranties for its software.
We can’t afford to. So we can’t promise that GNU software has no Year 2000
bugs, any more than we could promise you the same thing about another sort
of bug.”
It is indeed amusing to note, in the GNU public license, the place where the
inflammatory proclamations about freedom stop and the tone becomes much more
measured. That’s the place where the license switches to the topic of
software “warranties”. At this point the discourse begins to sound much
more familiar (upper case in the original, see
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html):
“EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER
PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER
EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS
TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PROGRAM IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE PROGRAM
PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY SERVICING, REPAIR OR
CORRECTION.”
Where have we seen this before? Oh yes—in the hated “proprietary” licenses,
those which “take away your freedom and mine”: no warranty of any kind; AS
IS; caveat emptor.
In using such terms the GNU license is neither better nor worse than most of
the rest of the industry. Very few providers of software are able, today, to
warrant their software the way producers of non-software artifacts warrant
their offerings. (It should be pointed out, however, in reference to the
first of the quotations above, that Y2K-compliance guarantees are becoming
increasingly available.)
We cannot be too harsh on GNU and consorts in this respect. But given the
violence of their attacks on the rest of the software industry, and their
self-positioning as freedom- defending angels, it is fair to ask: do you
have your priorities right?
Here is a hypothetical question to help understand what’s at stake. Assume
two pieces of software with a similar goal. We could posit that this goal is
to manage a surgical device or airplane controls, but let’s not make things
unnecessarily dramatic and simply assume a normal software application,
important and useful but not necessarily life- threatening —- a text
editor, a compiler, a graphics library, a Web server. Now assume that the
two products differ as follows:
- Product F is free software. It comes with the standard no-warranty
warranty.
- Product P is proprietary software. It costs $50 for the binary-only
version. It uses the most advanced techniques of software engineering. It
never crashes, or departs in any way from its (mathematically expressed)
specification. The seller is, in fact, so sure of those qualities that he
will commit in writing that any violation of the specification during
execution will immediately lead to reimbursement of the purchase price and
compensation for any damages incurred.
According to the free software literature, product F, being the only one
that preserves users’ “freedom”, is the ethical one. The seller of product P
may be a good engineer, but he is still a repugnant profiteer.
The question, which is left as an exercise for the reader, is: which one of
these solutions do you consider the more ethical? Auxiliary question: does
your answer change if the price of the product becomes $5000? $50,000? $5
million?
Hypothetical though they may be (an unfortunate result of the current state
of the art in software engineering), these are bona fide questions. I think
I know my own answers: I would consider the second solution more ethical
(certainly at $50, and possibly regardless of the price, unless perhaps
someone can show that it takes advantage of an undue monopoly), but I don’t
claim these are the only possible answers. The free software advocates, for
their part, do sound like they have found the sole truth. What I mostly see
is that by concentrating on one aspect of the picture they obtain a highly
skewed view of ethics, which can, by itself, become unethical.
Second auxiliary question for special credit: you think the revolutionary
software development technique you have just invented makes it possible to
produce provably bug- free products such as P. You need $20 million dollars
to productize it. Your university will be glad to pay for a postdoc for six
months if you teach an extra course. The government funding agencies, after
taking a year to review your application, tell you to get lost as your
proposal has no commercial value. (Public funding is very much
“goal-oriented” these days.) But you have found a group of investors that
values your idea. Of course they expect to make a huge windfall from their
investment, so they’ll laugh if you suggest free software.
The question: should you go with them, or is it more ethical to turn down
the proposal and devote the next five years of your life to a completely
free LATEX extension for Babylonian cuneiform?
If we accept that the matter of software quality may have ethical
implications, one of the tenets of the free software movement becomes rather
disturbing. The free software axioms hold, as we have seen, that although
charging for software is wrong it is all right to charge for services
associated with the software, such as maintenance and training. The risk
here is that such an attitude may lead to products with known deficiencies,
giving the provider a ready-made source of juicy service contracts.
To date, there is no proof that any provider of free software has engaged in
such practices, so it would be unfair to turn this worry into a criticism of
the current state of the art in free software. But as a worry it is
legitimate, especially at a time when ever bigger fish from the mainstream
software industry clamor their newly discovered fondness and enthusiasm for
the gospel of free software (proclamations which, in some cases, cannot but
leave a strange after-taste). The practice of releasing products that are
just good enough to convince buyers, and just bad enough to turn into
service cash cows, is not unheard of, in the software industry and others.
Anything to make a buck. This is not the fault of the free-software people.
But their all-out focus on one single issue, “freedom” as they define it,
and their refusal to attach any ethical value to another matter, quality,
does nothing to help advance this critical component of the software
profession’s social and moral responsibility to the world around it.
7. HOLIER THAN THOU
Why do people write free software? The free software literature mostly cites
one motive: an altruistic desire to help fellow human beings. Richard
Stallman had this to say at the start of the GNU project:
“I’m looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as
important as money.” (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html.)
and recently (Linux World, 1999):
“Although we do business to make a living and live, there are things that
are above and beyond that. Such as making the world a better place.”
Wow!
GNU describes its goals
(
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html) as “pragmatic idealism”:
“Every decision a person makes stems from the person’s values and goals.
People can have many different goals and values: fame, profit, love,
survival, fun, and freedom, are just some of the goals that a good person
might have. When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that
idealism.
My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading
freedom and cooperation.”
The already cited Paris lecture opened up (no trace whatsoever of any
pandering to the audience) with:
“I can describe the idea of free software in three words: liberty, equality,
fraternity.”
The reader does not have to be a cynic to start wondering, after a few too
many affirmations of one’s unmitigated devotion to the sole purpose of
“helping humanity”, what the real story is. Saints do not typically go
around clamoring “I am a saint”. Tartuffe, however, did. (Molire’s Le
Tartuffe, ou l’Imposteur is required high-school reading in France. Maybe
that’s why French people often have such a hard time taking proclamations of
absolute abnegation seriously.)
Questioning the motives of self-proclaimed benefactors of humanity is only
normal, if only because they themselves not only question the motives of
those whom they views as enemies of humanity (the commercial developers) but
openly present them as liars:
“The economic argument [for charging for software] goes like this: ‘I want
to get rich’ (usually described inaccurately as ‘making a living’)”
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/shouldbefree.html).
This slandering of commercial software developers is outrageous. Distorting
people’s claims that they want to “make a living” as a lie covering their
unabated greed is an under-the-belt rhetorical device. It is all the more
revolting, from an ethical standpoint, in view of the reality that many
developers of “free” software of the taxpayer-funded category have the
comfort of a monthly salary from an institution that can not legally go
bankrupt, such as a State university. This provides a convenient vantage
point for bashing commercial software developers, who have often put
everything at risk to pursue their ideal. Many of them fail miserably,
gaining only ruin and a divorce; some manage to “make a living”; a few will
become rich, as they are indeed entitled to if their talent, effort,
business sense and luck get them there. The functionaries have no right to
deny them their right to “make a living” from honest work.
Here it should be pointed out that besides money a common motivating force
for software entrepreneurs is their rejection by traditional institutions,
including those who support free software. Many a successful industry figure
has told the story of how he or she went to management with a great idea,
only to be rebuked, and was so outraged by the reaction as to go away,
implement the idea as a software package, and prove the idiots wrong. The
motives of such people deserve respect, not abuse.
Even if all commercial software developers became wealthy, there would be no
ethical basis for picturing them as greedy liars. Wanting to get rich is not
morally reprehensible. If it were, shouldn’t we hate people who buy lottery
tickets? We don’t. (Typically the moralists reserve their scorn for the
lottery organizers.) At least the entrepreneur who starts a software
company, perhaps with the hope of becoming rich, takes a personal risk, far
higher than the price of a lottery ticket. That doesn’t automatically make
him a hero (and it is indeed one of the differences between commercial and
“free” software developers that the former do not, in addition to other
expected benefits, demand that the world hail them as saintly benefactors of
humanity). But it also doesn’t make him a despicable thug. There is nothing
wrong about believing enough in one’s ideas—and ideals—to put one’s
livelihood at stake.
The character assassination performed on commercial software developers by
the extremists of free software, and their failure to accept people with
different views of the world can be honest and even idealistic in their own
ways, has no moral basis.
It would be a natural reaction to counter at the same level, and dismiss the
free software crowd as a bunch of hypocrites. That would be a mistake. One
should not respond to intolerance by intolerance. (And you never know:
someone might, after all, advertise his sainthood and be a saint, if an
immodest one[2].)
We should, as noted, question their motives; but this does not necessarily
mean dismissing these motives as obvious lies. We must investigate them with
an open mind, accepting that we will probably find cases of the advertised
generosity —- along with other impulses, some noble, some self-serving. We
must, in other words, dispassionately try to understand, beyond the
self-aggrandizement of some of the free software literature, why people do
write free software.
[2]: In the name of full disclosure, however, the reader must be warned that all
comments about sainthood in this article are based on hearsay rather than on
the author’s personal experience or encounters.
8. REASONS FOR PRODUCING FREE SOFTWARE
People who stumble across free software for the first time are often
surprised that anyone would willingly decide to give up any fees for the
products they develop. But in fact it is not hard to find several reasons
why, for many developers, this makes sense. All the reasons cited below
occur quite commonly in practice.
According to some of the literature cited above, the sole reason is desire
to do good. It is of course not the sole reason, but may be a reason.
Someone sincerely wants to help the rest of the industry with software
tools. There is no reason to doubt that this is often part of the free
software developers’ motives.
Another common motive is the realization that there is no money to be made
from the development. You make your software free because you feel that you
couldn’t sell it anyway —- there is no market, or you can’t find investors
to get a company started, or you realize you wouldn’t make a great
businessman and are better at programming. These days, for example, few
people will pay for an editor; it is not surprising that many editors are
free. Netscape, to take another example, only made its browser free (in two
different ways: permitting use of the binary versions at no cost, and
releasing the Mozilla product as open source) when Microsoft made its own
Internet Explorer available on Windows at no cost, killing the market
overnight. Until then, the Netscape browser was sold for a fee.
A motive that combines some of the previous two is the attempt to correct
limitations or deficiencies of existing tools. You are not completely happy
with an existing product (commercial or free) and fear that its producer
won’t correct the problem fast enough for your needs; so you decide to go
ahead and do it yourself —-
either as an add-on to the existing product or as a redevelopment. You may
feel, especially in the case of an add-on, that your contribution is not
significant enough to convince people to buy the result.
Making a product free is also a great way to enlist the help of others. You
realize that you can’t do everything by yourself and realize that free,
open-source development is a great way to find collaborators. One of the
marvelous effects of the Internet has indeed been to enable software
developers to put out announcements and obtain help from many people, often
complete strangers until then, all over the world.
Another common reason is the desire to learn. You want to enter a new,
promising area but don’t know much about it. Because this is you first foray
into that area you realize that no one would pay you for developing the
product, but that’s OK because much of what you expect is self-training. You
realize that the best way to learn is often to do. Often this case implies
the previous one as well: by developing the software in a free and open
fashion you hope to get help from people who are also learning or, ideally,
know more than you do.
Related to the desire to learn is increasing one’s marketability. There is a
great dearth of talented software engineers, but everyone who has to hire
software developers knows the incredible range in programming skills —-
most managers will readily admit that they see a ratio of 1 to 20 in the
productivity of people with seemingly comparable backgrounds —- and how
difficult it is to evaluate candidates based on anything else than their
tangible record of actually producing successful software. If you want to
price yourself above your peers, what’s better than spending a couple of
years building a great free utility, then come to a technically savvy
recruiter and say “Oh, by the way, I wrote the WIMP (Wimp Isn’t Microsoft
Project) Microsoft-Project look-alike for Linux, which 15,000 people
download every day and Caldera includes in its standard distribution”. A
great way to help the world, nibble away at the Great Satan of Redmond, and
advance your career.
Also frequent is the desire to make money. This seems contradictory with the
notion of free software, but is in fact quite compatible. At the time of
writing, the stock market has just seen a successful IPO for Red Hat, a
provider of Linux deliveries all based on free software. Anything
Linux-based makes investors vibrate (almost as much as anything
Internet-related). A number of companies, such as Cygnus (which according to
the GNU pages has more than 50 employees) have built their business around
distributing and servicing free software. Eric Raymond writes:
“I expect to be quite wealthy once the dust from the Linux IPOs has
settled.” (http://www.netaxs.com/~esr/travelrules.htm)
There is nothing wrong with this —- except when commercial developers
trying to “make a living” are accused of moral perversion because what they
are really supposed to want is … to become wealthy. One can only
compliment the founders of Cygnus and Red Hat: they saw in free software a
great business opportunity, and banked on it. It is indeed true in some
cases that you can make more money by giving away the software and charging
for services. But it’s an economic strategy, not an ethical matter. A
business model is not a moral principle.
This list of motives is not in order of importance, but if it were we would
probably have to put pretty close to the top the search for glory. People
want to get famous by writing a program that everyone will use. It is indeed
interesting to see that many of the advocates of free software suffer from
no visible atrophy of the ego organ. An extreme case is Richard Stallman’s
well-known uneasiness at the widespread media attention devoted to Linux, a
system that he feels (no doubt with some justification) could not have
succeeded without all the groundwork of the GNU project. About a year ago,
an editorial of the Linux Journal made much fun of a letter by Dr. Stallman
requesting that Linux—and, as a result, the journal—be renamed to a more
appropriate acronym, Lignux, acknowledging Linus Torvalds’s debt to GNU.
People in charge of both the operating system and the journal didn’t seem to
think that was such a great idea. Nowadays the authors of the GNU pages do
not mention “Lignux”, but repeatedly argue that the operating system should
be called “GNU/Linux”. We wish them luck. Like everyone else, they are
entitled to recognition of their contribution. If they appear a little
vainglorious at times, who would cast the first stone? Just cease slandering
people whose aims are different. Some humans want to be rich more than they
want to become famous; others want fame more than they want wealth. Most
people, given the opportunity, would gladly be rich, and famous, and admired
too. We’re all humans. Just spare us the sermon on how much nobler you are.
This list of motivations is probably not complete. Its most striking feature
is how close it is to what motivates the developers of proprietary software.
The relative rankings may be different, but most of the categories will be
present, to some extent, in both cases. This is not so surprising. Apart
from a minority of saints, most people share the same basic desires, in a
variable mix determined in part by personality and in part by circumstances.
One of the true differences between people is tolerance, or lack thereof.
Most of us can live with imperfect companions as long as we and they are
tolerant of each other. Intolerant saints, real or self-proclaimed, are a
dangerous proposition.
9. THE GREAT SATAN
Among the reasons for free software, one more deserves some consideration:
hatred of the “evil empire”—Microsoft.
It is not hard to understand some of the reasons for the resentment of
Microsoft. The company grew unbelievably quickly. Software engineers have a
nagging feeling that it was partly a result of sheer luck: when IBM obtained
DOS from Microsoft and hence created the modern Personal Computer industry,
it didn’t demand exclusivity, enabling the more forward-looking Microsoft to
sell the same solution to every IBM competitor. (It is interesting to see
that IBM’s mistake was based on a reasoning—we don’t make money out of
software products, we make money from selling “iron”, i.e. computers—that
is not unlike the GNU/FSF argument that one should not sell software, but
it’s OK to sell computers, as well as services etc.) The reputation of
Microsoft among developers is not helped by thge widely circulating rumor
that Bill Gates—although hailed by the popular press as the genius software
engineer of all times—was in fact, when he did program, rather lousy at it.
The perceived arrogance of Microsoft in dealing with partners, competitors,
computer vendors and customers does not help.
Anti-Microsoft feeling is also reinforced by the nature of the Microsoft
tools. Not only do they deserve their reputation of crashing frequently;
even when they do work, they often give computer-savvy users the impression
of forcing them into an intellectual stranglehold. Instead of the Unix
programmer’s freedom to drive the interaction with highly versatile commands
and scripts, you have to follow the exact scheme that the Redmond boys, in
their wisdom, have devised for you.
For all that, it is easy to miss the incredible contributions of
Microsoft—and its de facto partner, Intel—to the just as incredible
progress of the computer industry. By establishing a mass market that
enabled staggering price reductions, “Wintel” has made the computer
revolution possible. The most fanatical advocates of Linux do not seem to
realize that, without Microsoft, Intel and the resulting 200 million
compatible PCs, without the $500 400-MHz systems with a complete operating
system, there would be no Linux to speak of. The entire computer world,
Microsoft groupies and Microsoft haters, is riding on the coattails of
Microsoft.
It is easy enough to lambaste Bill Gates. It is less self-flattering for the
anti-Microsoft community to understand why Microsoft has reached its unique
status. There was the initial stroke of luck, of course. But there was also
an in-depth understanding of the market. There was in particular a
relentless effort at integration: you write a Microsoft Project plan,
integrate a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and a Microsoft Word document into
it at the click of a mouse, post it on your Intranet with Microsoft Front
Page for your colleagues to access with Microsoft Internet Explorer, have it
automatically generate an e-mail with Microsoft Outlook whenever a deadline
slips, and so on. The underlying engineering effort is gigantic, and does
more to explain Microsoft’s continued success than any conspiracy theory.
The other major explanation is the dismal failure of Microsoft’s
competitors. The torchbearer of commercial Unix, Sun Microsystems, had a
once-in-a-lifetime opening circa 1989. Microsoft’s nascent Windows operating
system was late and buggy; the Sparc architecture with SunOS and OpenWindows
was an exciting mass-market proposition. Instead Sun apparently decided that
the mass market was not good enough because of low margin and ferocious
competition, and that it was more profitable to sell high-priced
servers—replacements for IBM mainframe—to Wall Street fat cats. During all
that time Bill Gates (as was later reported) was scared of what Unix could
do to his business; his competitors never seized the opportunity.
When they woke up, it was too late: Microsoft owned the desktop, meaning
almost everything, including people’s minds. It even had become skillful
enough to recover from its initial misreading of the Internet revolution.
Its competitors had lost. Their feeble attempts to reinvent themselves with
other technologies (such as the Java programming language for Sun, a vain
attempt to challenge the Microsoft power) will not reverse that historic
defeat.
In achieving this result, Microsoft, however unpopular some of its tactics
may be, relied for the most part on its business acumen and its technical
dedication. The losers have no one to blame but the skills of their
competitor, and their own myopia.
This applies in part to the free software community. The initial 1984
announcement of the GNU project
(http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html) stated that:
“Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible
software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free(1) to
everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and
equipment are greatly needed.
To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write
and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few
other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire
game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply,
eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and
anything else useful, including on- line and hardcopy documentation.”
The GNU project has produced many good tools, for which the software
community must be grateful; but it has not produced, fifteen years later,
the announced system. The closest thing to the kernel is Linux, which came
from outside the project.
Microsoft envy is very palpable in the current excitement around Linux. On
the floor of a conference such as Linux World (now held twice a year in the
US, with equivalents in many other countries) one can hear the constant
Microsoft bashing. The jokes can be funny up to a point, but soon one starts
to realize that the problem most people have is not Microsoft. It’s that
they are not Microsoft. The greed and envy are transpiring from everywhere.
A famous French comic strip and animated cartoon, which has been running
countless episodes, shows the Grand Vizir (who goes by the name Iznogoud) at
the Caliph’s court, constantly plotting to get rid of his debonair master,
and constantly failing in his schemes, every one more clever than the
others. His motto, repeated in every tone from envy to complaint to
exasperation, is “I want to be the Caliph instead of the Caliph!”.
Iznogoud is, pathetically, human. Most of us, given a choice, would really
like to be the Caliph instead of the Caliph. What motivates the wheelers and
dealers at Linux world may be, for a part, a desire to help their fellow
computer users. But, mostly, they want to be the Caliph instead of the
Caliph. They might just as well admit it in as many words.
10. THE ETHICS OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
A point of ethics that arises in the design of free software has not yet
been raised in this discussion (or in any other text that I have read).
Many free-software products are “copycat” versions of commercial software.
The GNU project indeed made its mark by providing quality replacements for
dozen of Unix utilities, from awk and yacc to troff and cc. (It is ironic
that, even though the goal of the project, quoted above, was to replace Unix
with a free operating system, most of its results were for a long time used
mostly on commercial Unix systems.)
Such tools usually do not raise a legal issue: it is considered acceptable
to start from a tool’s specification and reimplement an equivalent version,
as long as you don’t use any of the original code.
But the ethical picture is not as clear, especially given the uncompromising
nature of the attacks on commercial software developers, as abundantly cited
earlier. By reimplementing someone’s design, you are not stealing his code,
but you are taking his ideas. Using other people’s ideas is not unethical by
itself; it is in fact an integral part of the scientific process. But you
owe some respect to the originators of the ideas you are borrowing, and you
owe them acknowledgment.
Such acknowledgements are seldom to be found. Take the book Gimp: the GNU
Image Manipulation Program by Michael J. Hammel, published in 1999 by SSC
(publishers of Linux Journal). It includes a 4-page acknowledgment section,
stating at the beginning that
“Of course, there are the original authors of the GIMP, Spencer Kimball and
Peter Mattis. At the time of the GIMP’s original release, they were
undergraduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. […]
The story goes something like this: Spencer and Peter [decided] that a
Photoshop- like tool for UNIX systems would be a fun thing to do.”
GIMP is indeed a free-software “copycat” of Adobe’s Photoshop commercial
product. The striking observation here is that nowhere do the four pages of
acknowledgments include any suggestion that the people who designed
Photoshop at Adobe might, possibly, deserve a modicum of recognition too.
This absence, unfortunately typical, represents a grave ethical lapse. That
the Adobe developers must have been paid for the efforts does not relieve
the need to acknowledge their contribution. They invented a brilliant design
and worked hard to implement it. The authors of GIMP were undoubtedly
generous to the rest of the world by imitating that invention and making the
result available to others; but they could not have done it without the
anterior contribution of the Photoshop team.
In software, much of the hard work and creativity goes into specifying a
system. You also have to implement it, but that’s not necessarily the place
where you will show your brilliance. Seeing your specification, and having
access to your system, a good developer can often reimplement it at
reasonable effort. Doing something that has already been done by someone
else—like Linux after Unix—is an order of magnitude easier, if only
because there is an existence proof: the reimplementer knows it can be done.
It is both a boon and a bane that the interface of a product to the rest of
the world, often the most difficult part of the work, is also the hardest to
protect (since you cannot let customers use the product without telling them
how to use it!). It’s a boon for users, competitors, and free-software
advocates; it’s a bane if you work hard only to see a more powerful
competitor prosper on the strength of your ideas. (The first spreadsheet
program, VisiCalc, was an immediate hit, leading to great commercial success
not for its inventor but for the next implementer, Lotus.)
It is legal, and it may be ethical, to start from someone else’s design and
reimplement it. It is profoundly unethical not to acknowledge it, whether
the originator dealt in free or in commercial software.
This is not just a matter of being fair and courteous to the people who made
possible your own job and hence your own little claims to fame and a great
career. It is also a matter of acknowledging the tremendous contributions of
commercial software. Commercial products not only save lives; more
prosaically, they established the historical basis without which there
wouldn’t have been any free software. GNU, as we have seen, was unable by
itself to build an operating system; the paragon of evil, Microsoft,
provided the economic basis that made Linux possible. There would also not
have been a GNU (and a GCC, a Linux, a Bison and so on) if there hadn’t been
a Unix in the first place, arising from the stroke of genius of two AT&T
Bell laboratories researchers—Thompson and Ritchie—working in a strictly
proprietary context.
Thompson and Ritchie, by the way, derived many of their ideas from Multics,
a sixties’ research project from MIT. The cycle is complete: commercial
software builds on public software, and free software builds on commercial
software. Sometimes you want one kind, sometimes the other. Both can be bad;
both can be admirable. Both result from the hard work of skilled,
hard-working, dedicated, often-idealistic software enthusiasts. It’s the
same people on both sides of the fence: the passionate “hackers” who think
software, dream algorithms, eat data structures, drink objects, and long
through the night will continue discussing the pros and cons of generating
code for a machine with a clever instruction prefetch scheme.
Mongering hatred of the members of one of these two complementary
communities is unproductive and unethical.
11. A COURSE OF ACTION
What should be done? I will conclude with a suggested agenda for everyone,
whether a commercial software developer or merely a computer user.
- Recognize the major contributions of the free software community, from
Linux and GCC to TEX, LATEX and Ghostscript.
- Accept that both commercial and free software have a role to play, and
that neither will ever go away.
- Be respectful of the authors of good free software.
- Try to convince them to apply the reciprocal goodwill (in some of the
cases cited this may be hard, but one should try).
- Refuse and refute the moral defamation of commercial software developers.
If you are a software developer, be proud of your profession.
- Call the extremists’ bluff by questioning their moral premises.
Re-establish ethical priorities.
- Refuse the distortion of moral values and the use of free software as a
pulpit from which to spread ideologies of violence.
- Demand (in the spirit of faithful advertising) that the economic origin of
“free” software be clearly stated, and that the products be classified as
one of “donated”, “taxpayer-funded” and the other categories described in
this article.
- For Microsoft, whose unique position in the community creates unique
responsibilities: promote a more open attitude towards the rest of the
world; open up; be less mean. You can afford to be.
- For everyone: focus on quality. Work with every competent person—free or
commercial software developers—to address the increasingly critical, and
increasingly ethical, issue of software quality.
- Strive to combine the best of what the two communities have to offer.
Copyright Bertrand Meyer, 1999
The Christian Horror Blog