The irony of free-software advocacy
A rich irony of the free-software movement is that it heavily depends upon proprietary hardware and proprietary software to make its voice heard.
As an example, while Mark Antony (really a nice person--we've had tea in London before and I genuinely like him) rails against my "Is open source losing its soul?" post, he does so using proprietary hardware and proprietary Twitter.
Apparently the irony is lost on Anthony. (And yes, he could find an open-source chip to use if he wanted to.)
Not that he's alone. Glyn Moody, one of the most persuasive of the free-software crowd and a wonderful person, writes his well-written Opendotdot blog...using proprietary blogging software. This wouldn't be so bad except that there is plenty of open-source blogging software out there. Heck, even Microsoft has one.
In reality, what the free software world declines to admit is that its very existence owes much to the proprietary hardware and software world that makes it possible. For example, IBM never would have been able to commit $1 billion to the advancement of Linux without a hefty war chest, one built entirely with proprietary software and hardware profits.
This isn't a paean to proprietary software. Nor is it a suggestion that Anthony and Moody scramble to find 100-percent pure open-source alternatives. That would be silly. They use what works, and should continue to do so. If an open-source alternative works better, use it. Otherwise, we shouldn't make a religious fetish out of it.
Indeed, this is a request that we recognize that when we advocate for open source or free software, we're generally doing so within our own distorted reality, one that decides X is OK if it's proprietary while Y is not. So, Anthony clearly believes that his operating system should be free software, but he's not too bothered if the laptop's hardware is proprietary, or that the communication media he uses to advocate for free software are also closed.
Is he a hypocrite? No. He's a pragmatist. He has simply decided that an OS must be free and that the rest...need not. At least, not yet.
We're very good at pointing out flaws in others, and usually point our fingers just beyond the periphery of our own faults. This is convenient, but it doesn't make us any holier than the next guy.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay. Or don't, if you've found a superior, free-software clone of Twitter. ;-)
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Without the patronage of 15th-century European monarchs, the oppression of religious dissidents in England, and the slave trade, the nation that you and I call home would not exist today. Our ancestors got rid of monarchy and religious establishment as first orders of business, but abolition took almost a full century longer. The founders took the long view, allowing an inhumane institution to stand in order to create a nation founded on ideals that would lead to that institution's abolition. While it is similarly ironic that abolition came earlier in the British (by thirty-two years) and French (by seventeen years) empires than in the United States, I doubt you would argue that the American Revolution was any less valid as a result.
Even after abolition came to the U.S., "separate but equal" racial segregation legally existed in parts of the U.S. as a means of perpetuating the historical imbalance of power. It took another century for the courts to declare the practice incompatible with the nation's founding principles.
Similarly, I think history will ultimately look upon fauxpen source as an attempt to retain some vestige of the old vendor-biased balance of power in a world where users have gotten a taste of software freedom.
(Please note that I am making an extremely high-level analogy, and have taken great pains to avoid implying anything whatsoever about your views on anything other than free and open-source software. Let's not nudge the conversation toward becoming a proof of Godwin's Law.)
I'm not sure I understand your analogy disclaimer. Are you or are you not saying that open-core as a business model (which you call 'fauxpen source') is as morally reprehensible as owning human slaves? If not, what is the point exactly of your analogy? If so, I don't think you're going to find much sympathy for such an extreme and fundamentalist position.
Yes, these companies could refuse to use open source, and get by, but again, they are pragmatic. True, Microsoft (among others) wrote tons of code on their own that is not open source and not directly dependent on open source, but the initial starts they had did.
Also, IBM made a bold decision early on to 'open source' the hardware specs, which lead to them losing a lot of money, yet it also helped to bolster the PC industry.
No reasonable person would consider issues concerning software freedom to be anywhere near the magnitude of issues concerning human rights. If you had read my comment in its entirety, you would have noted that I compared fauxpen source (which is not the same as open-core) to segregation, not to slavery. Again, this is an imperfect analogy, full of holes, but useful as a rhetorical device.
You also missed my point. Matt argues that Mark and Glyn's pragmatism, which dictates use of some non-open software and hardware, is equivalent to Matt's use of the term "open source" to describe software that withholds some or all of the freedoms dictated by the Open Source Definition. My point is that Matt's actions violate the spirit of the OSD, much as legally enforced segregation violated the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I think some of us operate under a different assumption, that to use FOSS is better than using proprietary, but the use of either is not a moral issue.
I like the participatory nature of FOSS. I try to use FOSS even when, for me, as an end user, better proprietary solutions exist. I try to do my part and file bug reports and evangelize the benefits of FOSS to others, but I don't try to couch my support of FOSS in moral terms.
In fact, the quasi-religious, holier-than-thou attitude of some FOSS advocates turns me off to FOSS altogether.
Proprietary software has branding and company backing. Open Source keeps proprietary software in constant innovation mode and keeps the price right.
Obviously this doesn't work with Microsoft Windows as it is too expensive and bloated, but it does keep it in check to some degree and probably more so as time goes on.
Open Source gives some power to consumers and organizations when evaluating software choices.
Then, that humam decides(licence) to keep it secret (proprietary) or to disclose it (open source).
Essencially, what is done afterwards do not affect the software.
This is very simplistic, because of the interaction process. Someone will argue that the open source has more eye on it, so the process is better, and it is true. Others will say that the proprietary has more money so they can hire better talents, and that is also true.
Both methods (proprietary and open source) have vantages (and disadvantages).
I can go from Sao Paulo to Rio by car or by plane. Depending on the situation one is better or the other is better. But at the end, I will be there.
The same way, depending on the type of software, the open source fits better or proprietary does.
If this assumpion is right, I tend to think that the more popular a demand, the open source fits better. The more specific to the proprietary.
Is the fence there to keep things in or keep things out I wonder.
Absolutely admitted. The world has closed source and open source in it. It's not a religion. It's technology.
Open source has made for some absolutely wonderful advances, I run my web servers on Linux, and I use a database called Oracle, which is closed source.
Frankly you didn't make it clear where there is a conflict, or what the point of interest in your article was exactly.
The existence of X implies, by definition, the existence of what "X is not", nothing new under the sun, and actually nothing that any person would fail to admit, even people from 'free software world'.
However, you don't seem to be a user there
http://identi.ca/mjasay
Too bad .. as most open source twitter clients don't even realize the difference and you can set identi.ca to autopost to your twitter account :)
:)
- by mcginnisj June 20, 2009 9:40 AM PDT
- Little late to the party. The piece leaves the impression that Open Source owes everything to the commercial environment. Its really a two way street. From your own article --
- Reply to this comment
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(13 Comments)-- You mention blogging software, which I assume you mean WordPress. Yes commercial software. But let's relate the whole story -- It uses PHP, Open Source coding base.
-- You mention IBM and its $1Bn commitment to FOSS. That is just a down payment. Hark back to the dark days of the early 1990's and the run up to Y2K. IBM was losing customers in droves as their code bases and platforms - Mainframe, Mini, PC - could not talk to each other. It was so bad that in some cases you could not even port the data sets from one platform to another for the same application! Companies realized that, well hell if I have to go that far I might as well consider competitors as well. It's the same effort, and they did.
Along comes Linux, IBM saw it as a means to provide a cross platform solution suite and that is what they did. IBM convinced customers that they could utilize Linux on their platforms and that the code would run on any platform that was an IBM certified application. That single move made the difference between IBM staying a contender in the IT wars or going the way of Sun.
Every dividend check that IBM issues is like a realization of a second life. They owe it to Open Source.
There are many stories like this. Another is the **** wringing a certain GPU mfr got into with its user base. A enterprising young man figured out what need to be added to the code, did so, posted, got sued by said vendor. All hell broke loose in the user community. Said vendor now contracts the guy out to make upgrades just so they have IP control of the code. They also now have updated code faster than their own in-house staff could deliver.
The fact is the give and take between the two camps is about equal. FOSS has no reason to feel that they owe anybody anything.