Free software… Now what?

When you change places with your slave, even for the tiniest moment, your life is forever changed. You cannot then fail to seek his or her freedom. Yet freedom is incontrovertible only to the slave. To the free person, a degenerate form of freedom is often just the freedom to exploit, while to the slave, freedom is just emancipation. The chaos of freedom can form its own prison. What’s missing in raw freedom is responsibility and guidance. Long term success demands more than freedom and the protection of freedom.

Both Microsoft Windows and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) equally strive to be free! The difference is only intent: FOSS wants freedom from lock-in or lock-out while proprietary private interests wants freedom to forge the lock: Both need the help of a larger vision.

Proprietary private interest software, such as Microsoft Windows, epitomizes the danger of raw freedom: irresponsible freedom is one-sided and selfish and embodies only the freedom to operate with as few constraints as possible in order to maximise revenue and profits. As an extreme example, Windows may need corrective constraint and guidance to become less predatory and to reduce its lock-in of users as well as developers. Ultimately, this guidance may derive from anti-monopoly legislation in the U.S., E.U., and interested countries, including India. In the end, Microsoft may learn the hard way to become a more responsible player who can be responsive to the needs of its customers for healthy competition in the software and IT services industry.

For related reasons, unconstrained freedom cannot be the ultimate goal of FOSS. Without purpose and guidance free software often degenerates into sloppy, mediocre, or half-built products caught in the inevitable myopia of small or specialized projects. Raw freedom cannot guarantee quality or relevance. The best free software is constrained by a vision of purpose and requires the good fortune to be guided by the broad perspective of talented leadership. Linus Torvalds is the quintessential “benign dictator” of Linux.

The ideal of “freedom” in Free and Open Source Software must be to share the energies and extend the protections of all contributors and developers in mutual benefit. However, the ideal of collaborative self-development and mutual self-help cannot by itself ensure highest quality and relevance, since the developer community is but a fraction of the larger consumer community. In the baby steps beyond initial freedom, FOSS needs feedback, guidance and proactive assistance from all of its well-wishers and beneficiaries to maintain lasting quality and relevance. The beneficiaries which form the ultimate customer base of FOSS are more motivated by the indirect and derivative benefits of freedom. For example, small offices using Open Office only care about functionality and cost. Large government or industry consumers, in addition, want to use Open Source to drive down costs through competition with private proprietary monopolists. Despite their disinterest in the code base, these consumers are the only way to sustain FOSS as an industry paradigm. For the FOSS nuclear engine to sustain its power it must add the fuel of acceptance and use. Wide acceptance drives up the quality and breadth of features of all Free and Open Source Software.

But acceptance of FOSS depends only in part on FOSS itself. The indirect benefits of FOSS must be used to facilitate the investment by government and industry into the technological base and to encourage third party vendors to evolve deployment and support structures.

FOSS needs the support and investment of both governments and private adopters. Governments must accelerate their support of FOSS to guarantee their own independence, authority and capacity to engineer information based societies. Private interests must also support FOSS to promote a business services model which generates jobs and wealth in the very communities they serve.