Software Freedom: An Introduction
Introduction
Further Efforts
1 The Goal
Safety, Quality, and Opportunity
2 Why
2.1 Safety
2.2 Quality
2.3 Opportunity
3 What is free software?
Five Freedoms
3.1 How is software made free?
4 How to Create Software
Aristotle said ...
4.1 Commons-based Peer-production
4.2 The Advantages of Commons-based Peer-production
5 Legal framework
5.1 Partial Benefits
5.2 Need for a Reliable, Quick, and Honest Legal System
6 Freedom and Duty, in detail
A Way to Employ Copyright Law
6.1 Copyright, Copyleft
6.2 Use
6.3 Copy
6.4 Redistribute
6.5 Study
6.6 Source code is vital
6.7 Modify
6.8 The Duty to Distribute Derived Source
6.9 More limited licenses
7 Software Dangers
8 What Free Software Brings
8.1 What Freedom Brings to Software
Free Software Brings Security
Free Software Brings Reliability
Free Software Brings Efficiency
8.2 What Free Software Brings to Customers and Businesses
Bloat and Frugality
Frugal standards
Choice of Vendors
The Legal Right to Start a Business
Running a Legal Business Less Expensively
8.3 What Free Software Brings to Society
Access
Collaboration and Sharing
How Freedom and Competition Work Together
Empowering Society
9 The Social Costs of Restrictions
Selfish by Law: Don't Share That Toy!
9.1 "Rah! Rah! Forbidden to Study"
9.2 Raising the Cost of Discovery
10 Misleading Metaphors
Software is Different
10.1 Software is Non-rivalrous
10.2 Software is Inexhaustible
10.3 Software is Easily Manufactured
10.4 Software is Potentially Nonexcludable
11 Metaphors explain the new in terms of the old
11.1 Metaphor: Information Highway
11.2 Electronic Shopping Mall
11.3 Great Library
11.4 Metaphors Tell Us About the Internet
11.5 More Metaphors: Viral Code and Vaccination
12 Licenses, Game Theory, and Strategy
Different Entities
12.1 An Evolutionarily Stable Strategy
12.2 Software Licenses
12.3 Objections to the Theory
13 Limits to Learning
13.1 Trade Secrecy
13.2 Ban Reverse Engineering
13.3 Patent Restrictions
13.4 Trade-off between citizens' interests
13.5 Different Attacks in Summary
14 Tiger teams and Poodle Teams
Poodle Teams
14.1 Telling the difference
15 The Manufacturing Delusion
Software is Not Rivalrous
15.1 Why Enter the Software Industry?
16 Business models
17 Concluding Remarks
Appendix A GNU General Public License
Preamble
Appendix: How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
Appendix B GNU Free Documentation License
Concept Index
About the Author
Software Freedom: An Introduction
*********************************
Copyright (C) 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Robert J. Chassell
This document introduces software freedom: why and how such freedom is
important.
Edition 1.03, 2005 Oct 27
This uses a verbatim license, since it is a statement of my opinions;
it is not a manual or help document.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
this entire document without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Introduction
************
Often times, our societies are hurt by the newly gained ease with
which computer programs can be duplicated and information stored. We
face new and different difficulties than in the past. These
difficulties come from bad laws, false beliefs, and obsolete
institutions.
With software freedom, we can overcome these difficulties (leaving us
with the more 'normal' problems of an advanced society).(1)
When I first started this book, I thought I was only going to discuss
the implications of "increasing returns to scale", in which the more
you make, the easier it is to make more. As a practical matter,
oligopolies or monopolies are the consequence of such a technology.
In the past, with steel making and oil refining in the late 19th
century, this kind of economic development caused problems with both
quality and opportunity. In the present, software oligopolies have
exposed us to machines that need frequent reboots, systems that are
vulnerable to simple viruses, and to a wide-spread belief that
computers often fail for no good reason. (Such flaws are avoided by
good software.)
But, to my surprise, in working on this book, in addition to talking
about problems of quality and opportunity, I also found myself
figuring out how to defend freedom from assault, how to defend
ourselves from enemies without and from criminals within.
Bad laws and obsolete institutions weaken us. Their perceived
benefits are short term. Their long term effects bring danger. The
consequences are startling. For long term survival, we must change
ongoing practices and ways of thinking within our societies.
I first became involved with software freedom in 1984. In 1985, I
became a founding director and the first corporate treasurer of the
Free Software Foundation, Inc. The FSF was designed as the
institutional arm of the GNU Project, an effort to create a complete,
free software system. I have been involved with software freedom ever
since. Over all, I have been involved in aspects of software other
than programming. (I wrote a book, 'An Introduction to Programming in
Emacs Lisp', but I do not think of programming as the focus of my
life.) I edited more than a dozen books and handled the finances and
administration of the Free Software Foundation.
It took many years, but the GNU Project succeeded. GNU/Linux (often
shortened to 'Linux') not only works, it is readily available and is
used by millions of people. For the GNU Project, the most difficult
years were the first seven, in the 1980s and the early 1990s. During
that time, we created most of the key parts of the system. In the
early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, who was not directly involved in the
Project, created a kernel, called 'Linux', which while not as good as
the kernel being created under FSF auspices, was good enough and
worked. More to the point, Linus placed his kernel under the GNU
General Public License. This meant it could be used legally. The GNU
system with the Linux kernel proved highly attractive, technically,
socially, and legally. Within another seven years, GNU/Linux had
spread widely.
It is sad that we had to develop free software intentionally. In the
early days -- during the first generation after 1950 -- all software
was free or perceived as free. That is to say, programmers felt they
had the right to copy, study, modify, and redistribute it. Indeed, in
the beginning, you could not copyright a computer program and you
could not patent any of its mathematics. Trade secrecy existed but
was not felt as onerous.
Perhaps the best metaphor for software is that of a cooking recipe. A
recipe tells you how to cook dinner. A computer program tells a
computer how to act. Neither are necessarily considered 'literature',
although both may be well written. Most importantly, people expect to
share cooking recipes. Although a few cooks attempt to keep secrets,
most are happy to tell you what they did. Similarly, at the
beginning, most programmers were happy to tell you how they
programmed. But then, some lost the freedom to talk.
Beginning in the 1970s and early 1980s, it became legal in the United
States for companies to copyright computer programs, and legal for
them to patent mathematical procedures. Software vendors stopped
supplying source code. 'Non-Disclosure Agreements' prevented
programmers from helping each other.
These attacks on programmers' freedom inspired Richard Stallman, a
brilliant computer programmer, to talk about freedom and then to pull
together many people and start the GNU Project, to create and
distribute software that would be free.
This book is not about the GNU Project, nor is it about software as
such. Rather, it is about the beliefs, laws, and institutions that
surround or should surround the software industry.
And freedom, as with every social institution, needs beliefs, laws,
and people to protect it.
Acknowledgements
----------------
I am especially indebted to the works of Douglass C. North and Yochai
Benkler. I would like to thank both men for their writings. Their
works led me to change how I think. Neither, as far as I know, have
suggested that they hold the opinions I present here; they may well
hold different opinions or have come to different conclusions than I.
I am also indebted to the works of Alan Page Fiske, Adam Przeworski,
Lawrence Lessig, and Clayton M. Christensen, who have opened my eyes
to the nature and structure of our society and to the institutions
that configure it. My many thanks. I hope I have learned well.
I would like to express my thanks and indebtedness to two men whom I
know personally, who have shaped my thoughts and life, Richard M.
Stallman and Eben Moglen. Richard introduced me and others to the
idea of software freedom, and started the project which has led to the
most significant current instance of free software, the programs of
the GNU operating system using a Linux kernel. Eben inspired me to
look further into the institutions and laws that can help or hinder
our success.
Finally, I would like to thank Stacey Goldstein and Bradley Kuhn for
helping me with this book -- most importantly, for keeping themselves
and others 'off my back' until I understood myself the issues; and
then for helping my own discoveries to others.
My mistakes are my own.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) For example, the degree to which we should attend to the short
term or the long term consequences of an action. One situation
occurred in the 1980s and 1990s; the consequences are still with us:
on one side, the GNU Project chose not to make it easy for a user,
without quite realizing it, to execute code. In contrast, Microsoft
Corporation chose to make it easy, as a part of its 'email
experience'. This choice is enjoyed by virus writers and hated by
those who have suffered from computer viruses.
Further Efforts
===============
After reading through quickly and briefly, you may wish to go further.
My suggestion is that you determine how certain you judge each claim
-- perhaps some are weak -- and you evaluate the proposals that are
mentioned.
For judgement, provide evidence for (or against) each claim. The
intent is to exercise 'determinative' oratory, as described in *note
(Choice-and-Constraint)Words Only::. However, the evidence will
mostly, perhaps entirely, be of the 'I hear' or 'I know culturally'
nature, rather than of the 'I reason', 'I observe', or 'I experiment'
nature.
Informally, the 'I hear' evidence will consist simply of cocking one's
head and saying to one self, "right!" or "wrong!" or "somewhat
suggestive". More formally the evidence will consist of scholarly
references, news stories, or interviews. The 'I know culturally'
evidence requires, I think, a convincing, personal story.
It is good practice to specify what you think is the certainty (or
uncertainty) for each claim or bit of evidence: whether it be a slight
hint, weakly suggestive, suggestive, or highly suggestive, or the
contraries.
Thus, there is text that says that software freedom leads to safety,
quality, and opportunity. Is this true, and if so, how true? Is the
evidence weakly suggestive, suggestive, or highly suggestive, or the
contrary? By evidence, I refer to what you know or can find out as
well as to what is written.
Supposing the claim is highly suggestive, as I think. Then you can
evaluate a political proposal, in this case, favoring software freedom
using the GNU General Public License as the legal tool. An
alternative proposal, that I do not mention, is to ban copyright
altogether. Yet another is to use the GNU General Public License but
to shorten the length of copyright.
To evaluate a political proposal, you can use the 'four Ps of
politics': protect, preserve, prepare, and provide. (*Note The Petals
of Cooperation: (Choice-and-Constraint)Petals of Cooperation.) You
can use other criteria, too.
In each proposal, what is currently uncertain and what should be
determined? If the underlying factors are sufficiently uncertain,
should the proposal be revised to succeed regard of outcome? If so,
how?
1 The Goal
**********
Our circumstances are straight-forward. Over the past half century,
technology has advanced. We can now copy and distribute large
programs easily and cheaply. We could not do this in the past. This
change in technology changes our society.
Safety, Quality, and Opportunity
================================
For safety, quality, and opportunity, we need software freedom. By
software freedom, I mean our freedom to use, copy, redistribute,
study, and modify software.
Not everyone will choose to exercise their freedom, but with such
freedom, more people will be able to discover, develop, and apply
advances. We will survive and prosper; those who fail will lose.
Similarly, with freedom, more people will have the motivation and
resources to make software reliable, efficient, and secure. We will
enjoy high quality software. And finally, with freedom, more people
will learn to understand, change, and make use of this new world that
technology has brought. We all will gain opportunity.
In a small, informal society, a few comfortable social conventions can
protect software freedom. But in the large, complex society that we
inhabit, we need laws and institutions to defend ourselves; otherwise,
freedom will lose. Moreover, as a practical matter, in the modern
world, conventions will not be widely adopted by businessmen and
others unless they are backed by law.
Firstly, software freedom must be defended against enemies who wage
war.
Secondly, software must be defended against thieves. Otherwise they
will gain a free ride, and eventually ride us down.
Both these necessities impose constraints on how governments and other
organizations may use software, and on their collection and use of
information. Moreover, these necessities impose constraints on the
types of laws and institutional arrangements that may be chosen.
* Governments, businesses, and other organizations must change how
they plan and implement information collection and storage,
because the more successful they are at collecting and storing
information, the more attractive a target they become to crooks
and other enemies.
* Governments, businesses, and other organizations must change how
they acquire software and subsidize development, because the more
successfully they support restrictions on software, the more
vulnerable they become.
* Citizens must change their laws and institutions, to favor
safety, quality, and opportunity; because old laws, and the
institutions that grew out of them, fail under new conditions.
Fundamentally, it does no good to create or continue laws that aid
enemies of any sort or that weaken ourselves.
Moreover, to strengthen ourselves, we need to discover, develop, and
apply advances. This means that rather than extend the period of
copyright more years into the future, copyrights must be shortened.
(Copyright cannot be ended altogether, since it provides a way to
protect freedom.) Software patents must be abolished.
Finally, rather than ask a government to purchase or subsidize
software that puts restrictions on what people may do, our defense
requires that governments focus their purchases and operations on
software that frees people to learn and advance, and do this in a
manner that protects everyone from thieves and enemies..
All these actions are necessary to defend society, to benefit from
software, and to gain opportunity.
These actions will be opposed by the short-sighted, the craven, and by
those who wish to attack our countries, to hurt us, and to take away
our freedom.
2 Why
*****
There are three reasons to favor software freedom:
* safety,
* quality, and,
* opportunity.
2.1 Safety
==========
For many people, the deepest argument for software freedom is simple:
without it, we all will lose our freedom. We will be conquered, if
not now, within a few generations.
Victory goes not to the brave, nor to the dedicated but, more often
than not, to those with the more advanced technology, and the means
and will to use it.
Victory does not necessarily mean military victory; it may mean
commercial victory.
An "advanced technology" need not be a computer or other technology
requiring a complex production technique. A jujitsu throw may be
advanced: the goal is to win. Success may come from a throw that uses
an attacker's strength against him and against which he is not
guarded.
2.2 Quality
===========
Over time, free software tends to become more reliable, efficient, and
secure. Free software gains quality. This is because everyone
involved has the motivation, and some have the resources, to improve
the software.
Machines should not crash unnecessarily, email messages should not
waste their recipients' money, computer systems should not be
vulnerable to simple viruses. Computer programs should do what you
want.
The owners and managers of a company that produces proprietary
software have a motive to delay publishing some bug fixes: the
shareholders gain more when they can sell more copies of an update or
of a second update; and they can sell more when the update fixes bugs.
Clearly, this economic motivation has no effect when the software -
proprietary or free -- is sold in a competitive, free market; for in
that case, customers will seek reliability. Consumers will avoid a
company that delays bug-fix publication.
But if a customer finds it difficult to change, if he or she
experiences 'lock in', then the customer may decide to suffer current
problems rather than change to different software. As with all people
who deal with a monopoly, or partial monopoly, the customer makes a
trade-off. He or she knows that the seller is taking more resources
than the seller could obtain in a fair market, but the extra cost to
the customer may not be enough to stop the customer from using the
product.
A customers is 'locked in' when he or she must pay a high transition
cost to shift to another vendor or to another solution. For example,
a person may keep his or her information, or his or her company's
information, in a format that is restricted to one vendor. A 'locked
in' customer will accept less efficient software than otherwise,
because the loss in efficiency costs less than the costs of change.
Indeed, since computers, even those with poor software, provide such
an increase in efficiency over the previous generations' pen, pencil,
typewriter, mimeograph, filing cabinet, and printing house, a user may
not appreciate that his or her poor, restricted software is
inefficient compared to other readily available software. Company
accountants, for example, may not think that the cost to a company of
viruses is a cost they are duty bound to stop.
But 'lock in' cannot exist in a competitive, free market, the kind of
market that software freedom creates. In such a market, a customer
can easily find another vendor. A customer can easily reduce the
costs of viruses.
With freedom, a customer will pay little or no extra cost to shift to
another software provider, another service, or another hardware
provider. This means that customers will tend to choose the more
efficient over the less efficient, since the more efficient costs less
over all.
When given the choice, customers prefer security. They do not like
the cost of losing their work, or losing a part of it. They do not
like to clean up from a disaster. They do not want to be robbed.
They do not want their personal habits made available to a crook,
their medical or financial data taken, their bank account emptied, or
their identity stolen. They dislike the consequences and they dislike
the fear.
Many customers dislike insecurity; but if the cost of shifting is
higher than the benefits they see to staying, then they will not
shift. Worse, some customers have not spent the necessary 'indirect
costs' of learning their circumstances. They do not realize that they
need not suffer. They have not invested the resources needed to learn
that security is possible.
But again, when transition costs are low, people will choose software
that is safe. Not everyone will so choose; but enough people will
choose so that secure software exists and expands. In addition,
hardware providers will offer software that, along with necessary
hardware and social habits, gives security.
Only when the perceived benefits of insecure software are greater than
the cost of changing, will people stay with insecure software.
2.3 Opportunity
===============
A free society is better than the alternative. You gain opportunity.
Your freedom to create and use software is a part of living in a
better society. Software freedom guarantees you the legal right to
work, to start a business, to choose whom to hire, to chose from whom
to buy, to choose software, to help others, and to share.
Software freedom does not guarantee that you will do well or be well;
but it does guarantee that you will have the opportunity.
Software has become an important part of a modern economy, like steel
or wheat. In the 1950s, the word 'software' did not exist, although
what we now call software was being written and used.
Incidentally, I first heard the term 'software' in 1966. Although I
understood that the term was a metaphor based on the word 'hardware',
at first I was continually confused. I kept mistaking the word
'software' with the phrase 'soft goods', which refer to products such
as draperies. I had a hard time learning to define 'software' as
insubstantial programs rather than as the kind of product from which
you can make substantial, but flexible, curtains.
Advances in technology have brought software into view. Just as we no
longer live in the kind of world that existed in the 1450s, we no
longer live in the kind of world that existed in the 1950s. In the
1950s, for example, mechanical devices controlled the engines of most
automobiles. Now the job is done by electronic devices, which are
controlled by software.
The issue at hand is how much freedom we all should have in learning
to understand, change, and make use of this new world.
If you or someone else wants to use a car with a particular device in
it, how expensive should it be? Should the device be priced at a
higher than fair market value, which transfers value from you to the
seller, or should it be priced at a level that motivates the seller to
sell, but which does not transfer away as many of your resources?
If you or someone else want to start a business involving these
electronic devices, how expensive should it be? Should you be
forbidden? Should others also be forbidden?
Should you have the ability to choose readily the person or entity
from whom you buy services or hardware? Or should you make decisions
based on a high cost of shifting? By cost, I do not mean only direct
costs, but indirect costs, such as those of changing habits or those
of relearning. I mean, all the costs that come into a decision.
Of course, you will not be interested in most opportunities: I, for
example, am not much interested in the auto-parts industry, although I
recognize its importance. The question is whether you and others
should have the right both to be interested and to act.
The different choices open to you and others depend on how
institutions are organized. For example, a society can implement
institutions that restrict what you may learn or do; or the society
may implement institutions that encourage you to learn and act.
It goes without saying that people in a society can only implement
institutions within certain constraints; if they wish for more utopian
institutions, they may not be able to sustain them successfully.
Utopias often fail. Human character, habits, environments, the
available technologies, costs, and outsiders, all limit what can be
done. Nonetheless, people have choices, especially in the richer,
technologically more advanced societies.
The issues with software are whether to set up institutions that
restrict who may use a software package, which raise its cost, a
practice that is advantageous to some, but not to others; whether to
set up situations which reduce copying, which again is advantageous to
some, but not to others; and whether to introduce rules that reduce
redistribution, study, and modification?
As the Nobel Prize winning economist, Douglass C. North wrote(1)
_... institutions basically alter the price individuals pay ..._
For example, legal barriers to inexpensive use, enforced by police and
courts, lead to higher costs for people who use that software.
When there are legal barriers to study, organizations tend to work and
rework what they already possess, rather than employ inputs from
outside, even though the outside inputs may contain valuable
innovations.
However, a society cannot do without institutions; as North also said,
_The major role of institutions in a society is to reduce
uncertainty by establishing a stable (but not necessarily
efficient) structure to human interaction._
Every society will define in one way or another the bundles of rights
and obligations, the transfers of resources from one to another, the
costs, and the benefits, that its members enjoy or suffer.
In the United States, for example, it is legal, relatively easy, and
not too expensive to obtain a copy of Shakespeare's play, 'Macbeth'.
This was not true in Britain or its then colonies for more than a
century and a half after Shakespeare's death in 1616. During that
time, the British government continued to enforce the copyright
restriction that the copyright holders had on Shakespeare's plays.
That law was finally repealed in 1774.
But repeal can be reversed. Until recently, many thought that it
would become legal and perhaps even easy to reprint books first
printed in the United States during the 1928 - 1932 administration of
President Hoover. But the U. S. Congress changed that previous right.
You may not legally reprint such books, except by going through a
process that is costly in time, and sometimes money; and even then,
you may not obtain the legal right -- a right that until a few years
ago, you had every expectation of having in the early years of the
21st century.
Freedom provides for one way of structuring a society. As a general
rule, a free society provides more people with dignity and power than
a non-free society.
It goes without saying that a society with freedom must limit the
power that some might gain. This is because those people's '*freedom
to*' enables them to hurt others, who wish '*freedom from*'. There is
an old saying, "your freedom to swing your fist stops at the end of my
nose". The freedom "to swing your fist" is a 'freedom to'; freedom
from being hit is a 'freedom from'.
Quite clearly, not everyone can have 'freedom to' do anything.
'Freedom from' is necessary. Otherwise, people will get into each
other's way, and hurt each other. Programmers cannot hide their code
from others and still gain the benefits of collaboration.
That is why the major license for software freedom, the GNU General
Public License, can be understood as a protection, as a 'vaccination'.
The License is primarily a 'freedom from' license; it protects a
programmer from having his or her work taken without recompense. (The
License is also a 'freedom to' license; it permits third parties to
collaborate, even if an author or other first party turns against
sharing.)
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) 'Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance',
Douglass C. North, 1990,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 6, 22
ISBN 0-521-39416-3 hardback
ISBN 0-521-39734-0 paperback
3 What is free software?
************************
When I write about software, I am referring both to the programs that
run the computer, that is to say its operating system, and to
applications, such as electronic mail, spreadsheets, writing tools,
and Web browsers. In addition, I am referring to applications that
are embedded in a machine, applications that control a fuel injector,
or operate a telephone, or control a washing machine.
Five Freedoms
=============
Free software is software that you may use, copy, redistribute, study,
and modify.
These five freedoms constitute a bundle of rights.
Of course, an end-user, someone who uses but does not program a
computer, may wish only to copy and use a particular piece of
software. But that software is developed and improved by programmers
and others who study, modify, and redistribute software. The whole
bundle of rights is necessary.
The freedoms to use, copy, redistribute, study, and modify software
are not intrinsic to the technology: there exists software that you
are forbidden to use, forbidden to copy, forbidden to redistribute,
forbidden to study, and forbidden to modify.
In addition, for free software to be effective socially, a programmer,
or more precisely, the legal copyright holder of a program, must adopt
an obligation to the community: when a programmer fixes or extends
work that others have done, and makes that work public, the copyright
holder must pass on the same rights that he or she received, so that
others may use those fixes and extensions. The free software
community calls this practice 'copyleft'.
The converse of this is that others have the same obligation. If you
are a programmer, this duty of theirs ensures your access to
improvements and fixes to your own work, as well as to the work of
others. It means that everyone, including people who are not
programmers, will benefit.
The GNU General Public License is the legal tool that provides the
most freedom for software. It is the most protective of all the legal
tools. It takes away others' freedom to hurt you and others, and
restricts them from becoming bullies.
In essence, the GNU GPL forbids you to forbid; you may do everything
else. It also forbids others from stopping you.
Consider, for example, the history of the GNU Compiler Collection,
GCC. This program is used by many developers to convert their human
readable code to code that runs machines.
Richard M. Stallman began writing GCC in the mid 1980s. At that time,
he wrote it to work with just one computer programming language, C, so
initially he called it the 'GNU C Compiler'. However, he wrote the
beginnings soundly enough that people could adapt it for other
languages, which they did. In part, this extension is the result of
good technical work; if the program failed frequently when people
adapted it to other languages, or had the job appeared too hard, no
one would have extended the program. But GCC was well designed and
implemented, so people with a certain amount of skill could make
extensions. But in addition to being technologically possible,
extension had to be legally possible, without hassle.
In the late 1980s, programmers created another program, called Kyoto
Common Lisp. They did a good job technically. However, that code was
encumbered by a restriction that at first appeared minor: if you
transferred the code to someone else, you were responsible for
registering their name with the creators. This was intended to enable
the creators to warn all users of problems and pass on improvements.
The goal was good. But the restriction meant that no one would sell
CDs with the software on it, because of the hassle of registration.
Similarly, few, if any Internet repositories would distribute the
code, because they could not be sure that those who copied it would
register properly.
So the software stayed stunted. Few used it.
Then the license was changed to the GNU General Public License (a
copyright holder may always make such a change, regardless of the
previous license) and the software became more widely used. And then
it was folded into GCC. Now, it is part of the GNU Compiler Collection
and called 'GNU Common Lisp'.
3.1 How is software made free?
==============================
Freedom requires a legal and institutional framework. There are
different ways to ensure software freedom; the most powerful way is to
attach a special copyright license, the GNU General Public License, to
the software. This license gives you and others more rights than most
licenses.
In essence, the GNU General Public License forbids a copyright holder
to forbid. You -- a copyright holder, a programmer, or someone who
does not care about programming -- may do everything else. Your
rights and those of others are reciprocal; this encourages
collaboration among those who wish to work on the software. The GNU
GPL protects programmers from having their work stolen from them and
it protects users from being over charged for shoddy work.
Other kinds of free software license exist; some, unfortunately, do
little to support software freedom (*note An Evolutionarily Stable
Strategy: Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.). I will talk about these
licenses in *note More limited licenses: Limited Licenses.
But first, I wish to talk about the way software is created -- false
dreams and true practices.
4 How to Create Software
************************
An argument against free software is that it removes the incentives
needed for program development. It removes the inspiration that
programmers need. This argument is based on a common but false theory
of human action.
Some think that programmers work only for pay, rather than partially
for pay. The theory is based on the false mental model that people
work only for money; and that they are not motivated by anything else.
The theory contains some truth. Certainly, for many kinds of economic
activity, pay is the most important motivator. No one works on an
assembly line for pleasure. Similarly, those who do not work for pay,
volunteers, cannot help all the poor and helpless. Those who claim
otherwise are wrong. The burden is too heavy for volunteers to
provide the food, the hospitalization, and the income needed. Payment
is necessary.
Thus, those who focus on pay as a motivator have reason for their
mental model. But it does not apply universally. Those who focus on
the benefits of volunteering also have reason.
Aristotle said ...
==================
2300 years ago, Aristotle spoke of the need for an aristocracy.
Without one, he said, civilization could not occur. Only those who
did not work for material motivations would have time to run a
government, to create art, and to write plays.
In Aristotle's day, a group that did not create material objects had
to take them from others. Because of the lack of technological
development, people, rather than machines, did the work. This is why
Aristotle favored slavery, "until the shuttle", as he said, could
"weave by itself"(1). Two millennia after Aristotle, inventors
created automated textile machines; these machines could do the work
that women, slaves, and other people had done before.
People need to eat to live. A minimal income is necessary. And, of
course, people need to learn how to do things. Schooling is required.
This costs time and money. So, to follow Aristotle, people who create
must have some form of income. They need to be educated.
However, and this is the argument of those who favor volunteer work,
in addition to working for paid income, which most economists define
as the prime motivator, many people also work for internal reasons,
for the pleasure of what they are doing, and for external reasons, to
improve their reputation or status in the eyes of others, or because
they are expected to work.
Quite obviously, the rich have worked for non-monetary gain, or for
indirect monetary gain, for centuries. Some, of course, never work,
but many do find that some sort of work is their most interesting long
term occupation.
More recently, Abraham Maslow spoke of a hierarchy of needs,
* survival,
* security,
* social,
* esteem, and then, once those are assured,
* 'self-actualization'.
Successful software creation depends on people who can satisfy their
needs for survival and security, and who then work for internal or
external reasons that are not directly monetary.
Modern technology makes this process, called 'commons-based
peer-production', more effective than ever before.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) In Benjamin Jowett's 1885 translation of Aristotle's Politics,
Section 1.4, <http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/xari.htm#1253b23>, the
full quotation is:
_... if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying
or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus,
or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet,_
_ "of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods"_;
_if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum
touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would
not want servants, nor masters slaves._
4.1 Commons-based Peer-production
=================================
In his essay,'Coase's Penguin',(1) Yochai Benkler described the
successful modern practice for "knowledge work" and named it
"commons-based peer-production".
The keys to understanding commons-based peer-production are that:
* Nowadays, we are richer than we were and more people can engage
in "knowledge work" than in ancient times. Instead of women
weaving by hand, or slaves cultivating a field, machines can do
some of the necessary work.
* Computers and communications have lowered the costs of
information inputs. With further progress, the costs will
continue to come down, unless governments intentionally create
inefficiency.
* Because communications are quicker and less expensive than they
were, individuals can experience others' feedback sooner rather
than later; this means that even the impatient can enjoy social
motivations.
Moreover, commons-based peer-production solves management problems
that otherwise dog forms of production based on markets or contracts.
In particular, through peer review, commons-based peer-production
provides for 'subsidiarity'. The process locates a decision as close
as possible to where it is appropriate. Peer review stays within the
commons-based peer-production organization.
From past experience with academics, novelists, artists, and
aristocrats, we can understand the key organizational factors for
successful commons-based peer-production:
* Provide enough pay. People must survive.
* Reduce generalized fear, such as fear of losing one's income.
* Reduce the particular fear that thieves will steal one's work,
possibly in a manner that is felt to be unjust even if legal.
(This tells us the importance of the GNU General Public License.)
* Provide for inexpensive communications.
* Provide for appropriate tools.
* Reduce the cost of inputs (and remember to include hassle as a
cost).
In addition, we know that:
* People must choose themselves to work on a project, and be
self-directed; otherwise, for this kind of "knowledge work", they
will be less productive.
* Before going public, some person or group must take
responsibility for initial design, to give the project a distinct
form and direction.
* The design itself must possess strong and stable foundations, so
others can add rooms and towers, without the edifice falling
down.
* The design itself must be modular. Modules minimize the
cooperation needed for small projects and enables many different
and independent people to cooperate on larger programs. Modules
enable people to handle complexity.
A "time and motion" expert can tell a person how most efficiently to
assemble a widget, or to dig a ditch.
Indeed, a century ago, Frederick W. Taylor, an early "time and motion"
expert, became famous for figuring out how to improve the efficiency
of digging ditches by hand. Shovels existed in Aristotle's time; and
people dug ditches. But a shovel's design, and the way people dug,
were inefficient. More than 2000 years after Aristotle, Taylor
figured out a more efficient way; the method was adopted by the
Bethlehem Steel corporation and then by others.(2)
But programming is not ditch digging. Programming requires more
thought and creativity. "Time and motion" are not enough.
Moreover, people who work on software projects vary greatly from one
another. In a group of 11 programmers, one may do as much work as the
other 10. Also, we know that it is difficult for managers to
determine who is able to do more programming than another and the
relative quality and difficulty of that programming. We know that it
is difficult to determine who is motivated at any given time.
Because people differ so much from each other, project managers have a
hard time deciding how to pay a fair amount to a person who programs
part of a project. This is the case whether that person is in a
corporate work force or working through a market.
A decade ago, Richard Greenblatt, a famous programmer and the founder
of Lisp Machine Inc., tried to set up a just, proportional-pay
scheme:(3) his goal was to design an institution in which many people
could cooperate on a project, and in which each would be paid for his
contribution. However, no one could figure out how to pay each person
justly. The problem continues.
One suggestion is to pay a person according the number of lines of
code he or she writes: the problem is that cheats will write more
lines; and, in any event, the best code is often well thought out, and
short.
Another suggestion is to use contracts: that is to say, to set up a
company that hires programmers and that also sets up a management
structure to decide and inspire the programmers to work. This is a
common technique and is the method that many people assume is the norm
for the industry.
Unfortunately, the contract/contractor method is inefficient. Some
software projects fail spectacularly. Others cost more than expected.
Moreover, the relationship between customer and vendor may be warped:
often, with software, a customer learns what he or she wants over
time. Either the customer pays more than planned, or the vendor
absorbs the extra cost. Neither are efficient.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) 'Coase's Penguin', Yochai Benkler,
<http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF>
(2) Taylor did two things: after discovering the most efficient
weight (from an employer's point of view) for a shovel load, about 10
kg, he designed and manufactured different sized shovels for different
density substances; and he devised a way to leverage a shovel off
one's hip, so diggers consumed fewer calories.
(3) Personal communication
4.2 The Advantages of Commons-based Peer-production
===================================================
As Benkler says in his article,(1)
_[Commons-based peer-production] is better ... at identifying and
assigning human capital to information and cultural production
processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in
what I call "information opportunity cost." That is, it loses
less information about who the best person for a given job might
be ..._
A person chooses where to work, which increases his or her motivation.
And others encourage that person to work where the programmer will be
most helpful. Or, to be less diplomatic, others discourage the
incompetent. (All successful projects must include ways to weed out
low quality contributions.)
Without the costs and hassle of defining and enforcing property and
contract rights, the costs of organization go down. To use
economists' jargon, transaction costs are lower.
Because the goal is to satisfy oneself or others, education benefits.
Instead of a customer who pays more than planned, or a vendor who must
absorb unexpected costs, people can learn from each other, and help
each other, which people like to do when it does not cost them. (Of
course, not everyone wants or likes to learn or help others; but
enough do.)
Moreover, as Benkler says,(2)
_Peer-production has an advantage ... because it allows larger
groups of individuals to scour larger groups of resources in
search of materials, projects, collaborations, and combinations
than do firms or individuals who function in markets. This is
because property and contract impose transaction costs to limit
the access of people to each other, to resources and to projects
..._
The art of government is to design the rules and institutions of an
economy so that they work well. The rules and institutions must
support programmers and others.
In particular, while some programmers do not mind when others take
their work from them and do not provide any help or recompense in
return, other programmers, the majority, interpret such actions as
theft, whether or not it is legal. Theft discourages these
programmers. They want 'freedom from' theft.
Hence, a government must provide courts and inexpensive mechanisms to
enforce an anti-theft license, such as the GNU General Public License.
Otherwise, a government will see fewer programs developed in its
country.
In addition, a government must keep down the costs of information
inputs to programmers. Otherwise, as in any occupation, higher costs
will reduce output.
Finally, a government must never hinder cooperation, else it raises
transaction costs and destroys the efficiency of its software
industry.
These three requirements tell a statesman what is needed:
* First, a government must ensure that people feel they are living
in a society with justice. People work less hard and less
creatively when they expect they will be robbed. This is human
nature.
People may work because they have to make a living, but if they
feel 'ripped off', they do not do a good job. After all, the
virtue of a slave is to rob his owner and to rebel against an
unjust and forced labor. (A slave can do this most safely by
acting stupid and forgetful, hence slaves' infamous reputation
among their masters.) On the other hand, the virtue of a citizen
is to reduce the profits of crime, to avoid helping a thief.
* Second, everyone must have the right to use software and to study
it without fear. Of course, not everyone will study it; but the
question is whether people dare study.
If a person may look at code, but fears that by doing so, he or
she will be sued in later life for taking an idea from it, or
fears that his or her company will be sued, then he or she will
not study. Or if the programmer does study such code, he or she
will find -- as happened in the U. S. in the early 1990s -- that
some potential employers will not offer a job, because they fear
being sued if they hire the applicant.
Incidentally, the right to study means the code must be available
in a humanly readable form -- otherwise, as a practical matter,
it is no good.
And finally, since the goal from a government's point of view is to
inspire more and better software, a statesman will realize that
* The government must encourage modification and redistribution.
Unless forced, programmers will not intentionally make software
worse. On the contrary, they will try to make software better.
Similarly, no end-user will select a worse program. If proposed
changes look good, chances are that others will accept them, but
they will do this only if they are permitted to receive them. If
modifications are banned, or their redistribution is banned,
everyone loses.
This means that both by law, and by its own purchasing and
funding decisions, a government must favor free software.
Otherwise, it defeats itself.
Put another way, to become more successful, a society must reduce its
costs, either of transformation or of transaction or of both.
Douglass North looks at economics and economic history among many
countries, over centuries. As he points out(3)
_The total costs of production consist of the resource inputs of
land, labor, and capital involved both in transformation of the
physical attributes of a good (size, weight, color, location,
chemical composition, and so forth) and in transacting --
defining, protecting and enforcing the property rights to goods
(the right to use, the right to derive income from the use of,
the right to exclude, and the right to exchange). ... The
costliness of information is the key to the costs of transacting
..._
In short, to reduce the cost of transactions, the institutions of
society must lower the cost of information. Otherwise, the society
generates inefficiencies.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) <http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF>
(2) Also in 'Coase's Penguin'.
(3) 'Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance',
Douglass C. North, 1990,
Cambridge University Press, pp. 28 and 27
ISBN 0-521-39416-3 hardback
ISBN 0-521-39734-0 paperback
5 Legal framework
*****************
The wise citizen converts the general notions of the previous chapter
into specific laws, licenses, and other procedures that people can
follow.
The necessary specific legal rights are those to use, copy,
redistribute, study, and modify software. These rights generate
freedom.
It is important to ensure all five of these rights. While you and
other people will benefit a little if you have two or three of these
rights, rather than none of them, you and everyone else should have
all five rights. Without them, you lose the social and technical
benefits -- you lose them even if you are not a programmer.
It is also important to ensure that copyright holders fulfill their
duty to permit others' access to distributed modifications.
5.1 Partial Benefits
====================
In the short run, even a programmer will benefit a little from
restricted, proprietary software: the software can run a computer;
that is why people use it. But in the long run, a programmer is hurt
because he or she is held back. And others are hurt because
programmers are forced to fail.
Proprietary software creates a restricted zone; no one outside that
zone can learn from such software. No one can improve it. A
programmer can learn only that the program solves certain problems;
and that it possesses a specific user interface; he or she cannot
learn more. Restricted software makes a programmer a dependent who
cannot learn and cannot advance.
Worse, such software creates dependency in everyone else, too.
Non-programmers cannot use fixes and improvements that a programmer is
forbidden to make.
Note that it is fairly straightforward to copy and distribute software
that is hard to study and modify. This is often done with products
that are restricted, even though such actions are banned. In
countries such as Brazil and Malaysia, for example, you can purchase
CDs with Microsoft Office on them for far less than the Microsoft
corporation charges. However, the current governments are trying to
reduce the use of such software, which is illegal. (Free software
can, of course, be obtained and used legally by everyone.)
A programmer needs to be able to do more than copy and redistribute
software.
For success, a programmer needs to be able to study and modify
software. If you are not a programmer, you need to have the legal
right to hire people to do this, and to use the software they develop.
Or, simply, you need the legal right to choose the software you want,
which may be studied and modified by someone else.
The only way to ensure success is a proper legal and institutional
framework that protects rights, yours and those of everyone else.
Freedom for software is not a technical or business issue: what makes
software free rather than imprisoned is the legal and institutional
framework in which people work.
5.2 Need for a Reliable, Quick, and Honest Legal System
=======================================================
Regardless whether you are an 'end user', a developer, a businessman,
a teacher, or a civil servant, you must deal with people who are
strangers, people with whom you have no connections. This means that
you must, if necessary, be able to resort to law to settle a dispute
between you and a stranger. Usually, you can avoid such extremes, but
not always. Most people are honest and moral, but not everyone.
You need a legal and institutional framework to protect and preserve
your rights. If you cannot protect your freedom, people will take it
from you.
Without law, there are no practical sanctions. Without law, you must
depend on your family, clan, friends, or a criminal gang. For small
groups, such help succeeds, but not when you deal over great distances
with strangers.
Moreover, the agents of the law must be reliable, quick, and honest.
If the police or the courts are unjust, slow, or corrupt, people,
businesses, and governmental organizations will avoid them. People
will 'hunker down'; they will do less than they might, because action
is too dangerous.
Please understand: I do not myself like courts or lawyers. What I am
trying to say is that they are a necessary last resort. Whenever
possible, most people avoid courts and lawyers.
For the law to work successfully, we need a reliable, quick, and
honest legal system. No other way of settling disputes provides
justice.
What do I mean by a reliable, quick, and honest legal system? I mean
an _independent_ and _un-self-interested_ court system.
* A legal system that is not the agent of the powerful.
* Nor the agent of the outlaws.
* But a legal system that is driven by
- a respect for the process of being fair,
- rather than whether the people who work in it
are your friends or enemies.
6 Freedom and Duty, in detail
*****************************
How can you protect your freedom, and others' duty towards you? The
answer is to employ a government. The job of the government is to
protect you from those who would try to injure and take from you, and
to constrain you from hurting others.
Governments work through laws, which are public statements that tell
everyone what the government's police and courts permit and what they
do not permit. Governments also work through bounties. Bounties pay
for some actions and do not pay for others. Bounties may be direct,
but often they are implemented as differential tax benefits or as
government purchases.
Laws enable certain practices, and try to disable others. Bounties
encourage certain practices.
A Way to Employ Copyright Law
=============================
The GNU General Public License is a way to employ copyright law to
enable certain practices, and to disable others. The GNU GPL is a
specially drafted copyright license. It is a legal tool. It is a
license for a piece of software, for code.
In the following discussion, I speak to "you" as if you are a
programmer and copyright holder both. Of course, you may be one or
the other or neither. You may be an "end user", someone who uses
software that others write. Regardless of who you are, the software
industry needs this legal tool, this license, since people both
outside and within the industry benefit from it.
The GNU General Public License gives you rights to use, copy,
redistribute, study, and modify software. It forbids you to forbid.
It also forbids others from preventing you from acting.
In addition, the GNU General Public License imposes on you an
obligation, a duty that others expect you to follow, one that a
government may enforce through its police and courts. Your duty
requires you, after you have published a modification to someone
else's code, to give to others the same rights that you received when
you accepted that code, so that others may use those fixes and
extensions.
The GNU GPL was invented by the GNU Project to protect and preserve
free software. (Richard Stallman started the GNU Project in 1984. It
led to GNU/Linux.)
6.1 Copyright, Copyleft
=======================
An aside: since the GNU General Public License gives you *more* rights
than the usual copyright license, it is sometimes called a 'copyleft'.
This neologism depends on the multiple meanings of the word 'right'.
The word 'copyright' uses the word 'right' but,
* a 'copyright' license is actually a 'lack-the-right-to-copy'
license.
On the other hand,
* a 'copyleft' is a 'right-to-copy' license.
Before discussing your duty, let me first go through the list of
rights that come with free software: your rights to use, copy,
redistribute, study, and modify the software.
6.2 Use
=======
First, the right to use software.
Even if you possess a computer, and have software that runs on it, you
may be forbidden to do so. Sometimes people say, "In that case, I
will run the software without permission." There are two problems
with this.
The first is that as a country becomes more successful, the methods of
policing improve.
Schools and universities will check students' software. Companies
will not run forbidden software because their managers fear that a
disgruntled employee will tell the copyright owner. They fear that
their company will have to pay a penalty. Indeed, the company that
supplies me with electricity hired a 'license compliance manager' to
make sure that the company did not run software in a forbidden manner.
The second problem is that forbidden software is often available only
in a binary format. Binary software provides you only with the
ability to run a computer. You cannot study, learn, or modify the
program. You become dependent.
6.3 Copy
========
The right to copy.
Not many people own a factory that enables them to copy a car.
Indeed, to copy a car is so difficult that we use a different word, we
speak of 'manufacturing' a car. And there are not many car
manufacturers in the world.
Ask yourself, do you own a car factory?
But everyone who possesses a computer owns a software factory, a
device for manufacturing software, that is to say, for making new
copies. Because copying software is so easy, we do not use the word
'manufacturing'; we usually do not even think of it as a kind of
manufacturing, but it is.
Ask yourself, do you possess a computer?
If you do, you can readily manufacture an entity that is as complex as
a car. The entity will be a software package, not a material object;
that is because of the way our technology has advanced over the past
few centuries. It is now relatively cheap to manufacture complex
informational objects, but still expensive to manufacture complex
material objects. (Perhaps the course of technology could have been
different; perhaps not. I do not know. All I know is that over the
past half century, the cost of manufacturing a complex informational
object has dropped dramatically.)
In effect, everyone who owns a computer has become the owner of a
factory. In the 19th century, such ownership was rare. Now it is
commonplace.
In the political language of the 19th century, the right to copy
software is the right to use your property, your own means of
production.
6.4 Redistribute
================
The third of these legal rights is the right to redistribute. This
right enables you or others to start a business, to choose with whom
you do business, to help a friend, to share.
Without the right to redistribute, the market for software will be
neither competitive nor free. Without it, the price for software may
be inefficiently high. And without it, governments, police, and
courts must either be despised, for failing to enforce laws against
redistribution, or must spend taxpayers' money to enforce those laws.
Without the right to redistribute, a country will gain less.
The right to redistribute means that you, who own a computer, a
software factory, have the right to make copies of a program and
provide them to others. You can charge for these copies, or give them
away. Others may do the same.
Redistributed code must include source code. Redistributed binary
code lets people run a computer, but prevents you or others from doing
anything else. Remember, binary code traps you in dependence. As a
practical matter, you and others can learn from source code, but not
from binary code.
6.5 Study
=========
Next, the right to study. This right enables programmers to learn.
This right is of little direct interest to people who are not
programmers. It is like the right of a doctor to study medicine or a
lawyer to read legal text books. Unless you are in the profession,
you probably wish to avoid such study.
The right to study means that people in places like Mexico, or
Germany, or Thailand, can study the same code as people in Japan or
the United States. It means that these people are not prevented from
learning how others succeeded.
Bear in mind that many programmers work under restrictions that forbid
them from seeing others' code. All they see are the programs of their
immediate colleagues and the toy programs of school text books. They
are forbidden from studying the programs of their more distant
colleagues, those who work in different organizations.
Nearly a thousand years ago, Bernard of Chartres said that the best
way to see ahead and to advance is to sit on the shoulders of a
giant.(1) But programmers who are unable to see others' code do not
sit on the shoulders of anyone; they are thrown into the mud. The
right to study is the right to look ahead, the right to advance.
Moreover, the right to study means that the software itself must be
made available in a manner that humans can read.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) And in 1675, Sir Isaac Newton famously said the same: "If I
have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
6.6 Source code is vital
========================
Software often comes in two forms, one readable only by computers and
the other readable only by people. The form that a computer can read
is what the computer runs. This form is called a binary or
executable. The form that a human can read is called source code. It
is what a human programmer creates, and is translated by another
computer program into the binary or executable form.
Actually, a programmer can read binary, but with difficulty; it is
seldom worth the effort. And some programming languages use the same
text for both the humanly readable and the executable code. Either
way, readily readable code is best for humans. People will study
readable code.
6.7 Modify
==========
The right to modify is the right to fix a problem or enhance a
program. This right enables software to grow better.
For most people, this means your right or your organization's right to
hire someone to do the job for you, in much the same way you hire an
auto mechanic to fix a car or truck or hire a carpenter to work in
your home. If you are a programmer, this means your right to do the
work yourself, if you wish. If you are not a programmer, and do not
wish to hire anyone, then this means your right to choose the program
that best does what you want.
Modification is helpful. Application developers cannot think of all
the ways others will use their software. Developers cannot foresee
the new burdens that will be put on their code. They cannot
anticipate all the local conditions, whether someone in Kenya will use
a program first written in Finland.
As Douglass C. North said, in a more general statement,(1)
_In a world of uncertainty, no one knows the correct answer to
the problems we confront and no one therefore can, in effect,
maximize profits. The society that permits the maximum
generation of trials will be most likely to solve problems
through time ..._
Put another way, the society that permits more modifications will be
more likely to survive over time.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) 'Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance',
Douglass C. North, 1990,
Cambridge University Press, p. 81
ISBN 0-521-39416-3 hardback
ISBN 0-521-39734-0 paperback
6.8 The Duty to Distribute Derived Source
=========================================
Under the GNU General Public License, when you create and distribute
new code that fixes or extends older code, then you gain a duty: if
you redistribute, you must redistribute the sources for your new code
under the same terms as the older code. This means that people who
use your new version of the older code retain the same rights and
freedoms that they had when they used the older code.
No one loses the benefits of collaboration.
It means that if you fix my code, and you publish that fix, I have the
right to use your fix. It also means that if I fix your code, and
publish the fix, you have the right to use my fix.
6.9 More limited licenses
=========================
Most computer programs have licenses. But some licenses do not impose
an obligation to redistribute fixes or extensions.
These other licenses, such as a modified or unmodified BSD license,
permit a person or company to take software that is itself free, and
for them to fix a bug or make an improvement, and then restrict who
may use that fix or improvement.
The United States government created the original BSD license. In
effect, it became a way to subsidize partially monopolistic companies,
since each received code that was paid for by the United States
taxpayer. (The code was written at the University of California,
Berkeley, under a program mostly funded by the U. S. military.)
The original Netscape Public License was like this as well. You could
look at their original source code, but if you contributed
modifications or improvements, AOL (now Time Warner), the company that
purchased Netscape, had the legal right to take your work and prevent
you from using any fixes to it or improvements to it that they made.
They could legally prevent you from using software with your own code
in it!
While a good many people went along with this license, and they called
it 'free software', many others refused to cooperate with Netscape. I
myself think that this is one reason the new Netscape browser was so
delayed: Netscape lost the cooperation of the people they needed at
the beginning, the people who are the best in the world, who refused
to help them.
I mention all this because the obligation is as important as the
rights. For success, a company must contribute to the community as
well as take from it.
And while good will is important, and community concern is important,
it is only through the law can we ensure that everyone acts upon their
duty.
7 Software Dangers
******************
There are three parts to computer security: the system's design, the
way people use it, and the old fivesome: burglary, bribery, blackmail,
bamboozlement, and belief.
The technical parts of design are understood and implemented. With
GNU Privacy Guard, for example, you can send email that cannot be
decrypted.
However, crooks and spies do not attempt the impossible. Technical
success means only that they change their focus to studying how people
use their machines and to burglary, bribery, blackmail, or
bamboozlement, and to finding people whose beliefs they can employ.
For example, to overcome inefficiencies caused by security measures,
people sometimes tell colleagues their pass phrases. This is a
workaround. The alternative is to instigate a redesign to make the
software both more secure and more efficient. But people do not do
this unless the action is simple. They tend to do what is simplest in
the short run, which is to be insecure.
Worse, often times, neither they nor their managers look upon the
workaround as a symptom of a poorly designed, insecure work place.
Crooks and spies, of course, seize the opportunity. They listen in
elevators and look through windows. They find pass phrases and enter
the local network.
Another technique is bamboozlement. Bamboozlement is a suckers' game.
In the past, for example, some businesses provided convenient 'help
desks' for their employees. If you worked for such a business, and
forgot your password, you could telephone the help desk, tell the
service agent your name, employee ID, and date of hire, and the
service agent would reset your password and tell it to you. You could
return to work immediately.
This convenient help method presumed that no criminal or spy will go
to the trouble of discovering an employees' name, ID, and date of
hire, and then impersonating that employee. To some degree, the
presumption is valid. Most of the time, the method works. Most
people are never impersonated.
Moreover, the method keeps out 'riff-raff'. With such a barrier, a
criminal or spy will act only if the potential treasure lures
strongly. But being on a network, the potential treasure may be much
bigger than you imagine. This is often forgot.
The relevant treasure may not be what an employee has or has immediate
access to; for a criminal or spy, the employee may simply be an entry
or transport point. For example, someone in St. Petersburg, Russia,
obtained the sources for much of Microsoft's major software; that
person pretended to be an employee; but the employee was not the
target, the sources were the target.
Alternatively, the target treasure might be the records of a meeting
about take-over bids. Millions and billions are spent on take-overs;
secret knowledge can bring a fortune. For a military spy, the target
might be personal information about a large number of an opponents'
citizens. Civilian businesses often collect such information to
inform their marketing. But the information can be used in other ways
by an enemy military.
Only in sports do competitors play fairly. In war certainly, and in
business often enough, competitors are unfair. They do not 'play by
the rules'. This means that a country, or business, or other social
institution, must design itself to defend against the worst as well as
against 'riff-raff'.
As for defense: the first rule of system design is clear, and old
fashioned: 'never put all your eggs in one basket'. For example,
never permit all your information to be collected in one place, or to
be accessible by any one method or group of methods.
The reason is simple: if your and others' information can be accessed
in one place, or accessed in a multitude of different places by one
method or group of methods, then well-funded, well-educated,
sophisticated bad guys will try.
(It goes without saying that with well defended valuables, the
programmers never work with the system or systems that hold the data,
the data administrators check on each other, and the users can never
access more than a few records each day. Only an 'adversary' military
would have the reason and could afford the cost -- perhaps in the
hundred of millions of dollars -- required to fund a theft. It would
be difficult.
(Inexpensive theft is less and less likely. When computers that
contained medical information on more than a million United States
soldiers were stolen in 2002, all presumed that thieves had taken them
only to sell the hardware. None thought that crooks knew enough to
sell the data to an adversay for vastly more than they could sell the
stolen machinery. At that time, the presumption was correct, as far
as we know.)
People often make decisions in terms of their personal experience, or
their friends' experiences; but such experiences tend to be local.
You will know, directly or indirectly, about local thieves. Not so
many people have experience with crackers hired by a mafia in St.
Petersburg, Russia, or in New York, USA. But with the Internet, your
information is as close to someone far from you as to someone close
by.
Moreover, as the military says, 'a point of trust is a place of
insecurity'. A point of trust is where someone, or a group of people,
may be burgled, bribed, blackmailed, or bamboozled. Or where someone
can hold secret and contrary beliefs. Crooks and spies do not go to
places that do not matter (except to confuse followers, or for
vacation); they focus on key points. And if they do not want to
attempt to overcome effective encryption technologies, they employ the
'old fivesome'; they use old methods on new people.
If you want your country well defended, and if you want to feel secure
personally, then you must insist that neither a government nor a
private company nor any other organization collect your information in
one place, or permit information in several places be accessed by an
'interconnect' method or group of methods. In Chicago, for example,
jewelry salesmen took to informing the police where they were going,
for protection. But a crook got access to that information, and used
it for robberies. By telling the police where they were going, the
jewelers were telling the crook where to rob them.
That is the beginning: follow the principle of 'don't put all your
eggs in one basket', where, electronically, 'one basket' may also
encompass many different physical repositories, brought together
electronically.
One complication is that a machine that sends and receives email must
be on the Net; otherwise, its purpose is lost. Consequently, such a
machine, and its software, must be engineered so that nothing carried
in an email message can cause harm. For example, its software should
not respond to viruses. An otherwise convenient 'macro' feature is a
fault, not a virtue. You should avoid an email program, such as
Microsoft Outlook, that implements such a danger.
Traditionally, governments have thought to increase their and their
citizen's security by centralizing information. Police and other
agencies then access and use this information. Unfortunately, this is
the wrong approach. The more successful a government or private
business is at collecting information and providing access to it, the
more that access is worth to a crook or spy.
A central information repository -- or a distributed one that appears
'central' only because of electronic linking -- is like a single,
central fortress; once infiltrated, corrupted, or captured, the
fortress falls. When a fortress contains information, capture may
mean 'copy'; there may be no visible indication that anything is
wrong. The legitimate users may carry on happily and blindly.
Everyone one knows that a single physical target is a prime target.
No one but a fool builds a central information repository as a single
physical fortress. Instead, an information repository is spread out
physically over many different locations, and each requires a
different method to access. This is a trivial but good habit.
Nonetheless, from the point of view of an electronic attacker, such a
repository is still a single valuable target. Security comes only by
disconnecting segments of the repository from each other, so there are
several repositories, and by disconnecting them from networks.
Instead of one hundred thousand people having access to information on
which an enemy might be willing to spend one hundred million dollars
(as suggested by some recent U. S. government proposals), only one
hundred people should have such access. We know that security will
fail when 100,000 people are involved; we also know that sometimes,
security will be successful when secrets are limited to one hundred
people.
Unfortunately, not only do these kinds of defenses keep out enemies,
they hinder friends. This action increases the cost of legitimate
access to the information repositories. Segmentation is expensive.
Segmentation raises the cost of information inputs to those who try to
help.
This extra cost means that governments, businesses, and other
organizations must rethink how they do their work. For example,
rather than collect all kinds of information about air travelers --
who their documentation claims they are, their previous travel
patterns, their friends, associates, and neighbors in the same
network, town, or street -- a security agency must work differently.
It should decide that the kind of information it sought in the past is
too expensive in the modern world. The security agency should expect
failures, because it could not collect the requisite information,
because it could not successfully analyze it in time, or because it
was corrupted. Instead, it should act differently. For example, the
security agency should push for stronger cockpit doors. These will
hinder hijackers in a passenger compartment who try to enter a
cockpit. And the agency should strive to inspire passengers to defend
themselves if attacked.
Clearly governments can and have kept some secrets well. My point is
that such endeavors are expensive. Moreover, they become more
expensive as they become more useful to the 'good guys'.
Companies often collect many pieces of personal information, each
small and seemingly irrelevant, such as how much bread a buyer last
purchased. A business may forget that this information, with
appropriate processing, can also be useful to a military or commercial
enemy. Moreover, as I said before, since information can be copied
readily, such information may be collected and used by a business, and
at the same time captured and used by an enemy. A business, or its
host government, may not recognize the subversion.
Instead of collecting such information, a company should focus on
making better use of the aggregated information that comes from its
sales and which is anonymous. This is safer for all.
Of course, the change is difficult. People do not like to disrupt
their lives. They do not want to change jobs. But we are endangered
by the kinds of policing and the kinds of information gathering that
was used in the past. Successful security means that those activities
be abandoned.
Moreover, these activities must be banned. In so far as a private
company can increase its sales by analyzing and applying personal
information that it collects, it will do so. Otherwise, those who
follow the practice will over time succeed over those who do not. The
practice must be outlawed. Only by jointly accepting their need to
defend freedom, will everyone succeed. Otherwise, the defenders will
lose to crooks and to free riders.
8 What Free Software Brings
***************************
Why is free software a successful technology? It is successful
because freedom brings benefits.
To software, freedom brings:
* security,
* reliability, and
* efficiency.
To customers and businesses, freedom brings:
* frugal standards,
* a choice of vendors, and
* lower barriers to starting a new business,
To society, freedom brings
* access,
* sharing, and
* empowerment
8.1 What Freedom Brings to Software
===================================
Because of the ways people respond to a world of freedom, it brings:
security, reliability, and efficiency to software.
Free Software Brings Security
=============================
In the spring of the year 2000, a large number of people who used
proprietary software from Microsoft were hurt by a virus called the 'I
Love You' virus or 'Love Bug'. The vendor had created a system that
is foolishly vulnerable.
You can, of course, make free software equally vulnerable, just as you
can open the door to any house or business and invite thieves in. But
none of the free software distributions that I know are so vulnerable.
This is because people want to avoid harm and are able to insist that
their vendors protect them. Of course, the free software producers do
not always succeed, but on the whole, they have done well.
On the contrary, a proprietary vendor may not care about security, or
may come to care later than makes sense. According to 'Info
World',(1) the senior vice president in charge of Microsoft's Windows
development team said,
_We really haven't done everything we could to protect our
customers ... Our products just aren't engineered for security._
This ill design may have made sense in the latter 1970s, when
Microsoft first acquired the 'Quick and Dirty Operating System' that
it turned into DOS and the initial Microsoft Windows environments.
After all, at that time, microcomputers were standalone machines, like
typewriters; they were not connected to a network. Security was not
an issue. However, secure design has been important since the 1980s,
when many people began to connect to the Internet, which grew in size
from that of a small town to that of a city, and then grew larger than
any city on the planet.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) 2002 September 5,
<http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/09/05/020905hnmssecure.xml>
Free Software Brings Reliability
================================
I do not have much experience with systems that crash, excepting when
hardware fails, or I am testing experimental software, or when my
sister's husband is working on the electricity upstairs and turns off
_all_ the electricity.
Programs are complex entities. They have thousands or millions of
components. Because the components themselves are mathematical
objects, that is to say, numbers and symbols, the components will not
and cannot break, any more than the number 3 can break. But the
components can be combined wrongly, or the programmer can insert the
wrong components, or leave them out. Such bugs cause havoc.
An advantage of free software is that many people -- three, four, ten,
sometimes more, sometimes hundreds -- look at a piece of code. And as
the somewhat awkward saying goes
_Many eyes make all bugs shallow._
That is to say, one of the many people looking at the code will notice
the problem. And it will get fixed. Everyone wants and is rewarded
for good, working code. The user does not want trouble; the
programmer does not want a shameful reputation. She wants a good
reputation.
(Of course, if you are not programming or not hiring someone to
program for you, then no one may fix a bug that bothers you. Freedom
enables you to make the effort or pay the price, if you so choose; it
does not guarantee that another will do the job for you.)
In contrast, as I wrote earlier, a proprietary company that sells
updates will have a financial incentive to leave at least some bugs in
its code. This is so its customers will have an incentive to buy an
upgrade.
I find it odd that anyone would purchase overpriced, buggy code, but
they do. They either do not know about alternatives or they see their
actions as less difficult than switching.
Or they may not understand that quality software exists. For example,
I sometimes see people reboot their computer for no obvious reason,
that is to say, for no obvious reason if the software is sound. For
example, I have heard that some people reboot their computer when they
upgrade their a Web browser. This makes no sense at all.
As a practical matter, no one who uses a desktop machine and has a
reliable electrical power supply should have to reboot more than twice
a year, and perhaps not that often. The main reason to reboot,
besides hardware troubles and electric power failures, is to install a
change in the boot program itself.
If you are testing an experimental version of an application program,
and if it does crash, you should not need to reboot. Moreover, your
work should be saved for you automatically, or all but a few hundred
characters of it should be saved, even if the electric power dies.
Free Software Brings Efficiency
===============================
A notable feature of free software is that many applications run well
on older, less capable machines. For example, not long ago I ran a
window manager, graphical Web browser, and an image manipulation
program on my sister's old '486' machine. These worked fine. Text
editors, electronic mail, and spreadsheets require even fewer
resources than those which use graphics.
This frugality means that people can use older equipment. It means
that people can work effectively with newer, more capable equipment.
At the same time, manufacturers are building modern, low-end computers
that do as much as the older ones, and are not too expensive.
There is no need to acquire expensive hardware to run your software,
unless you are doing the kind of job that you could not undertake a
few years ago.
Similarly, frugality means that embedded systems can run a core of
free software programs that are little different from, or even exactly
the same as, those that run on bigger machines. Rather than diminish
the quality of important programs, frugality enables designers to
remove less important programs. (Of course, no one can run large
programs on small machines, but for many purposes, small machines are
large enough.)
8.2 What Free Software Brings to Customers and Businesses
=========================================================
To customers and businesses, free software brings frugality, a choice
of vendors, and lower barriers to entry.
Bloat and Frugality
===================
Computer programs can be written so that they are 'bloated' or
concise; that is to say, they can be written to require more or less
code to do the same job. Often it is simpler or quicker for
programmers to write bloated code thoughtlessly than write tight code.
However, no one wants to publish thoughtless work. Programmers seek a
good reputation. Hence, software freedom discourages bloat, since
free software is published. On the other hand, software restrictions
keep software secret, or secret within a small group. Bloat is less
discouraged.
Of course, these tendencies, one way or the other, do not mean that
all free software is free of bloat, or that all proprietary software
is spendthrift. These tendencies describe only a way of leaning.
Over time, however, the original writer and others will find it easier
to understand, fix, and extend less bloated code; they will have a
harder time with bloated code. The less bloated code will do better
for the society. (Code can be too concise as well as too loose. When
code is too concise, programmers -- even the original author -- have a
hard time figuring out what it does, which means they have a hard time
changing it. A key to good software is to write the appropriate
degree of conciseness).
Moreover, over time, end-users will find that they pay less for
hardware that runs less bloated code. This helps consumers.
Frugal standards
================
In addition to the way programmers write code that they know others
will study, free software brings with it frugal standards.
Standards are the way in which two programs, or two people, connect.
One important standard is the form in which electronic mail is written
and sent.
A while back, for example, I received an email message about "Access
to Information and Communication for Sustainable Development". The
message was sent both to me and to correspondents in poor countries.
This 'Access' message was written in '.doc' format. It took up more
than four and a half times the resources needed to convey the
contents. It could have been sent as a plain text message.
Next time you budget for a project, consider paying four and a half
times its cost. Then consider whether you would fund it. Next time
you pay at a restaurant, take out four and a half times the money ...
For me the resource use was not an issue because I do not pay by the
minute for telecommunications, as many do. But I know that my
correspondents around the world prefer that I take care in my
communications that I do not waste their money or that of their
supporting institutions.
Customarily, people who use free software write their messages in
plain text. Not all do, of course, but it is a social custom, one
that saves on resources.
Choice of Vendors
=================
Freedom means that you, as a customer, have a choice among those who
would provide you with software and associated services. You are not
in a 'take it or leave it' situation. You can choose among your
vendors.
Perhaps paradoxically, this choice is good for many vendors. Yes, it
is easier for a customer to leave.
But this also means that a customer is not frightened of working with
a small business that he or she fears may vanish in five or ten years.
The customer can move on without trouble, and as a consequence, finds
it less expensive and less risky to stay. This contrasts with
comments I have heard, where a customer decides to avoid a business
because moving from it would be expensive, and the customer fears that
the business will disappear.
Also, if customers can readily leave, employees know that they come to
the business because the customers like the solutions the business
sells. Employees like this, because it tells them they are doing a
good job. Owners sometimes like this, since they, too, want to know
they are living morally.
The Legal Right to Start a Business
===================================
Freedom means that you, as a businessman, have the legal right to
start a business. You are not hindered by overly expensive licenses.
You are not forbidden.
A quick digression here: restricted software often means you are
forbidden to become a businessman or entrepreneur, you are forbidden
to start a business. Miguel de Icaza, who started a major
international project in Mexico, could never has started with
restricted software. He was forbidden to use that software. Since
free software is sold in a competitive market, its price is low.
I said earlier, Douglass C. North pointed out that(1)
_... no one knows the correct answer to the problems we confront
... The society that permits the maximum generation of trials
will be most likely to solve [them] ..._
Moreover, as Clayton M. Christensen says(2) the
_... processes that are key to the success of established
companies are the very processes that reject disruptive
technologies ..._
Some companies run themselves well enough that they can invest in a
change that counters their current customers' wants, that reduces
their profits, and that may not work anyhow. But not many are so
good.
A society that intends to progress must provide for dud organizations'
easy death. In the case of business organizations, the country must
provide workable bankruptcy and buy-out laws. Other kinds of
organization, such as non-profit hospitals, need a structure that
enables, if necessary, their own easy 'discontinuance'. Governments
need to be able to replace themselves; losers must be willing to
leave. (Elections serve this purpose when they permit the defeat and
replacement of incumbents.)
At the same time, a society needs new organizations to work with the
new opportunities. There is where it become important that businesses
and other organizations can start legally and inexpensively. Without
legality, an organization cannot readily grow beyond a limited size.
Without low cost, those who would begin or promote new organizations
will start or invest in fewer of them.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) 'Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance',
Douglass C. North, 1990,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, p. 81
ISBN 0-521-39416-3 hardback
ISBN 0-521-39734-0 paperback
(2) 'The Innovator's Dilemma',
Clayton M. Christensen, 1997,
Harvard Business School Press
reprinted by HarperCollins, New York, 2000, p. 112
ISBN 0-96-662069-4
Running a Legal Business Less Expensively
=========================================
Free software means that software itself, a necessary supporting part
of a business or community project, will be both inexpensive and
legal.
Think of this from the point of view of a business or community group.
The organization can use restricted-distribution, proprietary
software, and either pay a lot of money it does not have, or break the
law and steal it.
I should mention that if a country is a failure, and expected to
continue as a failure, no one is going to try to stop illegal
distribution. I know a fellow in Africa who says that Cameroon is
like this.
Brazil is different. It was once considered a failure, but now
various U. S. companies are thinking it is a success. Hence, they are
pressing the U. S. government to persuade the Brazilian government to
adopt laws against illegal distribution. At some point, the Brazilian
government will have to enforce these laws to the satisfaction of
companies like Microsoft, or else face trade sanctions.
Indeed, in successful countries, non-free software is becoming
expensive for use as well as hard or impossible to study and modify.
Other aspects being equal, a business or organization with lower costs
is more likely to survive and succeed than one with higher costs. The
proposition is simple.
However, in the past in general, software costs, even proprietary
software costs, have been low compared to the total costs of operating
a business or other organization. Consequently, few have paid much
attention to such costs. But the costs of lock-in and insecurity are
increasing. Likewise, the costs of not being able to fix problems
readily are rising, as are the costs of not being able to choose among
vendors. Software costs, and its legality, are becoming more and more
important.
8.3 What Free Software Brings to Society
========================================
Free software bring access, collaboration, and empowerment to society.
Access
======
Free software is accessible. With freedom, a programmer is not
prevented by law, by cost, or by other practical considerations from
studying, modifying, and using great software written by others. He
can build on their work.
For example, a few years ago, some Icelanders wanted to customize a
widely used, but proprietary program. They told the vendor that they
would do the job at no cost to the vendor, but of course, they needed
access to the source code, so they could change it. The vendor
refused. Apparently, the vendor considered Iceland too small a
country, and too small a market, to deserve any attention.
So then the Icelanders investigated the KDE free software desktop.
They found they had both the legal and the practical right to
customize it for Iceland and to redistribute it. And they did.
Indeed, in the first demonstation that I saw, the programmer shifted
back and forth between Islandic and English interfaces.
Access means that programmers in a small country are not banned from
work. Likewise, a businessman is not prevented by law, by cost, or by
other practical considerations from using software that his country's
programmers customize. Nor is an 'end user' forbidden or prevented
from working with it.
Collaboration and Sharing
=========================
The right to redistribute, so long as it is defended and upheld, leads
to collaboration and sharing.
People share when they are not harmed by doing so. People like to
help their neighbors. With free software, you are not hurt if you
help someone else -- you lose nothing, but your neighbor gains. And
since you will not hurt yourself, you have every other reason to help
your neighbor.
Most people are kindly. Also, most recognize that when they help
their neighbor, their neighbor is likely to return the favor.
Free software, by reducing cost and hassle, and by removing hurt,
encourages collaboration and sharing.
How Freedom and Competition Work Together
=========================================
Before I try to explain how a competitive, free market leads to
sharing, let me talk about competitive markets and free markets
separately.
In a competitive market, a customer has the freedom to leave one
seller and go to another. This freedom is not merely legal, but also
practical. The cost of changing vendors is not so high as to
discourage the customer from changing.
A competitive market may not be free. A government or other
organization may have created barriers to business entry. An
entrepreneur may not have the legal freedom to attempt to start a
business. However, there are still enough vendors in the market to
make it competitive for customers.
In a free market, both sellers and buyers have the right to try to
sell or buy products. Everyone has the legal right to try to make a
living by selling and buying. But still, a customer may face
monopoly. The reasons is that a free market is not necessarily
competitive: if anticipated profits are too low, it may not make
business sense for a vendor to enter a market. For example, a second,
competitive railroad company may choose not to build a new railway
line between two cities. The railway company that owns the existing
line may have a natural, but not a legal monopoly on the railway
market between those two cities.
In a competitive, free market, neither side of a transaction has the
power to take from the other more than his or her due. In a
non-competitive, non-free market, one side can impose a higher price
on the other, up to the point where it is not worth the other paying.
In a non-competitive, non-free market, one side or another sets
prices. The side with more power selects a price that some find is
not worth paying. These potential customers lose because they do not
take part in the transaction. At the same time, even at a high price,
others do pay because they find the benefits are worth their extra
loss of resources. The monopolist or oligopolist makes extra income
through the higher price even though the volume sold is less.
In a competitive, free market, on the other hand, the price paid is
high enough to evoke sales, but not so high as to discourage some of
the customers from buying.
How Competition Leads to Sharing
--------------------------------
First and foremost, competitive, free markets lead to collaboration
and sharing.
This outcome is contrary to many people's expectations. Few expect
that in a competitive, free market, every producer will become more
collaborative and more sharing. Few realize that there will be no
visible or felt competition among competing businessmen.
The more competitive a market, the more cooperation you see. This
apparently counter-intuitive implication is both observed and
inferred.
Sharing occurs when people are not harmed by doing what they want to
do. People like to help their neighbors. Consider a small farmer,
one among a million. My friend George is one such. His harvest is so
small, that there is nothing he can do to effect the world price. His
neighbor is in a similar situation. Consequently, if George helps his
neighbor, his neighbor benefits, and George himself loses nothing on
the price he receives for his harvest. Since George will not hurt
himself, he has every other reason to help his neighbor. Not only is
George kindly, he also recognizes that when he helps his neighbor, his
neighbor is likely to return the favor.
This is what you see in a competitive free market: cooperation.
Visible competition indicates that the market is not fully free and
competitive. Visible competition means that at most you are half
free.
This is a key social consequence of software freedom: you are not hurt
when you help someone else -- you lose nothing, but your neighbor
gains. Moreover, most people will help another even at some cost to
themselves. Also, most recognize that help is often reciprocated.
People share.
Empowering Society
==================
People want the opportunity to learn, to work, and to share. This is
empowerment. Societies are made up of groups of people within
institutions. Societies also need empowerment.
For success, a society must encourage individuals to study, not forbid
them; it must encourage people to start new community organizations,
not forbid them; it must encourage people to start new businesses, not
forbid them; it must encourage people to choose among vendors, so that
poor vendors stop doing business.
Otherwise, the society will fail to solve problems. It will fall
back.
9 The Social Costs of Restrictions
**********************************
Freedom leads to benefits; restrictions have costs. Although I talk
about the costs in various places, there are three significant costs
that people do not always consider. Two costs have to do with the way
we bring up children: the degree to which we teach them to be selfish,
and whether we discourage them from studying; the third has to do with
the loss of discovery. These costs are the collateral damage of
restrictions.
Selfish by Law: Don't Share That Toy!
=====================================
"Johnny, please share that toy with Alice!" How often have you heard
a parent encourage sharing?
Our culture encourages parents to teach children to share in some
ways, and to be selfish in other ways. Thus, a child is taught that
some kinds of entity, such as a toy, should be shared among playmates;
but that to share other kinds of entity, or to share in other
circumstances, is theft. For example, a child is not supposed to take
a toy home from a store, unless it is paid for; but at home, the child
is supposed to share that toy with a playmate. Sharing and
selfishness are defined by our culture and by our laws.
Currently, there is an effort underway to extend the realm of
selfishness, to make it illegal to teach children to share in ways
that are natural for children and which were customary. Instead, a
child is taught to be selfish, not to share.
A few years ago, the daughter of a friend showed off a colorful and
dramatic program. However, I could not but notice that the program
came from another person. Her use and possession of that program was
illegal.
With non-public software, sharing is illegal. The programs'
distribution is restricted and even the youngest child is supposed to
insist that his or her friends or parents or school purchase
additional copies.
But the child can readily manufacture instances of the program -- the
child can manufacture instances so readily that we call it copying. I
have said this before, but the advance in technology is critical: a
process that had been hard before, to duplicate an entity, is now so
simple that a four year old can do it.
A culture can take advantage of this progress, or it can hinder it.
To hinder it means to add another realm of selfishness; to take
advantage means to continue a realm of sharing.
People laugh at the notion of anyone checking up on a child at home,
and enforcing any law that forbids the child from sharing. But what
if the child is a publisher?
My sister's husband, Fred, set up a Web site for my young niece. She
loves it and has learned a great deal. She writes her own stories.
And sometimes she wants to show a picture to her friends.
And sometimes, Fred has to tell her 'no'. Depending on the license,
some pictures may not be reproduced. Her sharing is banned.
9.1 "Rah! Rah! Forbidden to Study"
==================================
By law, teachers must prevent their students from studying the source
code to any non-free software that they use.
Non-free software encourages young students stand, drink beer, and
shout:
Rah! Rah!
Illegal to study!
Rah! Rah!
Forbidden to study!
Rah! Rah!
Illegal to study!
Rah! Rah!
Forbidden to study!
This chant is fun, for a short while. But as a practical matter,
studying is important. Students should have the legal right to study,
and should be encouraged to do so. However, in schools and
universities, the use of non-free software restricts what students may
study.
As a practical matter, students are more motivated to study programs
they use than programs they do not use. People are interested in
their own lives. Non-free software forces schools and universities to
focus on distant, less relevant topics. Their teaching suffers.
Moreover, by studying sizeable programs that they use, students can
learn how to construct such programs -- large programs are more
difficult to design and build than small or toy programs.
Clearly, most students do not want to become programmers, just as most
do not want to become lawyers. But just as student lawyers are
encouraged to study, so should student programmers be encouraged to
study.
Likewise, textbooks provide pathways into knowledge, and are so used.
But textbooks do not substitute for reality. Professional programmers
learn not only from books, but from the great programs of our time.
If you are a parent, or a teacher or administrator in a school, you
can spend a great deal of time trying to enforce laws against sharing
and studying. Or you can teach students to disobey the law. This is
a common, but poor way to educate a society. Or you can encourage
students to share software. You can come out against selfishness.
With free software, it becomes legal both to abide by the law and to
share with others.
Also, a school, college, or university that uses free software, need
pay less for licenses and less for policing. This is good for
budgets.
Ask yourself, do you know anyone who uses software that he or she is
forbidden to study? If so, you know someone who lacks freedom, who
lacks opportunity. You know a loser.
When a school forbids study, it betrays its mission.
9.2 Raising the Cost of Discovery
=================================
Restrictions on software slow progress overall. In addition, they
favor large companies that possess large inventories of patents and
copyrights. The restrictions encourage those companies to rework what
they have, rather than produce the best of new.
Put simply, patents and copyrights raise the costs of gaining
knowledge to those who lack legal access to information. Before
undertaking a project, a developer must spend his or her time and
resources talking to lawyer to determine what is permitted or
forbidden (or his employer must do this). He must find out, for
example, what sorts of study might get him or his employer sued in 5,
10, or 15 years. She must avoid some of the programming techniques
she learned in school. Consequently, such developers find it harder
to discover, understand, and apply knowledge.
On the other hand, those who work for companies that have access to
patents and copyrights will find it less expensive to work in a manner
so as to make use of those patents and copyrights that their company
possesses, since they cost their employer less. Indeed, if they do
not so direct their efforts themselves, their managers will insist.
Those who possess patents and copyrights will "systematically
misallocate human creativity", as Yochai Benkler points out(1).
Benkler goes on to make the critical point that,
_... only firms that rely on direct appropriation --
appropriation based on legal rights to exclude -- can benefit
from an increase in intellectual property. Indirect
appropriation strategies [such as selling a service, or selling
related hardware] do not benefit ..._
Worse, everyone loses:
_... all strategies suffer some increase in their input costs,
because of an increase in the probability that an input they need
in their productive activities will be owned by another firm._
In short, restrictions on software hinder everyone. But they hinder
those who work for a smaller business or who are independent more than
they hinder those who work for businesses that owns many patents and
copyrights.(2)
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) In 'Institutional Economics of Public Domain',
Yochai Benkler,
<http://www.law.nyu.edu/benklery/IP&Organization.pdf>
(2) In addition, in long sentences, Benkler says,
_Organizations that minimize costs by utilizing intrafirm sources of
information suffer the least increase in costs, because access to
their owned inventory continues to be at marginal cost, regardless how
extensive their power to exclude others from it. Organizations that
rely on barter may be forced to engage in more aggressive rights
acquisition, because an increase in excludability increases the
probability that their utilization of a collaborator's information
could provide grounds for a strategic suit. This increases the cost
of using barter/sharing systems, but not the appropriability of its
outputs._
10 Misleading Metaphors
***********************
Shoes and ships are produced and sometimes sold. So is software.
Moreover, when software is sold, it is often sold as if it were like a
ship or shoe. The understanding that comes from physical objects,
like ships and shoes, is applied metaphorically to software, even
though software cannot be worn on your foot or dropped on it.
Software is Different
=====================
The characteristics of software are different from those of shoes or
ships. It is wrong to try to understand software sales as if software
were like hardware.
Unlike ships or shoes,
* software is non-rivalrous,
* software is inexhaustible,
* software is easily manufactured,
* software is potentially nonexcludable.
To compare software to ships and shoes is to construct a metaphor or
simile.
Much of the time, there is good reason for using metaphors: they
provide 'mental models'; they offer a framework for thinking.
Metaphors succeed by furnishing ways to think that are based on other
knowledge. Often, writers make metaphors 'for effect'; they hope to
induce in their readers a change in emotion or in perspective. But
metaphors, often invisibly, are also used for other kinds of thought.
The concept of 'property' is such a thought. By extending the concept
of 'property' from a rivalrous good,(1) such as a car or chair, to a
non-rivalrous good, such as software, people can easily decide what
they think should be done with software: they apply to software the
rules they apply to chairs.
We have social conventions against stealing chairs; we support police
and courts to help those whose chairs are stolen and to find those who
committed the robbery; we pay insurance to replace unrecovered thefts.
The metaphorical application of these conventions and actions to a
computer program proceeds by the same reasoning: establish a social
convention by teaching children in school not to share a program, even
though they are capable of doing so; fund police and courts to help
those who want to restrict who can use their software.
But the metaphor breaks down at the concept of insurance: it turns out
that there is no need to insure for the theft of a program, since a
program does not vanish when someone else copies it.
This metaphor is called "intellectual property" or "IP". It is so
commonplace an expression that many no longer think of it as a
metaphor.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) The word 'rivalrous' means that your consumption _rivals_ mine.
Only one or the other, not both of us, can enjoy the consumption at
the same time. The word is defined more thoroughly in the next
section.
10.1 Software is Non-rivalrous
==============================
A car, a house, a loaf of bread, a shirt, a ship, a shoe: each is an
economic product that can be used by only one entity at a time. If I
take your car from you, you cannot use it. If I eat your bread, you
cannot also eat it.
Economists call such goods "rivalrous": if I cannot wear the shoe you
are wearing, if I cannot eat the same bread you are eating, your
consumption _rivals_ mine.
Efficient use of rivalrous and non-rivalrous resources
------------------------------------------------------
Many people believe the best way to ensure that rivalrous resources
are handled in an economically efficient manner is to provide each
resource with an entity that is able to exclude others from it. In
law, this right to exclude is called 'ownership'. The entity owned is
'property'.
The entity owning the resource is expected to handle the resource in
such as way as to maximize returns to that entity. And if everyone
does this, all benefit.
As Adam Smith wrote in 'The Wealth of Nations' in 1776,
_... every individual ... endeavours as much as he can ... to
direct ... industry so that its produce may be of the greatest
value ... neither intend[ing] to promote the public interest, nor
know[ing] how much he is promoting it ... He intends only his own
gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an
invisible hand to promote an end that was no part of his
intention ... By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes
that of society more effectually than when he really intends to
promote it ..._
This quotation tells us of the moral idea behind the belief in
competitive, free markets.
A major, usually unstated, presumption among those who support
competitive, free markets is that institutional constraints will
permit people to attempt to maximize returns on what they own.
Another presumption is that enough people will benefit from this
organization of society that those who lose because of the
organization will not be able to change the society.(1) These
presumptions have been more or less true in countries that have been
economically successful over the past two centuries, but are not true
over all.(2)
Nonetheless, in spite of the suffering and disasters we have seen,
Smith's remarks have justified the use of 'property' for the handling
of rivalrous goods.
However, non-rivalrous resources are not rivalrous resources. They
are different. However much one may support Adam Smith, his advice
regarding rivalrous resources does not apply to non-rivalrous
resources. A way to organize society for the economically efficient
use of rivalrous resources is not good for the economically efficient
use of non-rivalrous resources
For example, two people can share a program. Indeed, when you ask
someone whether two people can share a program, he or she says, 'of
course, it is practical'.
Unfortunately, when people set up laws, or accede to others setting up
laws, the laws often make sense only if such sharing were impractical.
This is because lawmakers and others often mistakenly apply the
lessons that apply to rivalrous resources to non-rivalrous resources.
They imagine, falsely, that a non-rivalrous resource is similar to a
rivalrous resource. They presume that if two of us have a program,
only one of us can use it at any given time. They act as if a
computer program were like a shirt that only one person can wear at a
given moment. Hence, they create laws that restrict software to fewer
people even though many can share.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Engels and other early Marxists did not believe this
presumption; they thought that the industrial proletariat would grow
in size sufficiently that they could eventually vote the competitive,
free market people out of government. They were wrong, but this is
one reason they proposed following legal methods, in contrast to
Lenin, who did not.
(2) As Hernando de Soto points out, in many countries, people
cannot prove they own their house. This means they can only borrow
from a lender who knows them and who has the means to ensure that the
money will be paid back: a mafia. Such people cannot borrow money
from a lender who will use courts to take the house if the money is
not paid back. In this circumstance, people have less access to
capital than they do where title to property is established and
enforced by an honest court and strangers can safely lend money.
This means that they cannot invest in the kinds of economic
development that depend on capital.
'The Mystery of Capital,
Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else',
by Hernando de Soto, 2000,
Basic Books, New York
ISBN 0-465-01614-6
10.2 Software is Inexhaustible
==============================
The idea of exhaustibility grows out of the ordinary idea of a
possession, which is an object that you can hold in your hand, wear,
or walk into. Such a possession is physical; and there cannot be too
many such possessions in the world, else there is no room for anything
else. Such possessions are, in the jargon of economists,
_exhaustible_.
A shoe or a ship are exhaustible possessions. You can run out of
either. Moreover, if someone takes your shoe or your ship, you lose
it. However, software is not like a shoe or ship: if I take your
shoe, you cannot wear it; but if I take your software, you still have
it.
Software is inexhaustible, as well as non-rivalrous.(1)
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Well, a nit-picker will say that our abilities in the universe
are limited, and we can run out of electronic storage space. But when
we talk about how the 'Dutch build the Netherlands' by creating
polders and pumping out the sea, we are not focusing on oceanic
limitations, but on Dutch success in expanding their land, something
other countries do not do. Similarly, for all practical purposes, if
we want more software, either we use more of the electronic storage
space we already have, or we build more such space.
10.3 Software is Easily Manufactured
====================================
Software is inexhaustible because it is easily manufactured.
Everyone who owns a computer owns a factory for manufacturing new
instances of software. Everyone who browses the Web, or reads
electronic mail, is a manufacturer.
Indeed, as I have said several times, this kind of manufacturing is so
easy that we do not use the word 'manufacturing'. We call it copying.
But copying is what happens in manufacturing.
In a science fiction story, it may be possible to copy physical
objects. Your friend might say to you, 'I like your watch.' You
would respond, 'Oh, let me copy it for you.' That fictional world
does not, as yet, exist. Perhaps it will never exist. But nowadays
you can copy certain objects that are not physical, such as software
packages. You can make duplicates readily and easily.
This is a change in technology. In the past, it was neither easy nor
cheap. In the 1950s, for example, you could copy a computer program
by hand or by typing it on a typewriter, or by using a very expensive
computer. You can still copy a program by hand or by typing it on a
typewriter, but few do. The price of computers and ancillary
equipment has come down. For most people, most of the time, it is
easier and less expensive to use the computer.
Also, both hand copying and typewriting involve copying to paper; yet
most software copying is not to paper. Indeed, people who do not
study or modify software hardly ever copy a program to paper; they use
the program, which means they copy it from a CD or other computer or
other source to the machine on which they run it.
10.4 Software is Potentially Nonexcludable
==========================================
You can sell a shoe or ship only if you can prevent others from
stealing from you. To benefit from a sale, you must be able to
exclude from the transaction those who do not pay you.
Most of the time, most people do not rob. People are protected by
social convention. However, some people do rob and some conditions
promote robbery more than others. An individual who cannot call upon
strong friends, or police, offers himself as a victim. The turmoil
and suffering of a war, for example, promotes robbery. Ideologies and
belief systems that encourage honesty among 'us' often permit lies and
robbery against 'them'.
In the jargon of economists, the ability to gain the value of a sale
is called "direct appropriation" and it depends on the ability to
exclude crooks from a transaction. (The ability to gain value from a
different activity than the one for which you are paid is called
"indirect appropriation". For example, some programmers create high
quality free software in order to improve their professional
reputations. They then convert their good professional reputations
into higher pay.)
Individual items, such as individual electronic messages, may be
encrypted in such a way that only the intended recipient may read or
use the message. So long as you and your recipient can exclude others
from fooling you into telling them the encryption key, or breaking
into your computer or their computer, the message -- or the item of
software -- can be made exclusive.
However, as a practical matter, this is not possible for software or
messages that are distributed to many people. The reason is
straightforward: somewhere in the chain of transactions, someone will
make the encryption key known. (This is the same problem as with
widely used databases. A military organization often restricts who
has access to its secrets, but that method fails when the goal is wide
access. Moreover, the more valuable the secret, the stronger the
attack.)
Perhaps an attacker will obtain the encryption key through
old-fashioned burglary, bribery, or blackmail. Or perhaps an attacker
will fool a user (this is called 'social engineering' or
bamboozlement), or the attacker will find someone whose beliefs cause
him or her to copy the secret. Or perhaps the maker of a key will do
a poor job and someone else will decrypt it. The latter happened to
DVDs, which are designed to contain a kind of message, a movie, that
many people watch. An interested teenage child posted on the Internet
a method for decrypting DVDs.
The only way to provide excludability to an intrinsically
non-excludable product is to police the product's use. Such policing
is expensive. At the very least, to gain some degree of restriction,
a society must change how people think. The majority of those with
some kind of power must come to believe in the legitimacy of the
policing. Parents must learn to teach a new kind of selfishness.
School administrators must budget and pay for multiple copies of
programs that they or their students could readily and inexpensively
manufacture for themselves. Businesses must hire 'license compliance
managers' to make sure their employees avoid the easy and the
inexpensive. The society must discourage study, discovery, and
application.
11 Metaphors explain the new in terms of the old
************************************************
In the previous chapter, I talked about the way the social conventions
and institutions governing software, a non-rivalrous good, may be made
by thinking with the idea of property for rivalrous goods.
Let me explore this way of understanding in more detail: I will
discuss how people think about one aspect of computers and software,
the Internet.
In this discussion, I am going to refer to quite obvious metaphors,
not to ways of thinking that some never think of as metaphorical.
In discussing technology, we use metaphors to link older and more
familiar technologies with a newer and less familiar technology.
11.1 Metaphor: Information Highway
==================================
In the United States, in the mid 1990s, the phrase "Information
Highway" became the most common metaphor for explaining the Internet.
I do not know if this metaphor was so common in other parts of the
world as the United States. If it was not common, it is still worth
studying, because everyone deals with Americans whose thoughts grew
out of this metaphor, and who are sometimes wrong.
The metaphor of the 'Information Highway' takes people's knowledge of
highways and invites them to apply that knowledge to the Internet.
What does this metaphor tell people? First, it tells people that the
Internet is outside your home or office. It is not inside.
Partly, this is a useful analog, since you need to gain access to the
Internet, through a telephone, cable, radio, or other communications
device. Similarly, if you own a house, you need to build a driveway
from your house to the road. But the metaphor does not help you if
you live in an apartment building right next to a public highway.
Moreover, the metaphor does not tell you that you can bring remote
computers into your home or office. It did not warn me that when I
was in Europe, in Germany, I could get confused with whether I was
using a machine across the Atlantic in the United States, or one a few
hundred kilometers away in another part of Europe.
Nor does the metaphor tell you that you can create a secure local
network that stretches across nations and oceans. This ability is
important for businesses trying to grow and for the civil society.
The metaphor correctly tells you that Internet connections may be slow
intrinsically, like a secondary road, or suffer traffic jams during
rush hour. However, it misleadingly suggests that the system takes up
a great deal of physical 'space' that could be used for other things
within a city, such as parks. The metaphor suggests that the space in
which information resides is limited in the same way as space within
the confines of a city. The 'Internet as Highway' metaphor does not
lead people to think of the space required by information in the same
way as the Dutch think of the Netherlands, as a land that is built.
The metaphor hides useful features.
11.2 Electronic Shopping Mall
=============================
A second metaphor is the "Electronic Shopping Mall". This tells you
that the purpose of the Internet is to provide a place to buy things,
and it also tells you that private investors will pay to build it.
The metaphor suggests that the Mall will need governmental regulation
and freedom, since you cannot run efficient or large markets without
both regulation and freedom. The metaphor also suggests also that
there will be great opportunities for theft, corrupted regulators,
sweat-heart deals, and cozy arrangements.
11.3 Great Library
==================
A third metaphor is that the Internet is a "Great Library". You can
search and find information. Indeed, I find that people are often
more likely to use the Internet as a reference library than they are a
real library!
The 'Internet as Library' metaphor tells us that many people can see
the same information, just as many patrons can borrow the same book
from a physical library. This is important to those who concern
themselves with budgets.
Moreover, the metaphor tells you to expect a vast range of queries.
While most inquiries will focus on the same small list of topics,
others, a huge number of them, will focus on subjects you never
considered. This has critical business and political ramifications.
In particular, it tells us that censorship, including the often
misunderstood technology of filters, is a mistake.
11.4 Metaphors Tell Us About the Internet
=========================================
These metaphors, limited and troublesome as they are, tell us about
tools that use software.
The metaphor of the 'Information Highway' tells us about roads with
potholes and weak bridges. We want our electronic networks to be
reliable. Highways attract highwaymen, thieves. We want our
electronic communications to be secure. Highways cost money. We want
our electronic communications to be efficient and use resources well.
The metaphor of the 'Electronic Shopping Mall' tells us about
burglary. After all, merchants get robbed.
The metaphor also tells us about the importance of trust in commercial
transactions, that our money be good. It tells us about issues of
privacy, and the opportunities for monopoly, and the moral importance
of a competitive, free market.
The metaphor of the 'Library' tells us to expect a small set of 'most
visited' sites, and a large set of seldom visited sites. It tells us
that people will want to learn about the oddest lessons. People want
the empowerment that comes from knowing. The metaphor also tells us
that private funding may be too limited to generate the full range of
social and economic benefits that libraries can bring.
In essence, these metaphors lead us to the lessons that are learned
from other technologies. The metaphors tell us what we want.
11.5 More Metaphors: Viral Code and Vaccination
===============================================
Another set of metaphors has to do with illness and vaccination.
When others hurt me, I try to defend myself. But some tell me that
this makes them sick. They tell me that I should permit people to rob
me of my work. They tell me that I should never try to defend myself.
They tell me that I should stop using the GNU General Public License,
a license that vaccinates me against hurt. Instead, I should adopt a
license that permits other people to rob me with impunity. They want
me to adopt a license that forbids me from fighting back. They want
me to give up my right to benefit from a derivative of my own work, a
right I possess under current copyright law.
Of course, the language is a little less feverish than this. Usually,
I myself am not called 'infectious'. Rather, the legal defense that I
use is called 'infectious'. The license I choose is called 'viral'.
In every day language, words such as 'infect' and 'virus' describe
disease. The rhetoric is metaphorical. A legal tool is not a disease
organism; but it is popular to think of the law as an illness, so the
metaphor has impact.
The people who want to rob me use language that says I make them sick
when I stop them from robbing me. They do not want to draw attention
to the so-called 'disease' that makes them ill: my health and my
rights, and the health and rights of other people. Instead, they
choose metaphor to twist people's thinking. They do not want anyone
to think that I am a good citizen for stopping crime. They want the
metaphor to fool others into thinking that I am a disease agent.
The GNU General Public License protects me. The connotation of
'virus' and 'infect' is that my choice of defense gives an illness to
those who want to rob me. I want freedom from their robbery; but they
want the power to hurt me. They get sick when they cannot hurt me.
To use another health and illness-related metaphor, the GNU General
Public License _vaccinates_ me; it protects me from theft.
Note that the theft about which I am talking is entirely legal in some
situations: if you license your work under a modified BSD license, or
a similar license, then others may legally take your work, make fixes
or improvements to it, and forbid you from using that code. I
personally dislike this arrangement, but it exists.
In addition to my personal dislike, there is a social reason to
dislike legal theft. This is best understood using game theory.
12 Licenses, Game Theory, and Strategy
**************************************
"Game theory" is a way of thinking about conflict and cooperation
among people, nations, spiders, and other entities. John von Neumann
invented game theory in a book he co-authored with Oskar Morgenstern
in 1944, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour'
The word 'game' in the name comes from its application to human
interactions in which some people gain and others lose. In a
competitive society, such as the United States, games of sport are
common and game theory applies to games. In addition, game theory
applies to other kinds of interaction.
When I speak of game theory, I often use the vague word 'entity'
because the 'players' need not be human. Trees, for example, may be
players. Trees need sunlight; they interact with other trees around
them for access to sunlight.
Different Entities
==================
The presumption underlying game theory is that different entities act
on themselves and on each other, and do so in ways that can be
described, with results that can be predicted (more or less) and
measured (perhaps crudely).
The quality of entities' strategies is determined by the results. You
can look at the results in two ways: at the consequences to
individuals; and at the consequences to all.
Different strategies determine which individuals succeed. The form of
the 'game' as a whole determines how well everyone succeeds or fails.
To determine how well everyone does as a whole, add up the total of
losses and gains for everyone. A war, for example, is often seen as a
'negative-sum game'. Even though allies in a war cooperate, and some
win a war, the total costs exceed the benefits, so the end result is
negative.
(Incidentally, many people do not think of a war as a 'game' and find
the term repulsive when applied to war; perhaps the theory should have
been named differently, such as 'a theory of conflict and
cooperation'.)
Other forms of conflict and cooperation are 'positive-sum games'. For
example, economists often point out that when two groups each produce
what they can most efficiently, and trade with each other, the total
product will be larger than when each acts on its own.(1)
Yet other forms of conflict and cooperation are 'zero-sum games', in
which the gain of one side equals the loss of another. Thieves often
think this way: they say to themselves, 'either he has it or I have
it. There is no way we can work together to create more for both of
us. If I take from him, he loses, but I gain.'
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) Economists praise 'free trade' which is the name of this
positive-sum game, but the transition to it may be difficult. To
become more productive, a group must specialize. Within the group,
some people will have to change what they do. But some people hate to
change and others cannot change to another job that does as well. So
they oppose this positive-sum game and cause their country to forgo
the benefits that are supposed to accrue to all as a group.
12.1 An Evolutionarily Stable Strategy
======================================
An evolutionarily stable strategy is a way of acting in a situation of
conflict and cooperation such that the entity acting can survive
repeated interactions with others. The idea comes from a combination
of evolutionary theory and game theory. At first, the idea was
applied to the conflict and cooperation that occurs among animals and
plants, but David Rysdam(1) applied the idea to how people make
choices on their use of software according to the different licenses
possessed by different programs. According to this analysis, among
the ways that different people use different programs, the GNU General
Public License provides for an 'evolutionarily stable strategy'.
Let me start with a quick example to show how games theory works.
Imagine two foolish young men, George and John, probably American,
playing a game called Chicken. In this so-called 'game', George and
John race towards each other at high speed, each in his own car. The
driver who swerves loses while the person who doesn't swerve wins. If
both swerve, no one wins. If neither swerve, the two crash into each
other and die. When both die, both lose.
To make the situation more clear, let's put the strategies in a grid
and assign numerical values to each outcome.
The values are the payoff to George, based on what both do.
+------------------------+---------+------------+
| [Payoff to Geo. ] | John | John does |
| | Swerves | Not Swerve |
|------------------------+---------+------------|
| George Swerves | 0 | -1 |
|------------------------+---------+------------|
| George does Not Swerve | 1 | -1000 |
+-----------------------------------------------+
+------------------------+---------+------------+
| [Payoff to Geo. ] | John | John does |
| | Swerves | Not Swerve |
|------------------------+---------+------------|
| George Swerves | 0 | -1 |
|------------------------+---------+------------|
| George does Not Swerve | 1 | -1000 |
+-----------------------------------------------+
If both George and John swerve, neither wins. The value of the result
is zero.
If George swerves and John does not, George loses a little.
George does not swerve, but John does. George wins. This is the
outcome shown in the lower left of the table.
If neither swerve, they crash into each other; both die.
The idea behind an "evolutionarily stable strategy" is to consider a
situation similar the one above, but for repeated encounters.
Moreover, the encounters are not simply between two entities, but
among many entities.
After many encounters, those with the highest scores win. In
evolution, this means that those with the highest scores survive, or
that their children and grandchildren survive
In programming, this means that a program, or its derivative, survives
over the years.
The evolutionarily stable strategy is stable in the sense that anyone
who adopts a different strategy does worse and worse. Generally it is
the strategy that eventually is adopted by the largest number.
Now, let me apply this form of analysis to software. What you can do
with software -- legally, and, in many ways, practically -- depends on
the license for that software -- whether you may use it at a fair
market price, whether you may study it, start a business involving it,
and so on.
---------- Footnotes ----------
(1) In 'Open Source as ESS',
David Rysdam, 1999,
<http://www2.fastdial.net/~drysdam/essays/GPL-as-strategy.html>
or <http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/docs/GPL-as-strategy/>
12.2 Software Licenses
======================
For the sake of simplicity, let us consider only three types of
license. There are more types, but this simplification helps us
understand. Moreover, this is a rather good description of the
general features of the three major kinds of license.
'* Restrictive license'
The source code is not available to other programs.
'* Between license'
Initially unrestricted, but may be restricted: the source code
may be inspected and included in other programs at will, but when
included it may be restricted.
'* GNU General Public License'
Unrestricted through-out time: the source may be inspected by all
programmers, and may not be restricted. When included within
other projects, the licenses of those other projects must also
permit the same freedom. The code must remain unrestricted.
Consider what happens in various situations. For this, we think not
of programmers, but of whether people who use the code continue to use
it. Metaphorically, we say, 'one program meets another'; what we mean
is that 'users choose among different programs depending on how their
developers improve the programs.'
* One restrictive license meets another restrictive license
The second program with the restrictive license proves superior.
The first program cannot improve, since the source code for the
superior program is not available for examination; it cannot be
used use for improvement.
(That is to say, the developers of the worse program cannot learn
from the source code of the better program. They cannot apply
the lessons that they learn from such an examination. Although
the developers of the worse program may learn how to improve
their package in other ways, they cannot learn by studying source
code for the better program. Over time, the programs' users will
tend to choose the better program because it better satisfies
them.)
* One between-style license meets another
The second program with the between-style license proves
superior. In this case, the programmers for the first program
can examine the code from the second and incorporate it. On the
next encounter (remember that an evolutionarily stable strategy
includes iteration), the two programs will enjoy more nearly
equal performance.
(That is to say, the users of the two programs will, over time,
have less reason to select one over the other.)
* GPL meets a between-style license
The program under the GPL proves superior. The program with the
between-style can examine the code from the program under the GPL
but cannot incorporate it without changing strategies.
I could continue. But rather than do that, let me summarize the
outcome in a matrix.
First meets Second.
Benefit to the first,
depending on how both act.
+--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| [Payoff to First ] | Second | Second | 2nd |
| | Restrictive | Between | GPL |
|--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| First Restrictive | 0 | 5 | 0 |
|--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| First Between | 0 | 5 | 0 |
|--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| First GPL | 0 | 5 | 5 |
+--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
First meets Second.
Benefit to the first,
depending on how both act.
+--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| [Payoff to First ] | Second | Second | 2nd |
| | Restrictive | Between | GPL |
|--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| First Restrictive | 0 | 5 | 0 |
|--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| First Between | 0 | 5 | 0 |
|--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
| First GPL | 0 | 5 | 5 |
+--------------------+-------------+---------+-----+
If two programs with restrictive licenses meet, they gain nothing. If
a program with a restrictive license meets a program with a
between-style licence, the program with a restrictive license gains.
However, if a program with a restrictive license meets a program under
the GPL, the program with the restrictive license gains nothing.
If two programs with between-style licenses meet, they each can gain
from the other.
If a program under the GPL meets a program with a between-style
license, the program under the GPL gains.
Finally, if two programs under the GPL meet, they each can gain from
the other.
The most obvious point is that programs with a between-style strategy
contribute both to programs with restrictive licenses and to programs
under the GPL, as well as to each other.
As Rysdam says,
_... in the terminology of game theory they are "suckers". The
reason for this lies in the definition of [the between-style]
strategy. All players can examine and use code from
[between-style] strategy programs but [between-style] strategy
programs can only use code from other [between-style] strategy
programs. That is, [between-style] strategy programs cooperate
well with each other, but do not keep "predators" from (ab)using
them._
However, no one can share code from programs with restrictive
licenses, so they do not lose anything to competitors. At the same
time, such programs cannot and do not help other.
Then, as Rysdam points out, programs under the GPL cooperate well
because their sources are available to each other but they cannot be
preyed on by programs under other licenses. In other words, programs
under the GPL only cooperate with programs that are sure to cooperate
back. They combine the best of all worlds.
This means that programs with a between-style strategy will tend to
lose, leaving programs with either a restrictive license or a GNU
General Public License.
After programs with a between-style strategy have lost, the matrix
comes to look like this:
First meets Second.
Benefit to the first,
depending on how both act.
+--------------------+-------------+-----+
| [Payoff to first ] | Second | 2nd |
| | Restrictive | GPL |
|--------------------+-------------+-----+
| First Restrictive | 0 | 0 |
|--------------------+-------------+-----+
| First GPL | 0 | 5 |
+--------------------+-------------+-----+
First meets Second.
Benefit to the first,
depending on how both act.
+--------------------+-------------+-----+
| [Payoff to first ] | Second | 2nd |
| | Restrictive | GPL |
|--------------------+-------------+-----+
| First Restrictive | 0 | 0 |
|--------------------+-------------+-----+
| First GPL | 0 | 5 |
+--------------------+-------------+-----+
In this, the payoff is clear. Programmers who work on programs under
a restrictive license cannot help other programmers who also work on
programs under a restrictive license. Nor can they help programmers
who work on programs under the GPL.
But a programmer who works on a program under the GPL can help other
programmers who also work on programs under the GPL.
As David Rysdam wrote:
_The GPL (and equivalent) licenses, when considered as
strategies, are simply better adapted to the free market._
12.3 Objections to the Theory
=============================
The analysis is straightforward. Nonetheless, people have raised
objections to it. However, on further investigation, the objections
fade.
Real licenses are not so simple
-------------------------------
The first objection is that the licenses as used in the analysis are
more simple than real licenses. In particular, the licenses in this
analysis vary only by whether and under what conditions other
developers may study and adapt programs' source code. Does not this
simplification invalidate the result?
The response is simple: the double criterion is key. The history of
the software industry tells us the criteria for success: whether
programmers may study and adapt others' source code, and if so, under
what conditions they may do so.
Obviously, a program with a restrictive license will benefit from
programs that have a between-style license.
In one sense, this is no different from saying that a program with a
restrictive license will benefit from more marketing on its behalf, or
from customer 'lock-in'. People can be encouraged to stick to or
adopt programs for a variety of reasons. However, using code
'invented elsewhere' may well be less expensive than locking in
customers or paying for marketing.
In any event, a society does not advance the progress of software
itself when it invests more in marketing a program, or in hindering
consumer choice. But a society does advance the progress of software
when programmers study, adapt, and use others' source code.
Clearly, the model is a simplification, but it is a telling one.
Programs differ
---------------
The second objection is that the analysis assumes that all programs
are the same. Does the analysis fail to handle complexity? In
reality, there are many different kinds of program, ranging from
kernels to word processors to card games. This objection suggests,
correctly, that the source code for a card game may not be all that
much help to a kernel developer. It may be some help, but not as much
help as the source for a different, but not too dissimilar kernel.
The solution is to apply the analysis a second and third time, once
for programs that are kernels, a second time for programs that are
word processors, and a third time for programs that are card games.
In each case, the results are the same. Indeed, this games theory
model is written so that it works with any group of similar programs.
It is not specific to one type of program.
The analysis is general.
People cheat
------------
A more practical, and cynical, objection is that for the
evolutionarily stable strategy to succeed, the programs under each of
the different types of license must be counted on not to cheat, or, at
least, not to cheat very much.
This is a valid objection. If programmers that develop code under a
restrictive license cheat, they and their sponsors gain. This is also
the case with crooks who rob banks and get away.
For this evolutionarily stable strategy to succeed, copyright holders
and courts must enforce the law and deter crooks. Never coddle
crooks. If crooks are not deterred, they must be caught and cured of
their criminality.
Fortunately, over time, it is likely that crime will be discovered.
As programs under the GPL become more successful and more widespread,
more people will ask how programs under a restrictive license can
continue to survive. The practices of their developers and sponsors
will be subject to more and more scrutiny. And if they are found
crooked, they will be caught. Crime will not pay.
History tells us ...
--------------------
Another question comes from a misunderstanding of history. The
analysis tells us that GPL'd programs can survive against programs
with restrictive licenses so long as governments support freedom. How
then do we explain the growth of programs under restrictive licenses
in the 1980's?
The answer is both simple and sad: in the 1980s, few programs were
under the GPL or similar licenses. The programs under a
non-restrictive license were mostly under a 'between-style' license.
As expected, these programs were preyed upon; they provided help to
programs under restrictive licenses, which grew in number and size.
Sources of income
-----------------
The analysis provides an interesting insight into the economics
implied by different style licenses:
Companies can employ police and courts to enable themselves to charge
high fees for programs under restrictive licenses. You then can ask,
will not these programs bring in more money to copyright holders than
programs under a free license? The answer is long term, since this
sort of change takes time, and is 'no'. The reason is that over the
long term, developers who work on programs with restrictive licenses
cannot help each other as much as developers who work on programs
under the GPL. So the latter's programs will eventually become better.
Programs with restrictive licenses will eventually vanish.
('Eventually' may, of course, be a long time.) Companies cannot
charge high fees for programs that no one wants. Instead, it is in
companies' self-interest to change their strategies, both for
licensing, and for making money. Companies are better off shifting to
the GPL, and to making money by selling services or selling hardware.
In the long run, companies are worse off when they depend on selling
software at prices maintained by a government.
Cooperation
-----------
Yet another objection has to do with cooperation among software
companies that restrict who may use their programs. Such companies
often work together. This way, they gain the benefits of cooperation.
The analysis dismisses this kind of cooperation.
Indeed, some companies cooperate with others, so their developers gain
access to others' restricted code. However, such cooperation requires
conscious action on the part of the managements of both companies. On
the other hand, the GNU GPL automatically permits people to cooperate.
Sharing is intrinsic.
The GPL thus lowers the cost of cooperation. As a consequence, there
will be more of it.
Code Reuse
----------
Another object has to do with code reuse. Everyone speaks of the
value of reusing other's code. It is a cliché: 'don't reinvent the
wheel'. But in practice, how much code is reused? Are not the ideas
behind a program more important than the code itself?
It is true that programmers often write software a second time. But
that also means that they and others must test the software a second
time, and must implement fixes and advances a second time. It is more
efficient to write and test once, to reuse code.
However, reuse works best with code that is modular and which follows
standards that all may adopt. Free software programs tend to meet
these criteria. For a restricted, proprietary program, there often is
little reason in the short term for its programmers to make it
modular; and a successful marketing monopoly provides a motivation
against following free and international standards.
The lack of code reuse is a penalty paid more by those who work with
restricted and proprietary programs than by those using free software.
13 Limits to Learning
*********************
Restrictions are not always immediately evident. If you are an
end-user, you may not be aware of what you cannot get; it may not even
occur to you that you have missed out on a development that did not
take place.
If you are a programmer, you may find yourself limited in what you may
study. Moreover, even if you have studied, you may be limited in what
you may do with your learning. Either way, you are forced to act
stupidly even though you can be smart.
In this chapter, I will primarily address programmers, since
programmers do the work from which the rest of us benefit.
13.1 Trade Secrecy
==================
Trade secrecy is a technique that is being employed in the U. S. and
Europe to limit learning. In the U. S. and Europe, trade secrecy laws
exist to protect companies from the inadvertent loss of a secret. The
most famous example is the secret of the formula for Coca Cola. The
Coca Cola company will not tell anyone how they make Coca Cola taste
the way it does. The formula is a trade secret. If by some accident,
the secret comes out, the courts will prevent anyone outside of the
Coca Cola company from using the formula or telling people what it is.
In the past, a company was required to take due care and precaution to
prevent the loss of a secret. If the secret was not well guarded, the
courts would not protect it. The current legal campaign is to cause
courts and police to guard secrets that are not protected.
This means, for example, that you might be forbidden to build and sell
a mobile telephone that uses a communications protocol that is well
known to you, but considered a 'trade secret'. Or, you might be
forbidden to help a friend, or a customer, view a legally purchased
movie on a legally purchased machine.
13.2 Ban Reverse Engineering
============================
The second technique is to forbid you to study what others have done.
If you cannot learn how to do something, you cannot do it.
Reverse engineering is the process by which you take apart a
competitor's product and figure out what they did. You learn from
them.
Very often, the original makers do not want others to study their
work. But it has long been recognized that such study is good for an
economy as a whole. Because of competitors, individual companies may
not gain as much monopoly profit as they would like, but the competing
businesses and the consuming public all benefit.
13.3 Patent Restrictions
========================
Patent restrictions are a third way to limit you. A company will gain
a patent on a mathematical area or business practice and then a
government will provide enforcement. Unless you can invent around it,
which is difficult if the patent covers a wide area mathematically,
the patent will prevent you from working with free software.
For example, you may be interested in electronic business to business
sales. B2B operations are efficient and potentially huge. They are a
successful and useful way to use the Internet. In a free society, the
best operations would succeed. But you may be hindered in trying to
be best.
13.4 Trade-off between citizens' interests
==========================================
In the United States of America, the purpose of copyright and patents
is
_To promote the progress of science and useful arts, ..._
(U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8)
That is to say, copyright and patents are a way a government
influences an economy through bounty giving. Unlike direct government
subsidies, however, a copyright or patent does not directly take from
government revenues, except through the costs of policing and courts.
Such costs are usually not attributed to specific patents or
copyrights. Moreover, patent or copyright holders gain income only if
others are considerably interested in the actions or information
covered by the patent or copyright. Consequently, copyright and
patents are, or were, thought to be among the better forms of
government subsidy.
The idea behind both patents and copyrights was that new inventions,
or new writings, are themselves common and inexpensive, but that the
development and marketing of them is expensive. While individuals may
come up with new inventions and new writings, only business
organizations with considerable money could invest in the necessary
development and marketing that makes inventions and writings
worthwhile.
Hence, the U. S. Constitution would permit investors to establish
monopolies on inventions or writings "for limited Times", and during
that time to charge more for their manufacture than these products
would in a competitive free market. The extra income to the investors
would motivate them to develop and market the products. Moreover, the
patent and copyright income would go only to those who sold products
that considerably interested others; the products would be purchased
only by people who would be willing to transfer more of their
resources to an investor than would be considered 'fair' in a
competitive, free market.
This was the trade-off: U. S. citizens would give up some of their
rights to fair prices; in return, the government enforced restrictions
would, it was thought, lead to more products becoming available than
would have occurred otherwise.
The problem now is that patents and copyrights have become ever more
widespread and their terms longer; and the nature of technology has
changed. It is now far easier and cheaper to manufacture some kinds
of product than ever before. So a trade-off that may well have made
sense in the past loses its justification, which is to _... promote
the progress of science and useful arts, ..._ (and not, as some have
pretended, to provide a 'natural right' to copyright or patent
holders).
In the United States, in so far as patents and copyrights fail their
Constitutional purpose, they fail to have any justification in law.
In every country, in so far as patents and copyrights fail to promote
safety, quality, or opportunity, they fail to support civilization.
13.5 Different Attacks in Summary
=================================
These attacks on your ability to do business are based on proposed
laws.
Each of the different limits to learning that I have mentioned:
* trade secrecy
* ban reverse engineering
* patent restrictions
either raises your costs but not the costs of your competitors or
restricts what you can do.
Each of these is a different way for others to gain power over you.
14 Tiger teams and Poodle Teams
*******************************
Now let us shift our attention to businesses that do not want to be
robbed.
Let's look at the consequence of restrictions, a consequence that
leads to more crime.
You have heard of "tiger teams". These are teams -- often from
military special forces -- who attempt to break into secure sites,
such as nuclear power plants, to test security.
Poodle Teams
============
You may not have heard of "poodle teams". Poodle teams are supposed
to look like tiger teams, but are made up of poodles. When they think
you might feed them, poodles will lick your hand.
Salesmen love poodle teams. They bark and growl when someone tries to
take away their food. When disguised as tigers, they look ferocious.
Those who manage security at nuclear power plants, and other such
places, hate tiger teams. Sometimes a tiger team succeeds in getting
in. There is only one group that security managers hate more, real
enemies.
It used to be that sites were vulnerable only to physical attack: but
now many sites operate electronically and are on the Internet. These
newfangled sites are like a building in the downtown of a great city,
an electronic city that is larger than any physical city on the
planet, a city composed of both St. Petersburg, Florida and St.
Petersburg, Russia, of both Haarlem in the Netherlands, and Harlem in
New York City.
These new sites are not only vulnerable to the old hazards of
burglary, bribery, blackmail, bamboozlement, and misplaced belief,
they are vulnerable to electronic attack.
Those who manage these sites need to test their defenses with tiger
teams.
But sometimes they are offered poodle teams.
Poodle teams do not test security, but merely the appearance of it.
Crooks will find out the difference between appearance and reality; if
the reality is weakness, crooks will rob.
14.1 Telling the difference
===========================
How does a security manager tell the difference between a tiger team
and a poodle team? The answer is straightforward, simple, and
politically sensitive. Ask that most cynical of questions, ask 'who
benefits?'
Ask if the team might in any way benefit, directly or indirectly, by
licking your hand, by telling you falsely that your security is good.
If so, you are being offered a poodle team.
On the other hand, if the team -- or its sponsors, or employers --
benefit when they succeed in breaking your defenses, then you have a
tiger team.
And how do you tell who benefits? For a poodle team, it is sufficient
that a sponsor, or employer, must ask for permission _from someone
other than you_ before attacking. If a team must ask someone else for
permission to study source code, the team is full of poodles.
Now, of course, a salesman will tell you that getting such permission
is a 'mere formality'. He will say that no one will ever have trouble
getting permission to study sources. But that salesman will be lying
to you. In fact, a vendor will provide such permission only to those
who will not cause too much damage. (Being good salesmen, they will
be quite happy showing off minor problems.) No vendor will
voluntarily risk a great loss.
The members of a poodle team, however indirect the connection, will
know who enables them to feed. You may think they are ferocious.
Doubtless, they will growl convincingly, but their job is to lick your
hand.
The tiger team is different. The members of a tiger team do not
require permission from a vendor, or a vendor's agent, directly or
indirectly. They have the freedom to study software for
vulnerabilities. And they know they will never be punished, not three
years from now, not fifteen years from now, for finding a
vulnerability.
On the contrary, a tiger team is motivated to find problems. Their
motivation is allied with yours, at least in the long run, however
much their discoveries may pain you in the short run.
What is the necessary condition for a tiger team? Freedom: freedom to
study source code. If you use software that is not free, you must
worry lest your evaluation team is a poodle team, since their
long-term motivation is for them to continue, for them to avoid their
being hindered or banned. Their vulnerability takes away their
freedom, and leaves you vulnerable.
You will hear wonderful stories by those who advocate poodle teams.
They will tell you that you should purchase restricted and secret
software.
But ask yourself, 'who, in the long run benefits and who loses, from
the discovery of a vulnerability?' Unless you benefit, regardless of
who else loses, you will be the loser.
As a practical matter of security, you need software freedom.
Otherwise, you will be licked by a poodle, and eaten by someone else's
tiger.
15 The Manufacturing Delusion
*****************************
Consider a business that sells software.
The idea that you should sell software *itself* is a business model
that is a 'manufacturing delusion'. It is a decision to operate a
business as if the software you distribute is similar to shoes or
trucks. Earlier, I described the belief as a mistaken mental model.
Nonetheless, given police support, as in the United States, companies
can follow this business model. It is a mistake.
Software is Not Rivalrous
=========================
Software is not like a shoe or truck that is manufactured and then
sold.
Firstly, perhaps 3/4 of the costs for a typical software package come
_after_ the software is first released. These are the costs of
adapting existing software to new hardware, the costs of debugging it,
and the costs of extending the software to handle new tasks.
A person who obtains a computer program does not want just the
original, as with a pair of shoes or a truck. The user wants the
debugged versions, the extended versions. When a company sells a
truck for $25,000, it expects to spend several thousand dollars on
warranty payments. But it does not expect to spend $75,000 on the
truck, three times the money it received,
But this is what the 'Manufacturing Delusion' says to do with
software: sell the package at a high initial price, and then provide
the fixes and improvements at little or no additional cost. This
leads to disaster.
For one, the owners of the software company see that fixes and
improvements cost them money, rather than generate revenue. So they
cut back on fixes and improvements. Instead, they encourage their
staff to focus on initial sales to generate revenue. But existing
customers then become upset and move to a competitor who offers a
similar product that is better.
And since it is cheap to manufacture new copies of software, a
competing company will reduce its prices to attract people to it.
Customers will only stick to one company if they feel they have no
choice: they will stay only if they see that the cost of changing is
higher than the cost of staying. This means that to become
successful, a company that sells restricted software must become a
monopolist. This is the nature of the situation.
That company must drive everyone else out of business, or at least,
drive enough competitors out of business that the majority of its
customers feel they have no practical choice of vendors. The
successful company must make sure that no one else manufactures CDs
with its software on it. So the successful monopolist must persuade
its government to use its courts and police and foreign negotiators to
prevent what it will call, dramatically, 'software piracy'.
The alternative is to work towards a different way of doing business,
a different way of making a living -- to work towards a competitive
and free market.
15.1 Why Enter the Software Industry?
=====================================
Because competition in a competitive market forces down the price of
free software, no one should enter the software industry to sell
software as such. Instead, a business should enter the industry to
make money in other ways.
In a free software industry, companies and people do not sell software
itself. For example, manufacturers sell CDs with software on it and
the prices for these CDs are reasonable. Other companies sell
services associated with software or they sell hardware or other
solutions.
What services do I mean? Most directly, I mean help in using a
computer, or, to take more specific examples, help in setting up a
packet radio network, or help in creating and nurturing a warehouse
data base.
Less directly, and increasingly, hardware companies that sell
telephones or desalinization plants, add software to their products to
make them more attractive to buyers.
And, of course, hardware companies sell hardware.
The profit-oriented case for free software revolves around economists'
notion of a "complementary product".
As a general rule, and all else being equal, demand for a product
increases when the price of its complements decrease. Thus, if the
price of hotel rooms in Miami, FL, decreases, the number of airline
passengers flying to Miami should increase.
Likewise, if the costs of software for a computer go down, the sales
of services or hardware associated with that software should go up.
Put another way, profit-seeking companies try to commoditize their
products' complements.
Companies enter the software industry in order to lower the costs of
software, so that they can then sell more of software's complements.
16 Business models
******************
There are different ways to sell software's complements. Each of
these is a "business model", that is, the outline of a way to run a
business.
First, consider paid-for training. It goes without saying that a
government could pay for this kind of education, and some do. But I
am thinking here of education that people pay for privately.
Famously, private educational and training services provide quick
profits for those who enter the business early. (Eventually, the ease
of entry means that more and more enter the industry and profits
decline.)
A second model is summarized by the phrase 'Give Away the Razor, Sell
Razor Blades'. This describes the business model that the Gillette
company adopted a century ago for its razors. It did not quite give
away the holder for its razor blades, but it sold them at a loss; and
it made money by selling razor blades. And it still does. I myself
have paid the Gillette company far more for the razor blades I have
bought from them than for their razors.
In this case, a company provides the software and sells support. Just
as a razor blade holder is complementary to a razor, software is
complementary to the support.
Some free software companies, like Red Hat, use software as a 'Market
Positioner': the software brings people to them to purchase their
other services. This is a third business model
Commercial free software companies may also 'sell a brand': that is to
say, the companies provide a trusted product. This depends on having
a known and good reputation.
Companies can do this in two ways: one, quite obviously, is to sell a
software distribution. Customers know the company selected the
software and did a good job, so the customer does not have to do the
work.
A second, more subtle way to sell a brand is to sell certification: to
guarantee a person's competence or a product's quality. Certification
becomes more important to a society the more that people deal with
strangers. Certification tells you whether a person or a product has
the characteristics claimed.
In addition to selling services, or selling a brand, or selling the
value inherent in a complete system, businesses can sell other kinds
of products. We call this fourth business model 'Selling an adjunct'.
One kind of product is that which goes with or explain a program. For
example, O'Reilly sells computer books.
Similarly, a computer manufacturer can build new hardware, or
recondition old hardware, and load it with inexpensive, customized,
free software.
'Widget Frosting' is the name of a fifth business model that is
similar to 'Selling an Adjunct', except that the product sold is more
important than the software.
In English, a widget is an unspecified, manufactured object. Frosting
is what you put on a cake, to make it more tasty. 'Widget Frosting'
is the process of making a manufactured object more desirable to
customers.
If you sell an Ethernet card or other small bit of hardware, you want
your product to operate everywhere. Otherwise, you are making your
market smaller for no good reason. One way to expand your market is
to make the software for it free; this way others can adapt and use
your hardware on their equipment, gaining sales for you.
More grandly, IBM, a large corporation, found that some of its
customers refused to buy bigger and more expensive computers from IBM,
even though they needed the larger capacity. The customers were
afraid that their existing software would not run on the bigger
machines. So IBM has adopted GNU/Linux to its whole range of hardware
from its smallest laptop to its largest mainframe.
As a result, an IBM salesman can say 'look, GNU/Linux runs on the
machine you are using now; and it runs on this bigger machine. Your
software will run, too. So you can buy the bigger machine safely.'
IBM uses the software to sell its hardware.
I should mention that most software is not written for sale, and never
had been. Many people do not realize this.
Instead, most software is written for use in other products, like
airplanes or ships, or in business or database systems. On its own,
none of this software has what might be called a 'sale value'; it has
only a 'use value'.
In the United States, less than 10% of all software is written to be
sold.
However, the software that most people think about is sold under the
'manufacturing delusion'. It is visible. People who see a PC often
think of the software on it. People who see a car or truck seldom
think of the software in it.
I have been talking previously about the kind of software that people
often think of selling, if they suffer from the 'manufacturing
delusion'. What I want to turn to now is software that quite
obviously has a 'use value' but whose 'sale value' is more dubious.
Companies that manufacture trucks or washing machines or electric
generating plants often use the 'Widget Frosting' business model, at
least in part.
They create software that runs inside their products and thereby make
their products more attractive than they would be otherwise. These
companies create embedded software.
There are two reasons such companies adopt free software. First, free
software provides the company with an existing, complex system that
works. The companies need to do less work of their own. It costs
them less. Second, the free software leads to better products, so
customers like them more. So the companies sell more.
Of course, other companies can use the same software: you need to give
people a reason to buy from you. Here is where virtue becomes
profitable. People will buy from you if your hardware is better, or
your service is better, or if they like you for some other reason.
If you are not well known, people will be more likely to risk buying
from you if they know they can hire someone else to work on your
product. You reduce your customers' risk by providing them with free
software.
It is a paradoxical rule: if it is easy for your customer to leave
you, your customer is more likely to stay.
17 Concluding Remarks
*********************
In conclusion, your opportunities depend on your legal and practical
freedom to:
* use,
* copy,
* redistribute,
* study, and,
* modify software.
In addition to freedom, software under the GNU General Public License
imposes a duty:
* If you redistribute fixes and extensions to work others have
done, then you must pass on to others the same rights you
received.
Freedom is Key.
---------------
Freedom leads to:
* collaboration
* access
* empowerment
* lower prices
* choice
* reliability
* efficiency
* security
* fewer barriers to entry
* fewer barriers to use
* more opportunity
Appendix A GNU General Public License
*************************************
Version 2, June 1991
Copyright (C) 1989, 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
========
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom
to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License
is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free
software -- to make sure the software is free for all its users. This
General Public License applies to most of the Free Software
Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to
using it. (Some other Free Software Foundation software is covered by
the GNU Library General Public License instead.) You can apply it to
your programs, too.
When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not
price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you
have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for
this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it
if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it
in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid
anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.
These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if
you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.
For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether
gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that
you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the
source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their
rights.
We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and
(2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy,
distribute and/or modify the software.
Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain
that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free
software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on,
we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the
original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect
on the original authors' reputations.
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software
patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free
program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the
program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any
patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at
all.
The precise terms and conditions for copying, distribution and
modification follow.
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
0. This License applies to any program or other work which contains
a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be
distributed under the terms of this General Public License. The
"Program", below, refers to any such program or work, and a "work
based on the Program" means either the Program or any derivative
work under copyright law: that is to say, a work containing the
Program or a portion of it, either verbatim or with modifications
and/or translated into another language. (Hereinafter,
translation is included without limitation in the term
"modification".) Each licensee is addressed as "you".
Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are
not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act
of running the Program is not restricted, and the output from the
Program is covered only if its contents constitute a work based
on the Program (independent of having been made by running the
Program). Whether that is true depends on what the Program does.
1. You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's
source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you
conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an
appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty; keep
intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the
absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the
Program a copy of this License along with the Program.
You may charge a fee for the physical act of transferring a copy,
and you may at your option offer warranty protection in exchange
for a fee.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion
of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and
distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section
1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a. You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices
stating that you changed the files and the date of any
change.
b. You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that
in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program
or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge
to all third parties under the terms of this License.
c. If the modified program normally reads commands
interactively when run, you must cause it, when started
running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way,
to print or display an announcement including an appropriate
copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or
else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may
redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling
the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if
the Program itself is interactive but does not normally
print such an announcement, your work based on the Program
is not required to print an announcement.)
These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If
identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the
Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and
separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms,
do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as
separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as
part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the
distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License,
whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole,
and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or
contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the
intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of
derivative or collective works based on the Program.
In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the
Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on
a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the
other work under the scope of this License.
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it,
under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the
terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of
the following:
a. Accompany it with the complete corresponding
machine-readable source code, which must be distributed
under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
b. Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than
your cost of physically performing source distribution, a
complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source
code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2
above on a medium customarily used for software interchange;
or,
c. Accompany it with the information you received as to the
offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This
alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution
and only if you received the program in object code or
executable form with such an offer, in accord with
Subsection b above.)
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work
for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete
source code means all the source code for all modules it
contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus
the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the
executable. However, as a special exception, the source code
distributed need not include anything that is normally
distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major
components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system
on which the executable runs, unless that component itself
accompanies the executable.
If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering
access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent
access to copy the source code from the same place counts as
distribution of the source code, even though third parties are
not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program
except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt
otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program
is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this
License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights,
from you under this License will not have their licenses
terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not
signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify
or distribute the Program or its derivative works. These actions
are prohibited by law if you do not accept this License.
Therefore, by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work
based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this
License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying,
distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program
subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any
further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights
granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance
by third parties to this License.
7. If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent
infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent
issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order,
agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this
License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this
License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy
simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other
pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not
distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license
would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by
all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you,
then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License
would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
If any portion of this section is held invalid or unenforceable
under any particular circumstance, the balance of the section is
intended to apply and the section as a whole is intended to apply
in other circumstances.
It is not the purpose of this section to induce you to infringe
any patents or other property right claims or to contest validity
of any such claims; this section has the sole purpose of
protecting the integrity of the free software distribution
system, which is implemented by public license practices. Many
people have made generous contributions to the wide range of
software distributed through that system in reliance on
consistent application of that system; it is up to the
author/donor to decide if he or she is willing to distribute
software through any other system and a licensee cannot impose
that choice.
This section is intended to make thoroughly clear what is
believed to be a consequence of the rest of this License.
8. If the distribution and/or use of the Program is restricted in
certain countries either by patents or by copyrighted interfaces,
the original copyright holder who places the Program under this
License may add an explicit geographical distribution limitation
excluding those countries, so that distribution is permitted only
in or among countries not thus excluded. In such case, this
License incorporates the limitation as if written in the body of
this License.
9. The Free Software Foundation may publish revised and/or new
versions of the General Public License from time to time. Such
new versions will be similar in spirit to the present version,
but may differ in detail to address new problems or concerns.
Each version is given a distinguishing version number. If the
Program specifies a version number of this License which applies
to it and "any later version", you have the option of following
the terms and conditions either of that version or of any later
version published by the Free Software Foundation. If the
Program does not specify a version number of this License, you
may choose any version ever published by the Free Software
Foundation.
10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free
programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to
the author to ask for permission. For software which is
copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free
Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our
decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free
status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting
the sharing and reuse of software generally.
NO WARRANTY
11. BECAUSE THE PROGRAM IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO
WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE
LAW. 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.
12. IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW OR AGREED TO IN
WRITING WILL ANY COPYRIGHT HOLDER, OR ANY OTHER PARTY WHO MAY
MODIFY AND/OR REDISTRIBUTE THE PROGRAM AS PERMITTED ABOVE, BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL,
INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR
INABILITY TO USE THE PROGRAM (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS
OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY
YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF THE PROGRAM TO OPERATE WITH
ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH HOLDER OR OTHER PARTY HAS BEEN
ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
END OF TERMS AND CONDITIONS
Appendix: How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
=======================================================
If you develop a new program, and you want it to be of the greatest
possible use to the public, the best way to achieve this is to make it
free software which everyone can redistribute and change under these
terms.
To do so, attach the following notices to the program. It is safest
to attach them to the start of each source file to most effectively
convey the exclusion of warranty; and each file should have at least
the "copyright" line and a pointer to where the full notice is found.
ONE LINE TO GIVE THE PROGRAM'S NAME AND A BRIEF IDEA OF WHAT IT DOES.
Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and paper
mail.
If the program is interactive, make it output a short notice like this
when it starts in an interactive mode:
Gnomovision version 69, Copyright (C) 19YY NAME OF AUTHOR
Gnomovision comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type `show w'.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it
under certain conditions; type `show c' for details.
The hypothetical commands 'show w' and 'show c' should show the
appropriate parts of the General Public License. Of course, the
commands you use may be called something other than 'show w' and 'show
c'; they could even be mouse-clicks or menu items -- whatever suits
your program.
You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or
your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program,
if necessary. Here is a sample; alter the names:
Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program
`Gnomovision' (which makes passes at compilers) written by James Hacker.
SIGNATURE OF TY COON, 1 April 1989
Ty Coon, President of Vice
This General Public License does not permit incorporating your program
into proprietary programs. If your program is a subroutine library,
you may consider it more useful to permit linking proprietary
applications with the library. If this is what you want to do, use
the GNU Library General Public License instead of this License.
Appendix B GNU Free Documentation License
*****************************************
Version 1.1, March 2000
Copyright (C) 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
0. PREAMBLE
The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or
other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure
everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with
or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.
Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher
a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered
responsible for modifications made by others.
This License is a kind of "copyleft", which means that derivative
works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense.
It complements the GNU General Public License, which is a
copyleft license designed for free software.
We have designed this License in order to use it for manuals for
free software, because free software needs free documentation: a
free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms
that the software does. But this License is not limited to
software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless
of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book.
We recommend this License principally for works whose purpose is
instruction or reference.
1. APPLICABILITY AND DEFINITIONS
This License applies to any manual or other work that contains a
notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be
distributed under the terms of this License. The "Document",
below, refers to any such manual or work. Any member of the
public is a licensee, and is addressed as "you".
A "Modified Version" of the Document means any work containing
the Document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with
modifications and/or translated into another language.
A "Secondary Section" is a named appendix or a front-matter
section of the Document that deals exclusively with the
relationship of the publishers or authors of the Document to the
Document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains
nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject.
(For example, if the Document is in part a textbook of
mathematics, a Secondary Section may not explain any
mathematics.) The relationship could be a matter of historical
connection with the subject or with related matters, or of legal,
commercial, philosophical, ethical or political position
regarding them.
The "Invariant Sections" are certain Secondary Sections whose
titles are designated, as being those of Invariant Sections, in
the notice that says that the Document is released under this
License.
The "Cover Texts" are certain short passages of text that are
listed, as Front-Cover Texts or Back-Cover Texts, in the notice
that says that the Document is released under this License.
A "Transparent" copy of the Document means a machine-readable
copy, represented in a format whose specification is available to
the general public, whose contents can be viewed and edited
directly and straightforwardly with generic text editors or (for
images composed of pixels) generic paint programs or (for
drawings) some widely available drawing editor, and that is
suitable for input to text formatters or for automatic
translation to a variety of formats suitable for input to text
formatters. A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format
whose markup has been designed to thwart or discourage subsequent
modification by readers is not Transparent. A copy that is not
"Transparent" is called "Opaque".
Examples of suitable formats for Transparent copies include plain
ASCII without markup, Texinfo input format, LaTeX input format,
SGML or XML using a publicly available DTD, and
standard-conforming simple HTML designed for human modification.
Opaque formats include PostScript, PDF, proprietary formats that
can be read and edited only by proprietary word processors, SGML
or XML for which the DTD and/or processing tools are not
generally available, and the machine-generated HTML produced by
some word processors for output purposes only.
The "Title Page" means, for a printed book, the title page
itself, plus such following pages as are needed to hold, legibly,
the material this License requires to appear in the title page.
For works in formats which do not have any title page as such,
"Title Page" means the text near the most prominent appearance of
the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the
text.
2. VERBATIM COPYING
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either
commercially or noncommercially, provided that this License, the
copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License
applies to the Document are reproduced in all copies, and that
you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License.
You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the
reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute.
However, you may accept compensation in exchange for copies. If
you distribute a large enough number of copies you must also
follow the conditions in section 3.
You may also lend copies, under the same conditions stated above,
and you may publicly display copies.
3. COPYING IN QUANTITY
If you publish printed copies of the Document numbering more than
100, and the Document's license notice requires Cover Texts, you
must enclose the copies in covers that carry, clearly and
legibly, all these Cover Texts: Front-Cover Texts on the front
cover, and Back-Cover Texts on the back cover. Both covers must
also clearly and legibly identify you as the publisher of these
copies. The front cover must present the full title with all
words of the title equally prominent and visible. You may add
other material on the covers in addition. Copying with changes
limited to the covers, as long as they preserve the title of the
Document and satisfy these conditions, can be treated as verbatim
copying in other respects.
If the required texts for either cover are too voluminous to fit
legibly, you should put the first ones listed (as many as fit
reasonably) on the actual cover, and continue the rest onto
adjacent pages.
If you publish or distribute Opaque copies of the Document
numbering more than 100, you must either include a
machine-readable Transparent copy along with each Opaque copy, or
state in or with each Opaque copy a publicly-accessible
computer-network location containing a complete Transparent copy
of the Document, free of added material, which the general
network-using public has access to download anonymously at no
charge using public-standard network protocols. If you use the
latter option, you must take reasonably prudent steps, when you
begin distribution of Opaque copies in quantity, to ensure that
this Transparent copy will remain thus accessible at the stated
location until at least one year after the last time you
distribute an Opaque copy (directly or through your agents or
retailers) of that edition to the public.
It is requested, but not required, that you contact the authors
of the Document well before redistributing any large number of
copies, to give them a chance to provide you with an updated
version of the Document.
4. MODIFICATIONS
You may copy and distribute a Modified Version of the Document
under the conditions of sections 2 and 3 above, provided that you
release the Modified Version under precisely this License, with
the Modified Version filling the role of the Document, thus
licensing distribution and modification of the Modified Version
to whoever possesses a copy of it. In addition, you must do
these things in the Modified Version:
A. Use in the Title Page (and on the covers, if any) a title
distinct from that of the Document, and from those of
previous versions (which should, if there were any, be
listed in the History section of the Document). You may use
the same title as a previous version if the original
publisher of that version gives permission.
B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or
entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in
the Modified Version, together with at least five of the
principal authors of the Document (all of its principal
authors, if it has less than five).
C. State on the Title page the name of the publisher of the
Modified Version, as the publisher.
D. Preserve all the copyright notices of the Document.
E. Add an appropriate copyright notice for your modifications
adjacent to the other copyright notices.
F. Include, immediately after the copyright notices, a license
notice giving the public permission to use the Modified
Version under the terms of this License, in the form shown
in the Addendum below.
G. Preserve in that license notice the full lists of Invariant
Sections and required Cover Texts given in the Document's
license notice.
H. Include an unaltered copy of this License.
I. Preserve the section entitled "History", and its title, and
add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new
authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on
the Title Page. If there is no section entitled "History"
in the Document, create one stating the title, year,
authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title
Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as
stated in the previous sentence.
J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document
for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and
likewise the network locations given in the Document for
previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in
the "History" section. You may omit a network location for
a work that was published at least four years before the
Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version
it refers to gives permission.
K. In any section entitled "Acknowledgments" or "Dedications",
preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section
all the substance and tone of each of the contributor
acknowledgments and/or dedications given therein.
L. Preserve all the Invariant Sections of the Document,
unaltered in their text and in their titles. Section
numbers or the equivalent are not considered part of the
section titles.
M. Delete any section entitled "Endorsements". Such a section
may not be included in the Modified Version.
N. Do not retitle any existing section as "Endorsements" or to
conflict in title with any Invariant Section.
If the Modified Version includes new front-matter sections or
appendices that qualify as Secondary Sections and contain no
material copied from the Document, you may at your option
designate some or all of these sections as invariant. To do
this, add their titles to the list of Invariant Sections in the
Modified Version's license notice. These titles must be distinct
from any other section titles.
You may add a section entitled "Endorsements", provided it
contains nothing but endorsements of your Modified Version by
various parties -- for example, statements of peer review or that
the text has been approved by an organization as the
authoritative definition of a standard.
You may add a passage of up to five words as a Front-Cover Text,
and a passage of up to 25 words as a Back-Cover Text, to the end
of the list of Cover Texts in the Modified Version. Only one
passage of Front-Cover Text and one of Back-Cover Text may be
added by (or through arrangements made by) any one entity. If
the Document already includes a cover text for the same cover,
previously added by you or by arrangement made by the same entity
you are acting on behalf of, you may not add another; but you may
replace the old one, on explicit permission from the previous
publisher that added the old one.
The author(s) and publisher(s) of the Document do not by this
License give permission to use their names for publicity for or
to assert or imply endorsement of any Modified Version.
5. COMBINING DOCUMENTS
You may combine the Document with other documents released under
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Concept Index
*************
* Menu:
* Advantages of peer-production: Advantages Commons-based Peer-production.
(line 966)
* Aristotle: Aristotle. (line 767)
* Ban reverse engineering: Ban. (line 3429)
* Benefits of free software: Software Benefits.
(line 1743)
* Benefits to software of freedom: Benefits to Software.
(line 1767)
* Benefits, partial: Partial Benefits. (line 1129)
* Bloat and frugality: Bloat Frugality. (line 1902)
* Business models: Business models. (line 3755)
* Business, running one: Run Business. (line 2050)
* Business, starting one: Start Business. (line 1989)
* Choice of Vendors: Choice of Vendors.
(line 1964)
* Collaboration and sharing: Collaboration and Sharing.
(line 2122)
* Commons-based peer-production: Commons-based Peer-production.
(line 831)
* Commons-based peer-production advantages: Advantages Commons-based Peer-production.
(line 966)
* Competition leads to sharing: Competition and Freedom.
(line 2186)
* Competition, how it works with freedom: Competition and Freedom.
(line 2140)
* Copy, right to: Copy. (line 1312)
* Copyright, Copyleft: Copyright Copyleft.
(line 1267)
* Cost of discovery: Discovery Cost. (line 2365)
* Costs of restriction: Costs of Restriction.
(line 2240)
* Creation, software: Software creation.
(line 743)
* Dangers, software: Software Dangers. (line 1522)
* Delusion manufacturing: Manufacturing Delusion.
(line 3650)
* Discovery, cost of: Discovery Cost. (line 2365)
* Duty to distribute derived source: Duty. (line 1466)
* Duty, freedom, in detail: Freedom duty. (line 1218)
* Easy ability to manufacture software: Easily Manufactured.
(line 2627)
* Efficiency: Efficiency. (line 1869)
* Efficiency, reliability, security: Quality. (line 403)
* Electronic Shopping Mall: Electronic Shopping Mall.
(line 2785)
* Enter, why?: Why Enter Industry.
(line 3713)
* ESS: Game Theory. (line 2899)
* Evolutionarily stable strategy: Game Theory. (line 2899)
* Evolutionarily stable strategy <1>: Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.
(line 2965)
* FDL, GNU Free Documentation License: GFDL. (line 4293)
* Free software, how created: How made free. (line 718)
* Free software, why support it?: Why. (line 374)
* Freedom, duty, in detail: Freedom duty. (line 1218)
* Freedom, how it works with competition: Competition and Freedom.
(line 2140)
* Frugal standards: Frugality. (line 1932)
* Frugality and bloat: Bloat Frugality. (line 1902)
* Game Theory and strategy: Game Theory. (line 2899)
* GFDL, GNU Free Documentation License: GFDL. (line 4293)
* Goal: Goal. (line 295)
* GPL, GNU General Public License: GPL. (line 3928)
* Great Library: Great Library. (line 2798)
* Honest legal system: Reliable Quick Honest Legal System.
(line 1174)
* How freedom and competition work together: Competition and Freedom.
(line 2140)
* How is software made free: How made free. (line 718)
* How to create software: Software creation.
(line 743)
* Illegal to study: Forbidden to Study.
(line 2302)
* Inexhaustible character of software: Inexhaustible. (line 2598)
* Interests trade-off: Trade-off. (line 3460)
* learning, limits to: Limits to Learning.
(line 3390)
* Library: Great Library. (line 2798)
* licenses that are limited: Limited Licenses. (line 1482)
* Licenses, game theory, and strategy: Game Theory. (line 2899)
* Licenses, software, evolutionarily stable strategy: Software Licenses in ESS.
(line 3049)
* Limited licenses: Limited Licenses. (line 1482)
* Limits to learning: Limits to Learning.
(line 3390)
* Mall, Electronic Shopping: Electronic Shopping Mall.
(line 2785)
* Manufacture of software easily: Easily Manufactured.
(line 2627)
* Manufacturing delusion: Manufacturing Delusion.
(line 3650)
* Metaphors, misleading: Misleading Metaphors.
(line 2429)
* Misleading metaphors: Misleading Metaphors.
(line 2429)
* Modify, right to: Modify. (line 1427)
* Non-rivalrous character of software: Non-rivalrous. (line 2494)
* Nonexcludable nature of software: Potentially Nonexcludable.
(line 2661)
* Objections to the theory: ESS Objections. (line 3229)
* Obligation to distribute derived source: Duty. (line 1466)
* Opportunity: Opportunity. (line 484)
* Partial benefits: Partial Benefits. (line 1129)
* Patent restrictions: Patent Restrictions.
(line 3445)
* Peer-production advantages: Advantages Commons-based Peer-production.
(line 966)
* Peer-production, commons-based: Commons-based Peer-production.
(line 831)
* Plans for business: Business models. (line 3755)
* Poodle teams: Tiger Teams and Poodle Teams.
(line 3535)
* Poodle teams <1>: Poodle Teams. (line 3548)
* Potentially nonexcludable nature of software: Potentially Nonexcludable.
(line 2661)
* Quality: Quality. (line 403)
* Quality <1>: Quality. (line 403)
* Quick legal system: Reliable Quick Honest Legal System.
(line 1174)
* Rah! Rah! Forbidden to Study: Forbidden to Study.
(line 2302)
* Raising the cost of discovery: Discovery Cost. (line 2365)
* Redistribute, right to: Redistribute. (line 1350)
* Reliability: Reliability. (line 1811)
* Reliable legal system: Reliable Quick Honest Legal System.
(line 1174)
* Restriction, social costs of: Costs of Restriction.
(line 2240)
* Restrictions, patent: Patent Restrictions.
(line 3445)
* Reverse engineering, ban: Ban. (line 3429)
* Right to copy: Copy. (line 1312)
* Right to modify: Modify. (line 1427)
* Right to redistribute: Redistribute. (line 1350)
* Right to study: Study. (line 1376)
* Run a business: Run Business. (line 2050)
* Safety: Safety. (line 383)
* Schools: Forbidden to Study.
(line 2302)
* Secrecy, trade: Trade Secrecy. (line 3406)
* Security: Security. (line 1773)
* Security, reliability, efficiency: Quality. (line 403)
* Selfish by law: Selfish by Law. (line 2251)
* Sharing: Access. (line 2095)
* Sharing and collaboration: Collaboration and Sharing.
(line 2122)
* Sharing and competition: Competition and Freedom.
(line 2186)
* Shopping Mall, Electronic: Electronic Shopping Mall.
(line 2785)
* Social costs of restriction: Costs of Restriction.
(line 2240)
* Software creation: Software creation.
(line 743)
* Software dangers: Software Dangers. (line 1522)
* Software freedom, why support it?: Why. (line 374)
* Software is easily manufactured: Easily Manufactured.
(line 2627)
* Software is inexhaustible: Inexhaustible. (line 2598)
* Software is non-rivalrous: Non-rivalrous. (line 2494)
* Software is potentially nonexcludable: Potentially Nonexcludable.
(line 2661)
* Software licenses, evolutionarily stable strategy: Software Licenses in ESS.
(line 3049)
* Software, what is it?: What is free software?.
(line 631)
* Source code vital: Source code vital.
(line 1411)
* Stable strategy, evolutionarily: Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.
(line 2965)
* Start a business: Start Business. (line 1989)
* Strategy and game theory: Game Theory. (line 2899)
* Strategy, evolutionarily stable: Evolutionarily Stable Strategy.
(line 2965)
* Study, forbidden and illegal: Forbidden to Study.
(line 2302)
* Study, right to: Study. (line 1376)
* Teams, tiger and poodle: Tiger Teams and Poodle Teams.
(line 3535)
* Tiger teams: Tiger Teams and Poodle Teams.
(line 3535)
* Trade secrecy: Trade Secrecy. (line 3406)
* Trade-off between citizens' interests: Trade-off. (line 3460)
* Use software, right to: Use. (line 1287)
* What free software brings: Software Benefits.
(line 1743)
* What freedom brings to software: Benefits to Software.
(line 1767)
* Why enter?: Why Enter Industry.
(line 3713)
About the Author
****************
Robert J. Chassell has worked with GNU Emacs since 1985. He
writes and edits, teaches Emacs and Emacs Lisp, and speaks
throughout the world on software freedom. Chassell was a
founding Director and Treasurer of the Free Software Foundation,
Inc. He is co-author of the 'Texinfo' manual, and has edited
more than a dozen other books. He graduated from Cambridge
University, in England. He has an abiding interest in social and
economic history and flies his own airplane.