Fyi:
-------------------- Start of forwarded message -------------------- Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2001 17:28:30 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: 200108220028.RAA02889@morrowfield.home From: Tom Lord lord@regexps.com To: fsb@crynwr.com Subject: the Free Software Movement in Industry
Comments?
Towards Shared Goals for the Free Software Movement and the Computing Industry: A Corporate, Industry-wide GNU Project
To the corporate boards of the software industry, I offer a new slogan: "Here is the Free Software Movement: Embrace and Extend!"
The Free Software Hard-Line and Big Business are Complementary
I'm a strong believer in the Free Software Movement "hard-line": that all software ought to be Free Software, distributed under the terms of the GPL. There are solid ethical and engineering reasons to take that stance (which are amply argued elsewhere -- I won't rehearse those arguments here).
I'm also a strong believer that growth-oriented, profitable, socially responsible businesses can be based on Free Software only, without any need for proprietary or even "open source" (non-GPL) components. The simplest argument in favor of this view is to recognize that proprietary software licenses are largely an accounting convenience rather than a necessary condition of how software-based businesses operate. When customers pay license fees, the positive value they are paying for is the value of the engineering and service processes of their supplier. That's rational behavior for those customers and I don't think we really need the specific threat of legal license enforcement to induce that payment behavior -- other forms of contract are possible.
Sometimes license enforcement is used to punish one company that avoids work by stealing source code from another. Under the rules of proprietary software, that makes sense. But from a larger perspective, those rules cause needless inefficiencies and help to build anti-competitive monopolies: results that impede the growth of the industry as a whole. The rules of proprietary software break-down cooperation between programmers separated by company boundaries, even when such cooperation can be of benefit to both organizations.
So there is no necessary contradiction whatsoever between the computing industry and the Free Software Movement. Indeed, each can help the other.
Using Ordinary Software Life-cycles to Renew the Free Software Movement and the Computing Industry:
A Massive, Industry-wide, R&D Project; A Computing Renaissance
There is an obvious way to proceed for an industry that is currently made up of a mixture of proprietary, open source, and Free Software business models. It would plausibly be reckless and destructively disruptive to simply release all existing proprietary software under the GPL. On the other hand -- software is not immortal. Most software has a natural life cycle and slowly fades away once it is replaced by something newer and better -- once it becomes "legacy" code. Organizations regularly plan around that life cycle, attempting to harness it as a source of growth.
The natural way to proceed, then, is to begin engineering the bulk of our proprietary systems into legacy status -- cooperating across company boundaries to build novel and superior replacements, distributing those replacements as GPLed Free Software.
In other words: let's rebuild our software infrastructure from scratch -- this time under the GPL. That's not one project: it's many. There isn't a single obvious solution: there's a need to experiment with a variety of strategies.
Overall, that's a large project. It's a call for MASSIVE R&D investment in Free Software. That investment would cause immediate industry growth, advance the state of human knowledge, advance the state of computing infrastructures everywhere, drive companies to learn to cooperate more fully on GPLed projects, and permit a graceful deprecation of proprietary software and business practices based on proprietary licensing. It would stand a very good chance of sparking a technology and business renaissance for the software-oriented segments of the computing industry.
From the perspective of the Free Software Movement -- such investment
could bring about a return to the best characteristics of the early days of the GNU project. The Movement would once again have a coherent strategic goal and a clear(er) tactical path for achieving that goal. Best of all, since that tactical path would be to engineer a future of BETTER software -- the Movement would once again have an opportunity to serve a valuable educational role.
It is inevitable that most or all of our existing proprietary systems will one day in the not too distant future become legacy code: we can plan for that, and use it as an opportunity to try something new -- Free Software all the way.
That's my suggestion to the boards of IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, and others: look beyond the Open Source Licences and embrace the Free Software Movement itself. Decide to make a formal goal of relegating all existing proprietary software to legacy status by building superior replacements. Institute sizable R&D processes aimed at designing and building those replacements as publicly visible Free Software projects. Become a new GNU project.
And then see what happens.
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