The article only deals with Open Source market dominance not 'Free'. All references to 'free' in that article are about royalty-free software not the 'four freedoms'.
Open Source I believe is vulnerable to this kind of threat because the idea is that it give developers freedom to innovate using a royalty free license.
OS is positioned much more closely to the capitalist demand for radical innovation and thus is already exposed to capitalist ideas of political and social legitimacy.
Free Software is not exclusionary AFAIK I cannot think of any case where proprietary software has been refused entry to a market because of it, but am open to studying examples of that happening if anyone can find examples?
- How can we oppose the argument that publicly financed software released as Free Software is anticompetitive?
In the same way competitive market actors defend vendor lock-ins and rent seeking and all the other market failures, resist market-led policy priorities which have already become over-represented. Real competition after all, is (in some) sense anti-competitive if we are imagining a 'pro-competitive' product produces a perfect market. It's a wrong question that anchors responses in wrong-thinking about markets and about free software.
- What can we bring up on the other hand in favor of publishing as Free Software from a competitive point of view?
(except the usual non-dependencies)
Why is this a demand? This sounds like an apology for Open Source, not the basis for promoting free software to me. 'Competition' is a market-led paradigm that deforms software development in favor of proprietorial interests, it's making a vice out of a virtue...
On Wednesday 4. July 2018 16.27.52 Mat Witts wrote:
Free Software is not exclusionary AFAIK I cannot think of any case where proprietary software has been refused entry to a market because of it, but am open to studying examples of that happening if anyone can find examples?
There are probably a bunch of different "concerns" raised by proprietary software vendors. One of which is that where the public sector obliges vendors to employ Free Software licences, then they feel excluded.
But given that public regulations can more or less stipulate anything that is in the public interest, such as adherence to genuine standards, then stipulating that delivered systems must be Free Software is an entirely reasonable thing to do. Nothing forces vendors to write proprietary software, and certainly not for everything they do.
Sadly, genuine standards are not widely encouraged and have been undermined by proprietary vendors. This is seen in the Norwegian public sector, for example, where public bodies make OOXML documents and even binary Microsoft Office documents available for public consumption, after the current administration rolled back the previously-introduced insistence on genuine document format standards.
And there are areas where standards are happily employed by proprietary vendors to keep a market to themselves, such as in niches where general Free Software development efforts are unlikely to penetrate. Institutional archiving is one of these areas in the Norwegian public sector, from what I have learned. I doubt that the entrenched vendors wish to see such standards loosened or dropped.
Rewinding slightly...
The article only deals with Open Source market dominance not 'Free'. All references to 'free' in that article are about royalty-free software not the 'four freedoms'.
But Erik also wrote this:
The point is that a main argument against publishing publicly financed software developments under a free licence is said to be "market distortion". The argument says that private actors cannot compete against "software offered by the state free of charge" and therewith these publications are to be seen anticompetitive.
Of course, this conflates the two meanings of "free", but for some vested interests, this slight of hand is performed to push home a particular argument whilst deflecting criticism of that argument. Nothing stops public bodies from actually making Free Software available for a fee, although that brings other considerations to bear.
Paul