I published a version of this article on Medium eight years ago. This version is updated with new references and arguments.
Over the last few years, I’ve been a part of lots of discussions — across domains, from technology to journalism and education — about Silicon Valley and how technology business models are affecting other industries. Outside technology industry circles, there’s lots of talk about how open source software is a more respectful model.
What’s missing from many of these discussions is a thorough explanation of what open source software actually is, and why exactly it promises an alternative. In this post, I’ll talk about the history and mechanics of open source software, and then discuss some of these arguments.
How software became commercial
In the early days of computing, when the work being done was largely academic in nature, software was often built collaboratively between institutions and shared under a public domain license. Public domain means that all intellectual property rights have been forfeited: anyone can sell, copy, alter, and use the work as the basis of something new, and the original author can’t take back their rights.
Companies like IBM had a slightly more restrictive approach: they supplied their mainframe computers with the source code. If customers made changes to make the software work better or fix bugs, they could send them back to IBM. Because the value of the computer itself was so high, and there were so few of them, the software itself was not considered to be valuable on its own.
As computers became more widespread, there were enough of them to create a market. They still came with bundled software for specific tasks, but new companies started appearing, selling more sophisticated alternatives that could be installed instead. Commercial software, released under a more restrictive license, became the norm.
In particular, one change bit academic researchers. Bell Labs developed a powerful new operating system called UNIX, originally for use inside the Bell network of companies. AT&T licensed it free of charge to academic and government users in the seventies — until everyone was locked in. Then they turned around and started charging for updates.
Richard Stallman
The birth of free software
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