Freedom Isn't Free

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Freedom Isn't Free

Wendy Liu

What would it take to set software free?

The failure of the open-source movement is ultimately a failure of imagination.

Let’s back up a bit. When I talk about the “failure” of the open-source movement, I don’t simply mean that systemic underfunding of crucial open-source projects has led to incidents like the Heartbleed saga, whereby a vulnerability in an important software library called OpenSSL undermined the integrity of a large part of the internet. Nor am I referring to the low adoption of open-source software on the consumer side. Those are certainly failures, but they are minor in comparison to the one that looms over the entire movement. Open source’s biggest failure is philosophical. And it is rooted in what we normally think of as open source’s greatest success.

In recent decades, open source has proliferated on the production side—how software is developed, deployed, and maintained. Much of the technological infrastructure that underpins our digital world now relies on open-source tooling. We’ve even reached a point where corporations are frequently choosing open-source software over proprietary alternatives. What’s more, they’re publicly extolling its virtues: they’re sponsoring conferences and allowing their developers to work on popular projects. Indeed, many employers now consider past contributions to open-source projects a de facto requirement for getting hired.

So hasn’t the movement succeeded, then? If startups that have built their businesses on open-source software can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital? If a company like Microsoft, which once positioned itself as the enemy of open source, is now funding key projects?

That depends on what you think open source is fundamentally for. For some, open source is about making software less buggy and more robust by widening the pool of possible contributors. For others, it’s about giving users—at least the more technically skilled ones—more control over the software they use. For the most cynical, it’s a way to dupe people into working for free.

But I always thought there was something more to open source—something more radical, something worth fighting for.

Free as in Freedom

For me, the best parts of the open-source movement were always the remnants of the “free software movement” from which it evolved. During the early days of the movement in the 1980s, best captured by Richard Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society, there were no corporate conferences featuring branded lanyards and sponsored lunches. Instead, it was all about challenging the property rights that had granted software companies so much power in the first place. Stallman himself was possibly the movement’s best-known evangelist, traveling around the world to preach about software freedom and the evils of applying patent law to code.

Stallman lent the movement an unorthodox, anti-establishment tone. He framed the argument for free software in moral terms, positioning it as not only technically but ethically superior to proprietary software, which he saw as a “social problem.” And he practiced what he preached: in his personal life, Stallman went to great lengths to avoid using proprietary software, even to the point of not owning a cell phone.

But it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations.

If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation.

Yet it was precisely the weakness of that foundation that made the free...