Eben Moglen on open source's future

What do you see as the biggest danger to open-source software today? On the one hand, there's still a locus of resistance. Microsoft still maintains strongly the view that its business model, which depends upon concealing source code from users, is a viable and important and indeed necessary model. And so as long as a company that sells a billion dollars a week in software is in that sense fundamentally still trying to [fight] the free way of doing things, Microsoft remains a very dangerous party.

But Microsoft, too, has now fundamentally recognized that there is not another generation left in the proprietary software idea, and they are trying to leverage the remaining value of their monopoly in a world of mixed free and unfree code. As Microsoft begins to move itself away from being the primary partisan of unfreedom, the second most important partisans of unfreedom are the owners of culture -- the Disneys and the other major movie studios, who have a great deal of image-making authority in the world and a great deal to lose from the obliteration of their distribution mechanisms.

Proprietary software companies may not want to hear about such radical ideas that could put them out of business. How do you make anybody listen? Possibly the difficulty you are having is too quick a diagnosis about what businesses need. The fundamental theory that I believe has to do with the benefits of what I think of as "copyleft capitalism" [the idea of making a program or other piece of work freely distributable, as opposed to restricting its use via a copyright].

The primary desire that businesses have is for control over their own destinies, for avoidance of autonomy bottlenecks which put the fate of their business into the hands of someone else. The difficulty that they experience -- that they call vendor lock-in, or noninteroperability -- is a difficulty which is really a businessman's equivalent of [Free Software Foundation President Richard] Stallman's frustration at unfreedom. They are essentially the same recognition: In a world of complex, interdependent technology, if I don't control my technology, it will control me. Stallman's understanding of that proposition and Goldman Sachs' understanding [for example] needn't be as far apart as one might think. The desire to maintain autonomy -- the desire to avoid control of destiny by outside parties -- is as fierce in both cases as it can get.

The near death of IBM in the 1980s gave that organization a clear understanding of how to avoid having its destiny controlled by somebody who made software. And as you look at the ripples of this idea through the economy, you begin to understand why lots of people are going to take up this call.

Each [IT vendor] is left in a different place because they are different entities. One of the things that everybody now understands is that you can treat software as a renewable natural resource -- like forest products or fish in the sea. If you build community, if you make broadly accessible the ability to create, then you can use your limited resources not on the creation or maintenance of anything, but on the editing of that which is already created elsewhere.

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